CONCLUSION

Northern Chilean prehistory shows a complex cultural development process from the time the first Andean highland influences impacted the area. From ca. AD 300, settlements experienced processes promoting urbanization and more stable societies, in part based upon developments emenating from the Tiwanaku and Inca states.

Cultural evolution during the first millennium AD in northern Chile is characterized by the coexistence of economically interlaced groups. First with Alto Ramirez, then more intensively under Tiwanaku domination, each of the interacting valleys, oases, and highland polities, nonetheless, showed some degree of autonomy. As a whole, the region was composed of a mosaic of small political entities in whose coherence ideology played an important role. However, independent local components participated in processes of regionalization that was certainly different from the process of urbanization propelling state societies in the Central Andean area. Northern Chile became exceptional for its cultural diversity in the achievement of social complexity. Local autonomy made cultural discontinuity and microregionalization possible.

The harsh and arid environment of northern Chile provides a unique context for studying how organized communities of Andean people developed extreme strategies for survival. Chilean prehistory represents a remarkable and successful process that can still be studied among peoples surviving today. It also represents a past experience from which we, as contemporary witnesses, can learn for future planning of development, particularly with reference to those actions related to arid environmental problems.

There are also fertile grounds for further research in connection with the ideological foundations by which pre-Hispanic cultures developed, a matter that can be approached through the combined study of Andean mythology and its contribution to the state emergence process in western South America.

Mobility patterns represent another interesting issue, especially considering the isolated conditions in which people lived in the vast Chilean desert. It seems that these patterns were thoroughly institutionalized in the Andean area, and that they could have interesting implications for the study of the origins of Andean civilization. Caravaning certainly determined connections among neighboring regions and is essential for reconstructing cultural processes in marginal areas, along with their integration into better known developments in core regions.