Fire Events, Violence and Abandonment Scenarios in the Ancient Andes: The Final Stage of the Aguada Culture in the Ambato Valley, Northwest Argentina

Understanding how archaeological sites are abandoned is a vital part of archaeology. This paper explores abandonment as a phenomenon in a worldwide context, particularly in relation to sites with evidence of fire, and with a special focus on the South-Central Andes. I evaluate the patterns from an area of the Argentinian Andes and discuss the disappearance of the Aguada Culture, one of the central cultures in Argentinian prehistory, using evidence from the core area the Ambato Valley. I conclude that environmental factors were not the sole or determining source of stress, but rather part of a social–environmental dimension in which several factors combined to push a society into a vulnerable situation. In terms of the abandonment of the Aguada settlements in the Ambato Valley, the study shows that frequent forest fires might have played a role, but based upon the regularity of such events as seen in the sediment history, it is unlikely that these were the only factor in the process of abandonment of the valley.