Transformative Architectures is an archaeological exploration of the sociality of architectural practices in a pre-Hispanic landscape. Investigating how built environments were assembled in the Guatacondo Valley, a ravine located in what some call the “hyper-arid core” of the Atacama Desert, between the fifth century BCE and the second century CE, I reconsider the centrality of the agricultural village in the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. Rather than approaching this landscape as a finalized object, I follow a multi-scalar approach that treats buildings—from mud walls to landscapes, from face-to-face interactions to intergenerational relations—as emergent assemblages of matter and actions, brought together through the entanglement of multiple materials, beings, and practices. In so doing, the project recuperates material histories to provide a narrative about this landscape that works against oversimplified characterizations of this territory as inhospitable, ancient, empty, and unruly. First, the dissertation connects these characterizations with the scientific, colonial, and capitalist appropriation of the Atacama, whose logics of progress and linear temporalities have shaped the kind of history writing that archaeology produces. Focusing on landscapes and building practices in the Guatacondo Valley, the dissertation then tracks and documents material traces of human occupations, posing traditional objects of archaeological inquiries as social projects rather than historical inevitabilities. Mapping connections between builders and buildings, Transformative Architectures provides insights into the ways in which technological histories accrue in the material. It proposes an alternate way of studying the agricultural village through a detailed exploration of situated architectural projects, making visible the long, messy processes of settlement formation that evolutionary and economic narratives of social complexity tend to elide. Disentangling the process of agriculturalization from village formation, the dissertation demonstrates that the social histories of the material unfold along paths that cannot be predicted in advance. Attending to the ecological, material, and human relations they create, I argue that collaborative projects such as building had the capacity to mobilize and constitute the very collective engaged in its creation. In acknowledging the human-architecture hybrid, this dissertation abandons notions of simple causality and linearity in favor of dynamic timescales that reject collapsing (pre)historical phenomena into discrete events. The dissertation proposes that architectural projects were “trans-formative” to signal the ways in which they remained open to new interventions and articulated relations between humans and places across generations.