@article{Transformative:3460,
      recid = {3460},
      author = {Vidal-Montero, Estefanía Paz},
      title = {Transformative Architectures: An Archaeology of Building  Practices in the Atacama Desert },
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      pages = {208},
      abstract = {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. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3460},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3460},
}