Chinchorro fibre management in the Atacama Desert and its significance for understanding Andean textilization processes.

• Chinchorro textilization, on the onset of Andean textile production, was embedded in wider human-camelid interactions. • It reveals the key role played by coastal hunter-gatherers in processes usually seen from a high-Andean view. • The early fibre management shows the roots of textile intensification, often seen as critical threshold in human history. • Textile practices and their embodiment increased as the transformative ties between humans and camelids intensified. • These processes were developed by communities of practice who shared a concern for corporeality through textile clothing. Textilization processes envisioned as technological transformation of animal fibres and the incorporation of textiles into human bodies, is analyzed among Chinchorro hunter gatherers, along the hyperarid Pacific coast of the Atacama Desert throughout the Holocene (ca. 7800–3500 cal BP). The Chinchorro, as producers and consumers of South American camelid fibres and textiles, created a range of textilized mortuary corporealities. We studied bodies (Artificially Treated Bodies, Statuettes, Figurines), tools and textiles. Based on technological analysis of textiles dressing the bodies, we address the technological procedures employed in textile production. We defined: (a) textilization of Chinchorro bodies, (b) the entailed social relations and technological practices and, and (c) the temporal variability of camelid fibre textile production. These results are discussed within the broader context of early Andean textile fibre management and camelid domestication. From a worldwide perspective, we highlighted how Chinchorro textilization processes, as a microhistory, can be seen in the flow of human-nonhuman animal mutual interactions that gave rise to domestication and the later textile industry. We conclude that progressively ties between people and camelids intensified, by increasing the incorporation of fibres and textiles in the bodies, and the development of communities of practice which shared a concern for textile embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]