“The Tarapacá Declaration” draws attention to the urgent need to change how human societies have been using water in the Atacama Desert, based on a historical trajectory spanning several millennia. The Declaration, an initiative that summarizes the results of the CONICYT/PIA, Anillo project SOC1405, is oriented towards civil society and various political entities, aiming to generate technological and cultural changes to halt and mitigate the effects caused by anthropogenic activities in one of the oldest and most arid deserts in the world. In the course of the project, we established the urgent need to sensitize society to the wasteful overuse and misuse of water in the Atacama Desert, a non-renewable resource in relation to the economic scales of extraction of this element that depends, fundamentally, on fossil waters that have accumulated for millennia in the highlands of the Desert. In this way we want to avoid that this scientific knowledge is encapsulated in the universities and to echo the point made by Victoria Castro (2003): that to grow you have to educate.

We present new data about the trace-element geochemistry of obsidian artifacts from archaeological sites located in the mixed Nothofagus and Austrocedrus forest of northwest Patagonia, Argentina. These data enlarge the available information in this field and allow us to discuss both the spatial distribution and the circulation of obsidian inside the forest and between this environment and both the steppes to the east and the Pacific coast to the west. We analyzed by ICP-MS the trace-element composition of 32 archaeological obsidian artifacts from seven sites located in the localities of El Manso, El Hoyo and Cholila. These data indicate north-south circulation of obsidian within the interior of the forest, and also east-west circulation over considerable distances between the steppes and the forest. No obsidian from sources in Chile has been found. Even though hunter-gatherers began to inhabit the Andean Patagonian forest in the Early Holocene, previous studies have not recorded the use of obsidian inside the forest environment until Late Holocene when the most intense human occupation of these spaces occurred. The new data presented here extends the temporal discussion of the use of obsidian in the forest back into the Early Holocene.

Compositional analyses performed on obsidian pieces, turquoise beads and metallic artefacts from Mocha Island allow us to propose a high mobility scenario for these goods for the last 1000 years in Southern Chile. These analyses lead us to hypothesize about the connections with areas such as the Coastal Range in Araucanía (35 km), central Neuquén in Argentina(390 km), and the Bolivian Altiplano/Argentinian Northwest (1900 km). The presence of these goods in Mocha Island and Southern Chile would be part of the deep social transformations undergone by the societies that inhabited these territories toward the end of the first millennium AD, leading to the formation of the El Vergel complex.