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The nature and extent of the Tiwanaku state expansion in the Andes during the second half of the first millennium AD continues to be debated. Here, the authors report on the recent discovery of an archaeological complex 215km south-east of Tiwanaku, where a large, modular building with an integrated, sunken courtyard strongly resembles a Tiwanaku terraced platform temple and demonstrates substantial state investment. Constructed, the authors argue, to directly control inter-regional traffic and trade between the highlands and the eastern valleys of Cochabamba, the complex represents a gateway node that effectively materialised the power and influence of the Tiwanaku state. 

For centuries the Cerro Rico of Potosí in the South American Andes has been known as the richest silver mine in the world but also as a notoriously challenging place for human habitation due to its extreme elevation. Nevertheless, little is known about the temporal depth and socioecological dynamics associated with the initial occupation of this region. In this paper, we present an archaeological and paleoecological assessment of the earliest human peopling of Potosí and the eastern south-central Andes. Systematic surveys in two neighboring regions complemented by test excavations, artifact analysis, and radiocarbon dating revealed evidence of foraging occupations dating to the Early Holocene as well as by agropastoralist communities during the Late Holocene. Local paleoenvironmental records suggest that periods of increased humidity might have fostered ecological productivity that incentivized settlement in this high elevation setting. The nature of the occupations and associated technological organization is consistent with findings from sites elsewhere in the arid Andes. 

South America is a megadiverse continent that witnessed the domestication, translocation and cultivation of various plant species from seemingly contrasting ecosystems. It was the recipient and supplier of crops brought to and from Mesoamerica (such as maize and cacao, respectively), and Polynesia to where the key staple crop sweet potato was exported. Not every instance of the trans -ecological expansion of cultivated plants (both domesticated and wild), however, resulted in successful farming. Here, we review the transregional circulation and introduction of five food tropical crops originated in the tropical and humid valleys of the eastern Andes—achira, cassava, ahipa , sweet potato, and pacay—to the hyper-arid coastal valleys of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, where they have been found in early archeological sites. By means of an evaluation of the contexts of their deposition and supported by direct radiocarbon dating, stable isotopes analyses, and starch grain analysis, we evaluate different hypotheses for explaining their introduction and adaptation to the hyper-arid soils of northern Chile, by societal groups that after the introduction of cultigens still retained a strong dependence on marine hunting, gathering and fishing ways of life based on wide variety of marine coast resources. Many of the studied plants were part of a broader package of introduced goods and technological devices and procedures, linked to food, therapeutic medicine, social and ritual purposes that transformed previous hunter-gatherer social, economic, and ideological institutions. Based on archeological data, we discuss some of the possible socio-ecological processes involved in the development of agricultural landscapes including the adoption of tropical crops originated several hundred kilometers away from the Atacama Desert during the Late Holocene.