The Confluencia style basically consists

outnumbering humans. They are shown with anatomical detail, generally as animated or moving figures. tiffany all are in profile and usually appear in group scenes. Notable among these scenes are moving herds, animals feeding their young, camelid fighting scenes, hunters with spears and darts and hunting by encirclement (see Montt 2004 and González 2002) (Figure 6). A comparative and contextual study of the anatomical morphology of the images of wild and domesticated camelids has suggested that the former correspond to llamas and the latter to vicuñas or guanacos (Gallardo & Yacobaccio 2005). The Taira Tulán and Confluencia styles are distributed throughout the Atacameña region, located in intermediate ravines in direct association with forage. This distribution coincides broadly with the majority of the residential sites from this period.

The Early Formative saw the con- solidation of bangles processes begun in the previous period, and hunting and gathering were integrared into a more broad-based economic model. However, over time these activities became dominated by sedentism, copper ore bead production, animal husbandry for transport and interregional exchange (Núñez et al. 2006c). The husbandry of llamas used as beasts of burden intensified during this period (Núñez et al. 2006c; Cartajena et al. 2007), and this new activity brought with it the need to care for the animals, organise their feeding and grazing around the annual cycle, model the herd structure and control reproduction. Indeed, higher ranking and more complex settlements of this time are found in well- irrigated ravines, indicating the crucial role of livestock husbandry in determining the settlement pattern (Núñez et al. 2006c). While it is true that the first appearance of crops, such as maize, beans, quinoa and peppers, starts during the Early Formative, these occurrences have been limited to date. This fact, added to the absence of very large and/or complex settlements in oases with agricultural potential, suggests that agriculture was a less important technical and social process than those rings to livestock husbandry, hunting and gathering (Holden 1991; Thomas et al. 1995; Agüero 2005; Núñez 2005; Westfall & González 2006).