This paper offers a provisional model relating

This paper offers a provisional model relating the rock art styles to different cheap bracelets of social interaction in the Archaic and Formative periods. In all of the periods mentioned the social primacy of some communities over others was reflected in the settlements, whose complexity, size and design suggest the existence of special places for social gatherings where social surpluses could be redistributed. The rock art styles not only expressed social identities at the intercommunal level, but were an active symbolic medium in the reproduction of the different social structures alluded to.

The early rock art styles' regional character, formal content and effects on social integration laid the foundation for a set of symbolic practices that in each period deposited an ideal closely linked to prevailing economic and social imperatives. While the prestige of the hunt was incorporated into the Kalina-Puripica and Confluencia styles, the new expectations introduced by pastoralism were expressed in the Taira-Tulán style. The incorporation of the Cueva Blanca style represents a profound rupture in Atacameña social prehistory, as for the cheap cufflinks time rock art imagery was reduced to an object, a textile product whose economic and symbolic importance reached its pinnacle during the Inka Empire (Murra 1975). This is highly important because the textiles alluding to Atacameño rock art were produced using an embroidery technique introduced from the far north of Chile around 500 BC (Rivera 1976; Mujica 1985; Sinclaire 1997). This would have lent prestige to the communities possessing this textile that, along with their use of new technologies such as metallurgy, would have allowed them to exercise influence over the Atacameño groups of the Late Formative period.

The needs associated with producing cheap earrings for exchange as prestige goods fostered alliances among communities across the region, in a framework of relations that seems to have contributed to an asymmetry in the redistribution system, given the relative position of different communities in regard to transportation, trade or prestige goods. However, social inequality was manipulated through rock art styles, the role of which was to suggest a consensus through a common imagery.