Although the beginning of archaeological studies dates back to very old times, the use and applications of disciplines such as physics, chemistry, geology, and biology in archaeology have rapidly increased during the last sixty years worldwide. Papers that apply methods and techniques of the so-called "hard sciences" to solve diverse problems in Argentine archaeology have become more popular during the last two decades. These studies involve the participation of professionals coming from several fields such as physics, chemistry, geology and biology, as well as archaeologists technically trained in those disciplines. Papers that apply this kind of approach can only be found as isolated contributions in Argentine archaeological meetings, symposia, and in non-specific publications, because there are no local technical journals such as those internationally available. For this reason we organized a Symposium at the XVII National Congress of Argentine Archaeology (October 2010, Mendoza, Argentina) seeking to offer a specialist-oriented arena to share new information and discuss methodological and technical issues regarding the application of physical, chemical, and biological tools in archaeology. This book includes some of the papers presented at that symposium, and partially illustrates the state of the art in the utilization of these analytical markers in Argentina. This book aims at presenting the local research to non-Spanish speaking audiences and at promoting a dialogue between archaeologists trained in chemical, earth and natural sciences who use these methods and techniques around the world.

The main objective for this research (focusing on a high altitude marsh called Vega de San Francisco in the Puna region, located 21 km from the Argentina-Chile border) was to reconstruct the formation processes of the excavated units through the analysis of their sediments, providing the necessary information to discuss human occupation intensity as well as to examine site usage throughout the passage of time. The sediment analysis provided three research avenues: physical/chemical properties, microvertebrates and microfossils. A fourth avenue was explored by using information obtained through experimental control sites. Spanish text.