Early High-quality Lithic Procurement in the Semiarid North of Chile

The identification of high-quality quartz crystal as one of the main lithic resources used at the Quebrada Santa Julia campsite (Jackson et al. 2007; Mendez et al. 2007) motivated a regional search for potential procurement areas and functionally related sites. At Santa Julia, excavations uncovered a 13,100 CALYBP short-term occupation, where quartz crystal was observed to constitute ~40% of the chipping debris and fragments and was the material of two marginally retouched knives (of a total of eight retouched tools) and two