“…This is particularly true for the coastal Atacama Desert, where shellfish are abundant, easy to catch as they live in large aggregations either on tidally exposed rocks or sandy beaches, and are not subject to seasonal variations, although when affected by warm El Niño events, new species show up in replacement within a short period of time. This is in stark contrast with the Atacama Desert inland resources (plant and animals), which were scarce, highly unpredictable, and spread out over such large areas that people were almost completely circumscribed to coastal habitats until the late Holocene (Grosjean et al, 2007;Gayo et al, 2012Gayo et al, , 2015Santoro et al, 2017). Moreover, inland camps were maintained by seafood transported from the coast up to 20-30 km (Núñez, 1986b).…”