The life in mina dal (El alto, Catamarca). Approaches from Archaeology

Abstract

Dal Mine (Mina Dal) was a mining venture located in El Alto-Ancasti hills, next to Guayamba, a small town in Catamarca province. During its years of activity (from 1930 to 1990) it worked on the extraction of fluorite mineral, transitioning from a small artisanal endeavor to an industrial production process. The latter, requiring training, retaining and specializing of the local rural community generated, on one hand, the transformation and reorganization of productive ways, and, on the other, gave way to a space where resistances and struggles began to appear in a place where peasant agencies acted upon in order to impose themselves over the transformation that this productive space was undergoing. In its years of activity, Dal Mine was the main work source in the area, capturing and reorganizing, not only the life of the local peasants and their families, but also concentrating within its facilities workers from neighboring locations. In this work, we will retrace this mining endeavor from its materiality in order to know how, from its day-to-day, the peasant life gave way to a space of industrial production.