continued to live in the region for far longer than was previously believed.

“Prior to my research, fewer than a dozen such traps were known across the entire pre-Hispanic Andes,” Adrián Oyaneder, author of the research paper and an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in the UK, tells The Art Newspaper. “

However, in parallel with a French research team, I was able to demonstrate that these structures are heavily concentrated in the Camarones Valley, where we documented 76 examples with strong indications of at least 100 more further to the south.”

When building their traps, Andean hunters usually followed a funnel-shaped design. Often constructed on steep hill slopes, the traps consist of two or more long dry-stone walls, with a dominant “arm”, on average 181 metres in length, and a shorter one of around 97 metres. 

The space between these arms narrows as they head downhill, forcing animals to move from higher ground towards a two-metre-deep drop, where they would fall into a structure designed to contain them. In the Andes, hunters typically used such traps to capture wild camelids, particularly vicuñas, a relative of the alpaca.