Diaguita

The Diaguita people are a group of South American Indigenous people native to the Chilean Norte Chico and the Argentine Northwest. Western or Chilean Diaguitas lived mainly in the Transverse Valleys that incise semi-arid mountains. Eastern or Argentine Diaguitas lived in the provinces of La Rioja and Catamarca and part of the provinces of Salta, San Juan and Tucumán. The term Diaguita was first applied to peoples and archaeological cultures by Ricardo E. Latcham in the early 20th century.

Ancient Diaguitas were not a unified people; the language or dialects used by them seems to have varied from valley to valley and they were politically fragmented into several chiefdoms. Coastal and inland Chilean Diaguitas traded, as evidenced by the archaeological findings of mollusc shells in the upper courses of Andean valleys.

According to the 2010 census there are 67,410 self-identified Diaguita descendants in Argentina. In Chile, Diaguitas are the third-most populous Indigenous ethnicity after the Aymara and the Mapuche, numbering 88,474 in 2017. The Diaguitas have been recognised as an Indigenous people by the Chilean state since 2006.

Early Spanish accounts, including Jerónimo de Vivar's Crónica y relación copiosa y verdadera de los reinos de Chile, claim the Diaguitas inhabiting the different Transverse Valleys spoke different languages. Jesuits active in western Argentina also report a large number of languages for the region. Nevertheless, the Chilean Diaguitas scholar Herman Carvajal Lazo claims that they could very well have spoken different dialects instead, which would have differed among each other mainly regarding their lexicon.

Cacán was proposed by Rodolfo Schuller and Ricardo E. Latcham to be the single language of the Diaguitas. This proposal has been questioned by some scholars but is accepted by others, like Sergio Villalobos.

There is notable scarcity of Diaguita toponymy in Norte Chico, including the area of Elqui Valley where most Indigenous toponyms has been attributed to either Quechua or Mapuche.

The origin of the Diaguita culture is traced back to an archaeological culture known as El Molle complex which existed from 300 to 700 CE. Later, this culture was replaced in Chile by the Las Ánimas complex that developed between 800 and 1000 CE. It is from this last culture that the archaeological Diaguita culture emerged around 1000 CE. The classical Diaguita period was characterized by advanced irrigation systems and by pottery painted in black, white and red.

Mapuche communities in the southern Diaguita lands – that is Petorca, La Ligua, Combarbalá and Choapa – may be rooted in pre-Hispanic times at least several centuries before the Spanish arrival. Mapuche toponymy is also found throughout the area. Around Elqui Valley almost all Indigenous toponymy belongs either to Quechua or Mapuche. There is no Diaguita (Kakan) toponymy known in the valley. While there was an immigration of Mapuches to the southern Diaguita lands in colonial times, Mapuche culture there is judged to be older than this. Indeed, in 1954 Grete Mostny postulated the idea of a link between Mapuches and the archaeological culture of El Molle.