Human–environment interactions in the Lake Junín basin: Fire, megafauna, deforestation, and domestication, from the peopling of the Andes to the Inca Empire Erik J. Marsh a,* , Kurt Rademaker b a Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y T´ecnicas (CONICET), Laboratorio de Paleoecología Humana, Instituto Interdisciplinario de Ciencias B´ asicas (ICB), Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina b Center for the Study of the First Americans, Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA A R T I C L E INFO Handling Editor: Donatella Magri Keywords: Late Pleistocene Holocene Quaternary extinctions Prehistoric archaeology Camelid domestication Deforestation Inca empire ABSTRACT Human–environment interactions are a focus of interdisciplinary research in the high Andes, recently invigorated by sediment-core data from Lake Junín (Chinchaycocha). On the basis of these records, recent articles have argued that humans arrived in the Junín basin 13 thousand calibrated years ago (kya), set large-scale fires, and hunted Pleistocene megafauna to extinction. Declines in montane tree pollen beginning ~4 kya have been attributed to deforestation, camelid domestication, and agriculture on the high Andean puna. In this paper, we critically examine these arguments and contrast them with a compilation of archaeological data from the Lake Junín basin including 113 radiocarbon dates (12 unpublished), settlement patterns, camelid osteometry, mac- robotanical remains, Inca period sites, and ethnographic and ethnohistoric descriptions of herding and farming. These data suggest that the earliest archaeological evidence for human occupation is not until ~11 kya, and there is no clear evidence for interaction with Pleistocene megafauna. Although the Junín basin is often cited as a center for camelid domestication in the middle Holocene, this claim remains tenuous, since osteometry struggles to distinguish wild and domestic camelids. Finally, ethnohistoric and ethnographic information offer no support for the argument that the basin was a "manufactured landscape" in the late Holocene. Moving forward, we recommend more careful consideration of (1) the mismatch of temporal resolution in paleoecological and archaeological chronologies, (2) the potential spatial mismatch in the catchment area of palaeoecological proxies and archaeological datasets, and (3) ambiguity in Sporormiella as a proxy for fauna and charcoal as a proxy for human activity. We suggest that future work on paleoecological proxies from 0.7 to 0.3 kya could be harnessed to build a comparative baseline, since these centuries saw large populations of humans and domesticated camelids near the lake. Our goal is to promote more robust reconstructions of human–environment interactions in the Lake Junín basin and elsewhere. 1. Introduction In the high Andes of Peru, Lake Junín (also called Chinchaycocha, 4080 masl), has long been targeted for paleoclimate reconstructions (Hansen et al., 1984; Seltzer et al., 2000). Recent publications present data from a 2015 lake core with an impressive time depth of 670,000 years (Chen et al., 2020; Hatfield et al., 2020; Rodbell et al., 2022; Schiferl et al., 2023; Woods et al., 2020). These data have been used to explore human–environment interactions since the late Pleistocene, including the timing of the earliest human occupations, extirpation of Pleistocene megafauna, large-scale burning, camelid domestication, deforestation, and agriculture (Bush, 2020; Bush et al., 2022). There has also been a surge of archaeological data, including new radiocarbon dates and osteometric data from Telarmachay, one of the basin’s marquee archaeological sites (Fig. 1) (Le Neün, 2022; Le Neün et al., 2023b, 2023c), in addition to surveys of the basin’s extensive Inca and Colonial roads and settlements (Bar Esquivel, 2024; Casaverde Ríos, 2024; Hastings and Perales Munguía, 2024; Medina, 2024; Perales Munguía, 2024; Saez Diaz, 2024). The goals of this paper are to critically review the recent surge of paleoecological data, synthesize the extensive but not widely published archaeological information from the Junín basin, and suggest how to * Corresponding author. E-mail address: emarsh@mendoza-conicet.gob.ar (E.J. Marsh). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary Science Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quascirev https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.109159 Received 30 September 2024; Received in revised form 17 December 2024; Accepted 22 December 2024 Quaternary Science Reviews 351 (2025) 109159 0277-3791/© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).