Kamiare

The Kamiare were the southern of the two Henia-Kamiare ethnicities whom Spanish documents grouped as Comechingones, holding the drier sierras and valleys of Argentina's San Luis province, on the southern edge of the Sierras Pampeanas; one reading takes kami as mountain country, making them peoples of the ranges.

Like their northern Henia kin, they were settled farmers raising animals for wool, meat and eggs, wintering in communal stone dwellings half-buried in earth. Their dozen or so clans under curaca chiefs gathered at seasonal feasts and marked hunting grounds with abstract rock carvings.

From Córdoba after 1573 the Spanish conquest reached them through encomiendas and forced resettlement, and seventeenth-century authorities moved defeated Calchaquí and Chaco groups into the region. Epidemics and tributary labour dissolved their chiefdoms before the century ended, their language giving way first to Quechua and then to Spanish.