Lickanantay

Lickanantay, also known as Atacameño, names the people of the Atacama oases. Their communities occupied a desert landscape connected by irrigated cultivation, pastoral settlements and caravan routes. Inca roads linked the salt-flat country with the high plateau and the lands farther east, giving these oases a place within a wider Andean network before Spanish conquest.

Spaniards reached the Atacama oases around 1536, encountering resistance during the following decades. Colonial rule brought land grants, encomienda obligations and evangelisation. San Pedro became an important regional centre, while seventeenth-century changes included the introduction of mules and a decline in population. Transport and the organisation of labour consequently changed alongside religious and political authority. In the late eighteenth century, wider Andean rebellions also reached Atacama under the local leader Tomás Paniri. The region later entered the Republic of Bolivia after the end of Spanish rule.