Multiple dynamics produce the ecological present. For the past 30 years or more, in the southern Atacama salt pan (Salar) in northern Chile, extractive industries have been accumulating minerals and water in exhaustive quantities, taking ever more than may be regenerated. However, the exhaustion of the Salar de Atacama involves a more complex set of symptoms than demonstrable environmental depletion. Fragmented scientific knowledge of the salt pan due to the privatization of water and under-regulation of mining provides a partial explanation for this complexity. In this article, we discuss these political conditions of environmental knowledge and, using a range of methodologies, we show that the scale of resource extraction threatens social and environmental harm and exhaustion may manifest in unexpected ways. We used remote sensing data to elaborate maps that reflect environmental change (1985-2017), relative to the intensification of extractive activity for copper and lithium salts in the area. Using these data, we undertook ethnographic and participatory mapping work to discuss with people from the Peine Indigenous community how they have experienced ecological change related to mineral and water extraction in the southern Salar. A review of the historical and archaeological material helps us to show the depth of Indigenous people's relationships to and knowledge of the salt pan and surrounds, and how social memory may be ecological. Combining the different results of our research, we argue that ecological exhaustion emerges from social, environmental and political conditions driven by both tangible and uncertain impacts of industrial extraction. Revealing these conditions of exhaustion raises key questions about the complexity of the effects of extraction.Keywords: Indigenous peoples; Salar de Atacama; participatory mapping; mining; water rights

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The looting of archaeological heritageIn 2012, in addition to AP Journal Volume 2, JAS Arqueología also published a book in Spain about the looting of archaeological heritage: Indianas jones sin futuro (Indianas jones without future), by Ignacio Rodríguez Temiño. We then realised there was an urgent need to debate this issue more thoroughly at an international scale, to show how different things can be and try to find better strategies for the protection of archaeological heritage.While the forum was being designed, a special issue of Internet Archaeology on looting was published (Issue 33) and new projects started to emerge. This shows an increasing interest in these topics and opens the way for wider debates and perspectives.At first, we thought metal detecting was the main topic to be discussed. Then we started to realise it was just a small part of a wider problem: looting. This is how we decided to initiate a series of forums for the coming years, with a focus on different aspects of looting, and from different perspectives*.PART I (vol. 3 -2013) Beyond metal detectors: around the plundering of archaeological heritage.PART II (vol. 4 -2014) Conflict and looting: alibi for conflict… and for the looting of archaeological heritage.

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