This chapter discusses comparative data on daily practices, household materiality and settlement patterns from north-west Argentina and addresses the question of early village formation, growth and abandonment from the perspective of social actors engaged in this process. This approach, which takes into account the recursive relations between objective structures and practices, not only illuminates the agents and social scales articulated in the process of village life expansion in the south Andes, but also contributes to understanding the similarities and variations with other cases on a global scale. The earliest village settlements in north-western Argentina started to grow after 2500 bp. During the first millennium ad, several sedentary agropastoral settlements systems were founded, expanded, transformed and abandoned during the Formative or Early period. As in many regions worldwide, there is clear evidence of rapid demographic growth, as well as the development of intensification strategies and a high degree of landscape domestication. Nevertheless, particular historical trajectories that shared some of those features were not identical worldwide. In several south Andean cases, residential sites tended to spread out along the landscape keeping considerable distances between houses and fields, precluding the formation of really large and clustered village settlements. These processes lead complex demographic contexts with the development of densely inhabited regions but with scattered and spaced layouts. One clear example of this particular setting that is discussed in this chapter was recorded on the Tafí Valley, a high elevation basin located in north-west Argentina.