Social worlds are constituted by movement. Mobility entails the circulation not only of people, but also of material goods, imaginaries, experiences, flows of information, and knowledge. In this article, we examine different forms of movement in the Atacama Desert during the Formative Period (c. 2500-1500 cal BP), such as pedestrian travels, llama caravans, and navigation on sea lion-skin vessels along the Pacific, incorporating various material means and encompassing a wide array of incentives. We present different case studies that challenge monolithic assumptions about mobility in the South-Central Andes, commonly understood through the lens of ecological complementarity and primarily driven by economic exchange. Extending Binford's classic distinction between residential and logistical mobility as two ideal types of hunter-gatherers' settlement systems to include groups of early farmers, in combination with the territorial categories of local and extra-local, we interrogate the spatial and temporal scale of these journeys-from daily to seasonal, from short to long distance-and its materialization. In these examples, we approach movement and travel as a way of life, expanding the traditional view of mobility through an exploration of the varied ways in which it was practised and integrated into the social lives of desert dwellers. Recent literature on the archaeology of deserts characterizes them as landscapes that have captured public imagination because they are commonly perceived as places to assess human resilience, technological innovation, adaptation, and change. Rendered as extreme and inhospitable environments, they have played a major role in inspiring anthropological inquiries as well, including ethnographical accounts of 'desert peoples' and the study of the evolution of human societies (Veth, Smith & Hiscock 2005: 1-2).