45 five indigenous peoples are claiming, in the lands of Fiscal Lots 14 and 55, a part of what was once their vast ancestral territory. 160. In addition, even if it was assumed for the purposes of the discussion that any of these five indigenous peoples arrived in Salta in the course of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, there is no doubt that they are the descendants of the ancestral inhabitants of the Great Chaco, a geographical region that covers vast portions of the territory of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay. They arrived, following their traditional nomadic routes and as a product of the process of contact with the non-indigenous, at some point in the course of the past two centuries to the Salta Chaco region, and established therein, over the course of the decades, their cultural and internationally protected bond with that specific area of the Chaco territory, being accepted and incorporated into the ethnic and cultural panorama of the area by other aboriginal inhabitants, with whom they established community and family ties which are currently existing and incontestable, and which the IACHR must ensure are respected and protected. In this regard, the IACHR recalls that a key element in the determination of when a given group can be regarded as indigenous or tribal is the historical continuity of its presence in a given territory, and, for indigenous peoples, an ancestral relationship with the societies that pre-existed a period of colonization or conquest. 161. This does not imply that indigenous or tribal peoples are static societies that remain identical to their predecessors. On the contrary, as human groups, indigenous and tribal peoples have their own social trajectory that adapts to changing times, maintaining in whole or in part the cultural legacy of their ancestors. Indigenous cultures evolve over time. The indigenous communities of the present are the descendants of inhabitants of the pre-Columbian Americas; over the centuries they have been through specific events which have shaped their distinctive social structures, spirituality and ritual practices, language, art, folklore, memory and identity – in sum, their culture. It is on the basis of that individual history that the relationship of each indigenous people and community with its territory is built, a relationship from which their physical and cultural subsistence emerges, and to which international law 142 has given a privileged level of protection. The history of indigenous peoples and their cultural adaptations over time, as constitutive elements of their contemporary structural configuration, are consistent with the preservation of a fundamental relationship to their territory, protected by international human rights law.143 The five indigenous peoples that today inhabit Fiscal Lots 14 and 55 of the Province of Salta have proven that they preserve that historically constructed and internationally protected relationship with the territory of this area in particular. B. Delimitation of the legal controversy to be resolved 1. Evolution of the subject matter of the petition before the IACHR 162. The initial petition received in 1998 by the IACHR referred mainly to the lack of prior consultation of a series of public works undertaken in the indigenous ancestral territory. Nonetheless, the issue of territorial property, as well as other related topics that refer to the ancestral territory – such as the illegal extraction of timber, the tending of wire fences and the environmental degradation caused by the cattle-raising activities of the creole population - were central axes of the debate between the parties before the IACHR; both the petitioners and the State, in their arguments and reports, positioned the issue of territory as a central issue to be resolved in the present case. 142 IACHR, ”Indigenous and tribal peoples’ rights over their ancestral lands and natural resources – Norms and Jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System”, 2010, par. 35. 143 In the case of Yakye Axa v. Paraguay, the Inter-American Court described the history of the affected community as follows: “…it is necessary to consider that the victims of the instant case have to date an awareness of an exclusive common history; they are the sedentary expression of one of the bands of the Chanawatsan indigenous peoples (…). Possession of their traditional territory is indelibly recorded in their historical memory, and their relationship with the land is such that severing that tie entails the certain risk of an irreparable ethnic and cultural loss, with the ensuing loss of diversity. In the process of sedentarization, the Yakye Axa Community took on an identity of its own that is connected to a physically and culturally determined geographic space, which is a specific part of what was the vast Chanawatsan territory” IA Court H.R., Case of the Yakye Axa Indigenous Community v. Paraguay. Merits, Reparations and Costs. Judgment of June 17 th, 2005. Series C No. 125, par. 216. In the same sense, see: I/A Court H.R., Case of the Xákmok Kásek Indigenous Community v. Paraguay. Merits, Reparations and Costs. Judgment of August 24, 2010. Series C No. 214, pars. 37-43.