South America: Patagonia and Southern Cone (Geographic Keyword)
26-42 (42 Records)
Maritime hunter-gatherers from Fuego-Patagonia are of special archaeological interest given their sudden emergence in the archaeological record and their highly specialized economic adaptation. In 2011 we carried an intense salvage archaeological excavation program along the central area of Strait of Magellan in Southernmost Patagonia, Chile. Here we present the results obtained from 1.546 m2 of excavation, where a total of 18 archaeological sites, located along the eastern shore of the...
mtDNA and the Peopling of Fuego Patagonia (2018)
Information regarding the prehistoric human migration into Southernmost Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego provides a baseline against which it is possible to compare interpretations regarding the colonization of the Americas, including its timing and rates of human dispersion. The earliest archaeological evidence in Fuego- Patagonia dates to the Late Pleistocene (c. 10.500 BP). By the Middle Holocene archaeological record (c. 8000-4000 BP) shows marked differences between the technological,...
Navigating Paradigms: Site Location and Settlement Patterns in Watery Environments from the Pacific Northwest Coast and Southern Patagonia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstructing past seafaring presents major challenges. Beyond the archaeological invisibility of watercraft, a key issue is that theoretical models and archaeological predictions concerning aquatic movement are less developed than for terrestrial cases. We apply an explorative and...
New Insights into a Late Pleistocene Submerged Landscape on the Pacific Coast of South America (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying evidence of human activity on the continental shelf might prove challenging and employing inductive explanation by collecting data on available evidence represents an initial step to build generalizations. This is the case of the Late Pleistocene site GNL Quintero 1 (GNLQ1), located in Quintero Bay (32° S), central Chile,...
The Peopling of Southern Cone: A View from the Other Side of the Andes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part II: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of Monte Verde 2 west of the Andes confirmed a pre-Clovis peopling of South America. Since then, other archeological evidence in the eastern plains of the Southern Cone showed diverse adaptive patterns and varied technologies, different from Monte Verde, between 14,000 and 12,000 cal BP. In...
Plants and Steppe Hunter-Gatherers in Central Patagonia: A Case Study from the Aisén region (45° S, Chile) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on the use of plants among hunter-gathering groups has made visible the use of a predictable and ubiquitous resource that is locally and seasonally available, and that count with multiple potential uses. Recent studies at the Baño Nuevo 1 site (Aisén, Chile) have revealed...
Post-contact Times in Southern Patagonia (2018)
The history of the different indigenous hunter-gatherer groups that inhabited Patagonia since the Pleistocene was profoundly affected by the arrival of Europeans during the sixteenth century. This resulted in significant changes in various aspects of their lifeways, both archaeologically and ethnographically recorded. We integrate the available archaeological data of the post-contact period in southern Patagonia, along with ethnographic and historical data; showing the heterogeneous and complex...
Prehistoric Dogs in the Uruguay Lowlands (2018)
This paper presents archaeological information about domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) recovered in prehistoric sites in the southeastern lowlands of Uruguay. The presence of dog in the archaeological record is associated to horticultural activities of hunter-gatherers adapted to the very dynamic conditions of this flood ecosystem during the Holocene. Dog findings in mounds have a recurrent and unique association with burials. This context allows a starting discussion on the economic,...
Preliminary Investigations of Mobile Forager Landscape Learning Processes in Central Western Patagonia, Chile (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Central Western Patagonia is an area characterized by climatic and landscape contrasts, with a variety of ecotones within a defined area. This region is naturally divided into different river valleys, separated by steep, ice-capped mountains. One such valley, the Ibáñez River Valley, has been investigated archaeologically since the early 1970s. The Ibáñez...
Pristine Forests of Southern Chile? Evidence for a Millennium of Anthropogenic Woodlands (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relevance of the temperate forests of South America (35°S–55°S) have been acknowledged in ecological and biodiversity terms. Although evidence of human settlements in this vast territory goes back to ∼14,600 cal yr BP, these forests are commonly referred to as pristine or natural environments. In Southern Chile, paleoenvironmental studies indicate that...
The Quarry in the Forest: The Case of the Upper Guanaco River (Southern Patagonia, Argentina) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherer forest landscape use is an ongoing discussion in Southern Patagonia. The recent finding of a silicified rock quarry on the upper Guanaco River (close to the Andean range) adds important data to the debate focused on forest intensity use and it is useful to model forest-steppe interaction. The quarry, located in the western flank of a hill, in...
Re-evaluation of the Archaeology of the Pali Aike Lava Field (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Patagonian Evolutionary Archaeology and Human Paleoecology: Commending the Legacy (Still in the Making) of Luis Alberto Borrero in the Interpretation of Hunter-Gatherer Studies of the Southern Cone" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new research project will focus on the archaeology of the Pali Aike Lava Field, Patagonia, Chile by a restudy of the collections obtained by Junius Bird between 1936 and 1970. These objects...
Recycling on Fishtail Points: Morphological and Fatty Acids Analysis (2018)
Fishtail points constitute a flexible type that exhibits morphological variability, in part unrelated to spatial and chronological factors. Assemblages from the Argentinian pampas include small, medium and large points, produced either on a flake blank or by bifacial thinning on a biface, with or without fluting, with rounded or angular shoulders, that is, presenting variable sizes, design and manufacturing techniques. These variations were partly the result of the production of objects intended...
Southern Patagonian Hunter-Gatherers: Distributional Archaeology in the North Shore of the Viedma Lake (Santa Cruz, Argentina) (2018)
Results obtained through a distributional archaeology project along the north shore of the Viedma lake basin are introduced. The aim of the research is to gain knowledge about hunter-gatherer landscape use during the Holocene and to incorporate the basin within a broader discussion of the population of the western side of Southern Patagonia. Different altitudinal sectors along an East-West axis -from the steppe to the forest- were surveyed in order to understand seasonal mobility: 1) the coast...
Tackling the Early Holocene Record in Patagonia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early Holocene archaeological record in Patagonia has always been elusive. It is often recorded as layers within multi-component cave sites where archaeological and natural materials accumulate. However ordered the layering, careful the excavation techniques, or large the quantity of radiocarbon dates, such sites are complex to interpret due to site...
Technological Changes in Patagonia: Debitage Analysis at Chorrillo Malo 2 Site (Upper Santa Cruz River Basin) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent researches have shown the presence of technological and, in some cases, chronological discontinuities in the archaeological record of Central-South Patagonia from the Pleistocene–Holocene transition to the Late Holocene. Most of these changes have been recognized on lithic tools. In this presentation, we use...
‘To be or not to be…’ A Taphonomic Perspective on Pseudoartifacts (2018)
An anthropocentric perspective governs most of archaeological research into lithic assemblages. Hence, spatial and morphological trends in the lithic record are interpreted primarily in terms of human technological behavior without a systematic assessment of unintentional and/or non-human factors as sources of variation. Surprisingly, controversies on the natural vs. anthropic character of several lithic assemblages or ‘industries’ did not prompt the adoption of taphonomic approaches by lithic...