Assessing Fishtail projectile point distribution in the Southern Cone

Summary

This presentation discusses possible causes affecting the distribution of fishtail points in the southern Cone. This distribution is discontinuous, with large territories without diagnostic remains and areas where sites are concentrated. Also, most of the sites with this type of points exhibit few specimens, with remarkable exceptions in Uruguay, the Argentinian Pampa and Patagonia and southern Chile. We will present thoughts arising from long term research in a micro region in the Argentinian Pampa. On this ground the relevance of the following proposals is discussed: 1. sites occupied by early hunter gatherers do not always include materials that are currently diagnostic of early settlers using fishtail points. 2. the practice of depositing broken fishtail points at one place leaves other sites without these diagnostic tools and affects our record of their distribution.3. certain landscapes and particular resources, such as hills and rocks, were especially attractive for early settlers causing concentrated occupations 4. Some concentrations of sites respond to the history of research and to modern high population areas with good visibility. It is concluded that the discontinuous distribution observed responds both to the behavior of the early occupants and to current research history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Mobility and Use of Space in Late Pleistocene South America: Is it Possible to Discuss Early Human Regional Ranking?

Keywords

Spatial Coverage