Plants and Steppe Hunter-Gatherers in Central Patagonia: A Case Study from the Aisén region (45° S, Chile)

Summary

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 that even though these groups based their diet on the consumption of terrestrial fauna, the archaeobotanical record has indicated the consumption of plant resources as a supplementary food. And residue studies show the use of stone tools in the collection, processing, and use of plant resources. For this presentation we shall compare the archaeobotanical record (fruits and seeds and residues/microfossils in stone tools) of three steppe hunter-gatherer sites that have a long occupational sequence: Baño Nuevo 1 (10,750–3100 cal years BP) and cueva La Vieja (12,000–130 cal years BP) in the Ñirehuao basin, and El Chueco 1 (11,500–180 cal years BP) in the Cisnes basin, in order to evaluate, in a large spatial and temporal scale, the appropriation, processing, and use of plants among steppe hunter-gatherers, considering the multiple potential uses that these resources have within these societies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Histories of Human-Nature Interactions: Use, Management, and Consumption of Plants in Extreme Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30908