New Insights into a Late Pleistocene Submerged Landscape on the Pacific Coast of South America

Summary

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, which provides the first evidence of a drowned terrestrial site along the Pacific continental shelf of South America covered by sea-level rise after the LGM. A substantial continental extinct fauna assemblage has been comprehensively excavated and dated 29–23.1 cal kyr BP. However, recent paleoenvironmental and marine geophysical data enables reinterpretation and sheds considerable light on site history. New radiocarbon dates of bones and sediments provide ages between 23 and 21.5 cal kyr BP, suggesting a more recent stratigraphic sequence than previously known. Georeferenced historic charts indicate large lagoons with a rich ecosystem existed before modern impacts to the landscape while coastal aeolian deposits suggest dunes covered an extensive area coinciding with the formation of GNLQ1. These new data support the fact that floodplains with a shallow wetland developed among dunes associated to a low energy fluvial environment represented a major coastal landscape feature.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32778