Kanči: Indigenous Seafaring, Watercraft Diversity, and Cultural Contact in Southern Patagonia

Summary

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.

Human adaptation to (and building of) watery environments is a phenomenon of growing interest for archaeology and anthropology. It is an aspect that has been related to forms of economic production and the derivations of the evolution of forms of transportation and mobility in past societies. But seafaring also affected how human groups related to other ethnic groups and how they constructed their relationship with the landscape-waterscape. One main problem in the study of Indigenous seafaring is the lack of direct material evidence. For historical times, this information can be critically inferred from chronicles and travelers’ accounts. This paper presents the results of the spatiotemporal analysis of 1,046 sightings of Indigenous canoes recorded in written sources from 1520 onward, in which descriptions of the canoe cultures of Southern Patagonia are recorded. We find significant diversity in Indigenous watercraft and seafaring since the eighteenth century linked to processes of cultural contact, and possible relationships with Indigenous migratory processes originating in Northern Patagonia. We analyze the introduction of new watercraft technology in the region and evaluate its impact on hunter-gatherer organizational strategies and the relationships with the waterscape of Southern Patagonia, traditionally built around the bark canoe.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35983.0