Junius and Margaret Bird at Chiloé: A Review of the First Archaeological Work in the Northwestern Patagonian coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Junius and Margaret Bird's expedition to southern Patagonia is primarily renowned for its discovery of Late Pleistocene occupations within the Magellanic steppe. However, their voyage included two lesser-known stays at the northern margin of the Patagonian archipelagos. During those periods, Junius conducted the first archaeological work at the shell middens of the insular coasts of Reloncaví Sound and Chiloé Island, which he believed to be the birthplace of the canoe-faring societies of the southern Pacific. Perhaps surpsingly, however, his publications only briefly mentioned these sites. Therefore, if not for excerpts from Junius and Margaret's diaries and letters, those excavations and surface collections have remained relatively unknown, despite representing pioneering work in an area that wasn't studied for decades thereafter. In this work, we present results of the first study of the collections held at the American Museum of National History, along with the spatial reconstruction of the archaeological work carried out between 1935 and 1936. The collections include evidence so far unrecorded in the area, such as Mytilus shell tools, and a diverse set of ceramic, bone and lithic assemblages that account for Chiloean cultural history from the Middle Holocene to the Spanish colonial times.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37846.0