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Early peopling and coastal archeology in patagonia and Tierra del Fuego: Information gap, preconceptions and perspectives

Abstract:

The lack of early occupations in coastal areas of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego contrasts with the existing evidence for other sectors of America. The peopling of the southern end of this continent shows a significant difference between the initial occupation of steppe areas during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition and the later colonization of coastal environments in the Mid-Holocene. This situation seems to be increasingly consolidated with the development of coastal research in the last decades. However, the substantial development of these studies has focused on shell middens, which has imposed some analytical bias on our conception of the coastal archaeological landscape. This is due to the predominance of interpretative approaches to explore human adaptations in maritime environments and the advantages conferred by shell middens in terms of preservation, resolution and archaeological visibility. The difficulty that this situation imposes is that there are no reasons to assume the formation of shell mounds from the initial moments of a regional sequence. This promotes the need to devise surveys and pbkp_redictive models from interdisciplinary perspectives with scarce development in the region.