Subsistence variations and landscape use of marine foragers in southern South America. New perspectives from an isotopic zooarchaeology

ZANGRANDO, A.F.J.; TESSONE, A.; TIVOLI, A.M.; NYE, J.; PÉREZ, S.A.

Vancouver

Congreso; Society for American Archaeology, 82nd Annual Meeting; 2017

Predictions based on resource distribution and abundance throughout patches (i.e., patchchoice model) are critical to model human-specific decisions.However, information about pastabundance or distribution of preys is rare, and archaeological evaluations are normally basedon modern ecological parameters. This procedure can face some problems since speciesdistributions are likely to have fluctuated along time as a consequence of differentenvironmental factors, or as the product of human predation. Stable isotope studies have thepotential to address this problem providing a suitable paleoecological framework. We presentand discuss stable isotope analyses from zooarchaeological samples of coastal and marineresources dated to the past 6,000 years with the aim to investigate possible variations in thepatch use by marine hunter-gatherers in southern South America. A number of studies havesuggested that variations in carbon and nitrogen values among marine animals can beexplained by differences in the isotope composition between nearshore and offshoreecosystems, or by changes in trophic levels. Since stable isotope analyses are used here aspaleoecological markers for assessing the distribution of animal resources in the past, thismethod allows us to identify the use of marine patches for foraging activities byhuntergatherers along the Holocene.