Rodent stable isotopes in the South American pre-Hispanic agricultural frontier: assessing their potential to evaluate past human strategies

LÓPEZ, JOSÉ MANUEL; QUIROGA, GISELA; DAUVERNÉ, ARMANDO; LUNA, MARTÍN; GIL, ADOLFO F.

Ushuaia

Taller; IV Taller de Arqueología e isótopos estables en el sur de Sudamérica; 2023

CONICET

Small mammals, particularly micromammals, have narrow ecological requirements, tolerances, and habitat preferences. It remains recovered in archaeological and paleontological sites offer the possibility of making palaeoecological inferences based on the knowledge of their particular ecological requirements, recognized through the current distribution of each taxon. Significant changes in technology and human subsistence during the second half of the late Holocene has been registered in Central Western Argentina. The introduction of agriculture is understood in the framework of an intensification process as correlate of high ranked resource depression and spatial saturation due to increase in human population. Despite these trends identified in the regional archaeological record, this scenario is still under debate. Given the requirements of micromammals to microhabitat level, in this study we explore the potential of Ctenomys sp., a semi fossorial rodent, as indirect marker of presence of maize, an isotopically distinctive plant central to subsistence practices of regional populations, to test the extent to which rodents used this domesticated plant. We use bone-collagen isotopic values of Ctenomys remains recovered in the archaeological site Agua de la Tinaja, located in an intermountain valley from the Andean precordillera (Uspallata, Mendoza, Argentina). From this site has been documented one of the first use of domesticates in the area, at the beginnings of the late Holocene. In order to identify original signatures of archaeological assemblages, the available isotopic information (part of them original of the present study) of modern regional Ctenomys assemblages and plant communities also is analysed. Isotopic signature of archaeological Ctenomys show a more enriched level of δ13Ccol in sectors where domesticates were found than components without agriculture and regional modern Ctenomys assemblages.