CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

During the last decades, the pre-Columbian presence of treponematosis diseasehas long been established, particularly on the basis of skeletal evidencecoming from different regions of North America, thus allowing for the most important paleoepidemiological trends of the disease to be outlined (Powelland Cook 2005). There are also a number of reports of pre-Contact treponemaldisease in South America based on bone evidence, some of which have beenrecently confi rmed by DNA analysis of mummifi ed tissues. However, for SouthAmerica there is still a lack of a systematic review of old and recent reports ofcases, the type of evidence supporting them (e.g. osteological, genetical), differential diagnoses considered, their spatial and temporal distribution, sex andage profi le of cases, and the socio-ecological context in which they occur. A critical review and systematization of the available information would allow for a more thorough assessment of the major paleopidemiological trends for the different treponemal syndromes, resulting, in turn, in the possibility of building a frame of reference to evaluate new potential cases in the macro-region. Thus, the aim of this poster is twofold. First, it presents new information and expands the differential diagnosis discussion of one of the few cases of possible pre-Columbian treponematosis reported in Argentina. Second, it seeks to discuss this evidence in the context of a critical review of the available evidence of pre-Columbian treponemal diseases in South America. The discussed case is an adult male, from Cerro Yanquenao site (Chubut), in the Argentinean Central Patagonian steppe, dated ca. 1100 years AP, that corresponds to the hunter-gatherersgroups that occupied the region during the Late Holocene (García Guraiebet al. 2009). The new radiographic (X-ray and CT-scanning) information available on this skeleton will be presented and discussed. As a frame of referenceto further assess this case, the results of the main paleoepidemiological patterns of treponemal diseases emerging from the systematic review of the literature inSouth American reports on possible pre-Columbian cases will be used.

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