Record of Late Holocene Human Occupations in Coastal Deposits of the Middle Uruguay River

CAROLA CASTIÑEIRA LATORRE; RODRIGO COSTA ANGRIZANI; EDUARDO APOLINAIRE; MARCO ALVAREZ; IRINA CAPDEPONT; ADRIANA BLASI; LAURA MARAVILLA; FLORENCIA MARI; MICHAEL ZECH

Advances in Coastal Geoarchaeology in Latin America

Springer

Año: 2019; p. 131 - 156

The archaeological record recovered in fluvial deposits of the UruguayRiver has been widely used to build interpretative frameworks about the South American prehistory. The interpretation of these records helped to consolidate the NorthAmerican Clovis First paradigm and, currently, to contribute to its discussion. Theyare useful as well to understand the technological divergences of lithic, pottery, andagricultural pre-Hispanic industries on a continental scale. The information of thissector mostly corresponds to the fieldwork carried out by the Archaeological Rescue Mission of Salto Grande before the beginning of the construction of the hydroelectrical dam in the middle Uruguay River. Recently, an international and interdisciplinaryteam of archaeology begun to develop systematic investigations in order to recognizeand actualize the information of this area. One of the main goals of this work is toreconstruct the paleoecological scenario in which the pre-Hispanic populations livedand interacted with each other and with the environment. To this purpose, differentstratigraphic successions on the middle littoral Uruguay River were surveyed. Theyallowed to define and date a succession of fluvial erosive?aggradational episodes thatcharacterized the fluvial dynamics during the Late Holocene. These episodes can belinked to the evolution of paleoclimatological phenomena supported by regionalmodels. On the other hand, the archaeological records registered in the successionsof the studied sites allowed to understand the coast of the Uruguay River as a hotspot area since its early human colonization.