BONE AWLS AND BASKETRY: COMPLEMENTARITY BETWEEN ETHNOGRAPHY AND EXPERIMENTATION

FRANCH ANNA; PARMIGIANI VANESA; MANSUR MARÍA ESTELA; DE ANGELIS HERNAN; ALVAREZ SONCINI MARIA CELINA

Paleoanthropology

Paleoanthropology Society

Año: 2020

1545-0031

The analysis of the ethnohistorical and ethnographic sources for Tierra del Fuego reveals the diversity of plants that were used by the Fuegian hunter-gatherer societies. One of the most used plant resources were reeds, which were gathered for basketry. Many of the written sources about the Fuegian societies describe the production of basketry and mention awls of different materials that were used in that process. The objective of our research was to study the tools related to the basketry making process, following a technofunctional approach that combines the ethnographic record, experimentation and microscopic functional analysis. Our principal aims were to reproduce, record and contrast the technical process of basketry and the way in which the bone awls take part in it, according to hypothesis derived from the ethnographic record. In the production process, we wanted to reproduce the operating chain involved in the manufacture of baskets of Marsippospermum grandiflorum, and to contrast the collection strategies and the technical processes of reed processing. Concerning the utilization of bone awls, the objective was to understand how awls were used in basketry, and to evaluate the formation and characteristics of use wear traces produced by this activity.