Changing views about the local evolution of human populations in the southeastern pampas of Argentina during the Holocene.

BARRIENTOS, GUSTAVO; PEREZ, SERGIO IVAN; BERNAL, VALERIA; GONZALEZ, PAULA; BÉGUELIN, MARIEN; DEL PAPA, MARIANO

Proceedings of the 5th Annual BABAO Conference.

BAR International Series

Lugar: Oxford, Great Britain.; Año: 2005; p. 93 - 104

The archaeological models and hypothesis derived to explain the local evolution of hunter-gatherer populations in the southeastern Pampas of Argentina (formulated in the last 20 years) assumed that it was a rather continuous and transformative process. To a large extent, this view can be considered as an enduring legacy of early processual archaeology, in which biocultural evolution was mainly envisioned as a process of internal, adaptative adjustment. Based on recent developments in metapopulation biology and evolutionary geography, and with analysis of archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence, we propose an alternative view. According to this, the aboriginal population history of the Pampas was not a continuous process that somehow started in the Late Pleistocene and finished in recent times, but a punctuated one, in which depopulation, colonization and population replacement events may have occurred more than once during the last 13,000 years. In this paper we present and discuss the evidence -at both regional and supra-regional scale- supporting this claim (e.g., temporal distribution of calibrated 14C-ages and human craniofacial morphology), exploring their implications for the archaeological study of human peopling of the Pampas.