Hunter-gatherer Home Ranges and Marine Resources. An Archaeological Case from Southern Patagonia

L. BORRERO; R. BARBERENA

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

University of Chicago Press

Lugar: Chicago (EEUU); Año: 2006 vol. 47 p. 855 - 867

0011-3204

As Murdock aptly said, “It has long been recognized that the form, size, and fixity of human settlements bear a definite relationship to the modes of exploiting the natural environment to provide subsistence”. The dietary importance of marine resources is one of the most frequently cited factors in the hunter-gatherer literature as conditioning spatial organization. In this paper we consider the variability in home ranges in relation to the intensity in the consumption of these foods. To accomplish this we evaluate two independent bodies of data: on one side, world ethnographic information, which provides a global view of the subject at a high resolution temporal scale; on the other side, Patagonian archaeological data, which is intended to address this topic at a wider temporal scale. The archaeological research lines that we emphasize are the spatial distribution of transported “marine” elements -like molluscs or sea mammal bones-, the distribution of human remains with stable isotopic values that indicate the consumption of marine resources, and archaeofaunal analyses of coastal and hinterland sites. An archaeological case study from Southern Patagonia, on Argentinean and Chilean territories, temporally framed on the Late Holocene, forms the basis of our discussion.