The Good, the Bad and the ugly: Prehispanic Harpoon Heads from Beagle Channel, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego (Patagonia Argentina)

V. SCHEINSOHN

Ancient and Modern Bone Artefacts from America to Russia. Cultural, technological and functional signature

BAR International Series

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2010; p. 295 - 302

The archaeofaunal record at Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego (Patagonia, Argentina) shows that the main staple of hunter-gatherers living there were pinnipeds (Orquera & Piana  1987, Schiavini 1993, Orquera & Piana 1999). Ethnographically it is know that “canoe” people or “canoeros” inhabited the Southern Tip of South America, at the Magellan-Fueguian Channels, until the arrival of European colonizers. The name was given to them by the European voyagers, after their bark canoes and their intensive exploitation of marine littoral resources. The pinnipeds were hunted in the coast, using clubs and stones to break their skulls, or at sea, harpooned from canoes. Then, using the harpoon shaft as a floating device that showed the location of prey, the animal was pursued to exhaustion and then finished off. But in the 6000 years´ span of archaeological record in the island, this kind of harpoon head, made of one piece from cetacean bone, was far from static and underwent several modifications. Departing from a definition of cultural evolution as a selectionist system (defined as a population of entities which have undergone repeated operations of blind variation and selective retention to evolve into another cf. Ziman 2001) and more specifically from Evolutionary Archaeology theoretical framework (lato sensu), in this paper an explanation of the evolution followed by harpoon heads is offered. The main hypothesis, following Petroski (1994) proposals on engineering history, is that the evolution of this tool could be explained by attempts to overcome its design failures. In other words, as this author put it, that “Form follows failure”.