Building and Interpreting Chronological Models: Exploring dates associated to Overo Style in sites of the Diamante Valley

FERNANDO FRANCHETTI

San Rafael

Workshop; Workshop on the Coevolution of Climate, Population and Food Systems in North and South America; 2018

PAGES-PEOPLE3000

I present radiocarbon dates that belongs to the Late Holocene from the Diamante valley, located in North Patagonia, Argentina. The samples correspond to charcoal, plants and maize. All of them are short live samples that were recovered in test pits and excavations, both in rock shelters and open sites.Radiocarbon dates have been used as a population proxy in the archaeology of Sourhern Mendoza. Moreover, researchers interpreted a Middle Holocene Hiatus from different sequences and set comparisons to other regions in South America and worldwide. This lead to propose different hypothesis related to increased aridity, volcanic activity, changes in settlement patterns and sampling biases. However, there is little information of the chronology of ceramics and projectiles points that could work as a temporal markers for surface survey collections. Therefore, I selected the dates associated to known styles of ceramics. Particularly, this trend works for the style Overo, proposed to be used mainly in the Highlands and the Piedmont and analogous to its mirror style called Nihuil in the Lowlands. This trend permits to explore two possible hypotheses: 1) Different styles of ceramics belongs to different periods of times across the Late Holocene. 2) All the ceramics styles in the region are continuously present during the Late Holocene but their densities and distribution vary from the Highlands and the Lowlands.