Subsistence variations and landscape use of marine foragers in southern South America. New perspectives from an isotopic zooarchaeology

TIVOLI, A. M.; ZANGRANDO, A. F.; NYE, JONATHAN; TESSONE, AUGUSTO; PÉREZ, SURAY A.

Vancouver

Congreso; SAA 82nd Annual Meeting; 2017

Society for American Archaeology

Predictions based on resource distribution and abundance throughout patches (i.e., patch choice model) are critical to model human-specific decisions. However, information about past abundance or distribution of preys is rare, and archaeological evaluations are normally based on modern ecological parameters. This procedure can face some problems since species distributions are likely to have fluctuated along time as a consequence of different environmental factors, or as the product of human predation. Stable isotope studies have the potential to address this problem providing a suitable paleoecological framework. We present and discuss stable isotope analyses from zooarchaeological samples of coastal and marine resources dated to the past 6,000 years with the aim to investigate possible variations in the patch use by marine hunter-gatherers in southern South America. A number of studies have suggested that variations in carbon and nitrogen values among marine animals can be explained by differences in the isotope composition between nearshore and offshore ecosystems, or by changes in trophic levels. Since stable isotope analyses are used here as paleoecological markers for assessing the distribution of animal resources in the past, this method allows us to identify the use of marine patches for foraging activities by hunter-gatherers along the Holocene.