Arqueología de La Boca del Riachuelo. Puerto urbano de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

CARDILLO MARCELO

The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology

Taylor&Francis

Lugar: Estados Unidos; Año: 2011 p. 170 - 171

1556-4894

This book represents the systematization of a great effort in the development and implementation of urban archaeology in the city of Buenos Aires. Even more significant is the fact that the investigation should focus on one of the most typical quarters of this city, the Riachuelo area, a port zone that became a central venue in the process of European colonization and subsequently a centre of immigration and industrial development during the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time it is worth mentioning that this place is presently at the core of controversies related to the precarious living conditions of its inhabitants, a process aggravated by the contamination of its water-course, one of the most polluted in the world. In this book, Weissel examines the conformation of the port section of the city of Buenos Aires over a time span of almost four centuries. This process of landscape modification starts off in the mid-18th century with the arrival of Spanish ships that began using this natural harbour recurrently, continuing to the present day. Linked to this process is the central hypothesis behind Weissel’s research, which postulates that the manner in which the space was used gave rise to different sectors in obedience to a particular social and economic impetus linked to the development of the port. In the initial chapters the author develops theoretical-methodological tools wherewith to explore the process of change, such tools are based on the use of the diversity indices commonly employed in ecology, taking the artifact to be the unit of analysis for this purpose. Within this framework human action is seen as the main agent in landscape modification, and the artifactual diversity as an indirect indicator of the variation of behavior through time. In chapter 7 Weissel presents the results on the basis of the information on the diversity measures of the assemblajes. In these he observes a differential representation of categories related to nutrition, medicine, and hygiene (among others), which he relates to possible differences in the use of the space at different times. The author also evaluates differential discard rates per area which would suggest, together with the observed changes in homogeneity and diversity measures, variations in the mode and intensity of using the space. The general tendency would indicate an increase in the diversity and homogeneity of the assemblajes over time. In this respect, a more detailed treatment of these indices would have been convenient, given the problems of using them on account of the unequal size of the sample sets under study, as the author himself acknowledges. This is the particular case of Shannon’s index of entropy (or Shannon-Wiener index), very dependent on the size  an richness of the sample. It must be remembered that Shannon’s index accounts for both abundance and the degree of evenness of the classes (or taxa) present (as Simpson’s homogeneity index, also used in the reasearch). This can give rise to some confusion in the interpretation of results, owing to the use of two indices to measure homogeneity, either as heterogeneity (or entropy), or as relative homogeneity. In chapter 8 the author discusses the relationship between human activities and the formation processes of the archaeological record, in terms of density, diversity, and distribution. The processes of large-scale formation and their representation in the archaeological record are specifically evaluated. One of Weissel’s hits is the identification, in the archaeological record, of domestic and work spaces, and their modification in time. The differences observed in the diversity of artifacts (abundance, homogeneity, and heterogeneity) are interpreted in terms of different strategies in the occupation of space by human groups. Such strategies would have produced the gradual separation of the coastal strip as a work area, and the Riachuelo’s floodable plain as a living sector. Without doubt, the comparative use of the results obtained through the application of diversity measures is one of the book’s central points. Its interpretation seems cautious, bearing in mind the disparity in sample size, differences in density, and the recorded formation processes. Still, the comparison of the diversity values obtained might be carried out with greater accuracy by means of an explicit frequentist criterion, estimating confidence intervals for the diversity measures. This would provide a more solid base for putting to test the suggested hypotheses. In the conclusions (chapter 9) Weissel stresses two large scale processes that can summarize the observed change: the gradual conversion of the river coast in to a port area, and the urbanization of the space. These processes are connected with industrial development, population growth, and the population’s changing trends of consumption and discard in the domestic space as well as the workplace, as part of the development of a capitalist economy. Finally, as the author accurately makes clear, the archaeological viewpoint allows the root of the social and political changes observed in the Riachuelo area to be explored from a new angle. This includes such present-day phenomena as the marginalization of the area and environmental pollution, as also changes in production and industry. For this reason this book is an important contribution to ongoing talks about environmental and social recovery of highly-impacted urban spaces, as well as a source of reference for other archaeologists.