INVESTIGADORES
POLITIS Gustavo Gabriel
artículos
Título:
AMS 14C dating of early human occupation of southern South America
Autor/es:
STEELE, J.; POLITIS, G..
Revista:
JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Editorial:
Elsevier
Referencias:
Lugar: New York; Año: 2008 vol. 36 p. 419 - 429
ISSN:
0305-4403
Resumen:
The presence or absence of a persistent and demographically-viable hunter-gatherer population in southern South America during the late Pleistocene is best addressed by evaluating evidence from as large as possible a sample of candidate archaeological sites in this region. We co-ordinated the AMS dating of multiple bone and charcoal samples from previously-excavated strata at the following sites: Arroyo Seco 2, Paso Otero 5, Piedra Museo, and Cueva Tres Tetas (all in Argentina), and Cueva del Lago Sofia and Tres Arroyos (in Chile). With one possible exception (Arroyo Seco 2), we did not obtain new results to confirm earlier observations of pre-Clovis-age cultural activity at any of the sites considered in this study. The exception, Arroyo Seco 2, is considered in detail elsewhere (Politis and Gutierrez, in press). However, our results on the samples which were the most preferred indicators of cultural events (hearth charcoal and cut-marked bone) confirm that people were in the southern cone of South America at or soon after 11,000 BP. These results imply the emergence of a consistent and archaeologically-robust human occupation signal simultaneously at locations dispersed throughout the Western Hemisphere, which challenges demographic models of a Clovis-age expansion from North America.