Health and Disease of Native Human Populations in Austral Patagonia First Steps, Results and Perspectives

FUGASSA MH; SUBY JA; GUICHÓN RA; RODRIGUEZ MARTIN C

Rio de Janeiro

Congreso; 1st Paleopathology Association Meeting in South America; 2005

The health and disease of austral extremity of South American hunter-gatherer populations has been scarcely studied in pre and post native - european contact periods. Its exploration requires an interdisciplinary collaboration, which must at least include Archaeology, Anthropology, Biology and History. The aim of this communication is to present the first steps of the collaboration and the support between specialists, and to make known the obtained advances. In a first approximation, we were interested in suggesting which could have been the diseases that were associated to hunter-gatherer populations in high latitude environments, as well as the expected diseases in the contact process in Tierra del Fuego. Moreover, in this period we are analyzing the epidemiology of direct and indirect contact from a historical-biological point of view. We have initiated the paleoparasitological analysis of coprolites from archaeological sites, and of sediments associated to the archaeological human record. Since the human bone assemblages are key to our studies, we have started to work on bone collections of several museums, excavations and assessment of human bones from archaeological sites of pre and post contact periods. In relation to where and how the biological human record appears, we are exploring the relationships between survivorship frequencies and intrinsic bone properties, in several contexts. In this communication we resume the results obtained at the moment, and we propose the following strategies.