Mound Building, Social Complexity and Horticulture in the Lower Paraná River

POLITIS, G.; BONOMO, M.

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Springer

Lugar: New York; Año: 2018; p. 1 - 22

This contribution summarizes the main issues related to the indigenous populations that occupied the alluvial plain of the Lower Paraná River during the late Holocene, especially since ca. 2000 yrs BP. This extremely flat alluvial environment was inhabited by populations that constructed earth mounds, had a diet based on wild resources complemented with house-garden horticulture, and revealed a certain level of social complexity, characterized as rank societies. This region had intense cultural dynamics that included the local groups as well as the Guaraní and possibly the Arawak, both descendants of populations probably originating in the Amazon basin but certainly expanding beyond it. The diversity of ethnonyms that the first European conquerors used to describe the Lower Paraná groups in the early sixteenth century (Chaná-Timbú, Timbú, Mbeguá, Mocoretás, Carcaraes, Corondás, Colastinés, Guaraní, among others) reflects this dynamics, and is the result of evolutionary/adaptive processes, and of particular historical trajectories.