CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The objective of this presentation is to evaluate if changes in the social organization of the hunter-gatherer groups that inhabited the lower course of the Colorado River during the final late Holocene (ca. 1000 - 250 years BP) may be understood in the context of regionalization processes (David y Lourandos 1998, 1999; Guilfoyle 2005). If this was the case, significant changes in several spheres of the social organizations are expected. This arid-semiarid area was occupied between ca. 5600-250 years BP, although the major frequency of occupations is concentrated in the late Holocene, more precisely from 1000-250 years BP. For the initial late Holocene (ca. 3000-1000 years BP) a pattern of ephemeral occupations and a strategy of residential mobility is observed together with a primary burial modality of inhumations. Subsistence is mainly based on a strategy of land resource exploitation (ungulates and large birds). Lithic technology is based on relatively simple chaînes opératoires including the exploitation of largely local but also exotic rocks from the Humid Pampa subregion, Cuyo and North Patagonia. The presence of fragments of engraved Rheidae egg shells was also recorded for this period. The last two lines of evidence suggest a fluent circulation of rocks and images in an extra-regional space throughout the Pampean and North Patagonian regions. Instead, during the final late Holocene (ca. 1000-250 years BP) several changes were recorded. A pattern of more stable, prolonged and re-occupied settlements along with higher artefactual deposition rates and intersite variability was recognized. Both residential and logistic mobility strategies were simultaneously operating and new burial modalities (secondary) and formal areas of inhumations were emerged. Subsistence was characterized by a pattern of resource diversification (e.g., river and marine fish, armadillos, birds), the intensive use of some resources (e.g., guanaco) and the existence of an intensification process. During this period, the systematic use of pottery technology is incorporated. More complex chaînes opératoires, an increased frequency of formal artifacts and a predominant use of local raw materials is detected. The low frequency of exotic rocks may indicate that the connections with some sub-regions (e.g. Humid Pampa) would not have been so fluent and may have been restricted. Also, engraved Rheidae egg shell fragments disappear from the record. Based on the above summarized information, we propose as a hypothesis that in some sectors of North-eastern Patagonia during the initial late Holocene (3000-1000 years BP) relatively open social networks operated, while for the final late Holocene (1000-250 years BP) relatively closed social networks would have taken place within a framework of increasing regionalization. Factors relating to the latter would have been population growth, changes in population dynamics, more intense and competitive social interaction networks and territorial behaviors, spatial circumscription and demographic packing. Naturally, regionalization processes operate in much widespread spatial scales than the evaluated here. Therefore, this analysis is partial and exploratory and the results will be briefly compared with information for the surrounding regions (North Patagonia, Pampas and Cuyo) in order to evaluate the existence of this process in more appropriate temporal and spatial scales.