Changing Views about the local evolution of human populations in the southeastern pampas of Argentina during the Holocene

BARRIENTOS, GUSTAVO; PÉREZ, SERGIO IVÁN; BERNAL, VALERIA; GONZÁLEZ, PAULA; BÉGUELIN, MARIEN; DEL PAPA, MARIANO

Southampton, Inglaterra

Congreso; 5th Annual BABAO Conference; 2003

BABAO

The archaeological models and hypotheses about the local evolution of the hunter-gatherer populations in the Pampas of Argentina (33° 40’S) formulated in the last 20 years were proposed assuming that it was a rather continuous and transformative process. To a great extent, this view can be considered as an enduring legacy of the early processual archaeology, in which biocultural evolution was envisioned as a process of internal, adaptative adjustment. However, recent theoretical developments in metapopulation biology and evolutionary geography show that local population history almost never is the result of a gradual, continuous process, but in many cases it involves marked disruptions and discontinuities. Human populations, like any other biological populations, are subjected to dynamical and largely stochastic processes alternatively leading to its expansion or contraction, growth or decline, diversification or homogenisation, isolation or integration, continuity or extinction. It is precisely the interrelationship between and within these developments what shepes the tempo and mode of genetic and cultural change. Our main argument here is that the aboriginal population history of the Pampas was not a continuous process that somehow started in the Late Pleistocene and finished in recent times, but a punctuated one in which depopulation and colonisation events may have occurred more than once during the last 12,000 years. In this paper we will present the archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence supporting this claim, and will discuss some methodological issues raised by this changing view about the local human evolution at the population and metapopulation levels.