CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The peopling of South America is a subject that has been discussed from many angles, including timing, migration routes, genetics, among others, and at various scales of analysis. In this paper we take on a supra-regional scale of analysis and examine stone tool assemblages from a series of Pleistocene/Holocene transition and Early-Middle Holocene sites located in two desert areas on the eastern side of the Andes ?Patagonia and the high Puna. Our objective is to assess how these lithicassemblages match up to the expectations of an exploration and colonization model proposed for Patagonia. Information on raw material provenance is used in order to assess changes in human behavior through time. The comparison between both regions allows us to examine how this process might have varied in these two similar but yet different regions of the Southern Cone, and to offer explanations about how the exploration and colonization strategies used by early hunter-gatherers indesert environments varied in relation to their knowledge of the resource structure and the distribution of resources.