The Archaeology of contact and migration in Western Pampas (Argentina)

BERÓN, MÓNICA ALEJANDRA

Dublin, Irlanda

Congreso; VI World Archaeological Congress; 2008

World Archaeological Congress

Research advances on cultural and bioarchaeological records en La Pampa province (Argentina) offer information about the dynamics of prehispanic populations in wide scales, both spatial and temporal. The variability in the origin of  artifacts found in different archaeological sites are evidences of a wide range of action/ interaction among people in the area: shells and snails used to manufacture ornaments come from maritime coasts, hundreds of kilometers far from the sites, or  chipped stone of high quality whose obtention implies log trips or good relationships with “the others”. Metal ornaments from transandean procedence point the wideness of these interactions. Also, the bioarchaeological record let us outline long contact processes among prehispanic populations and migratory events pushed by European colonization. The evaluation of a pull of variables, such as sex, statures, chronology, cranial deformation, stable isotopic values let us pose this idea. A synthesis of all this integrated information will be exposed in this presentation.