Sitios con entierros humanos y ocupaciones residenciales en la cuenca del rio Negro (Norpatagonia, Argentina). Diacronia y multicausalidad. Latin American Antiquity (en prensa).

PRATES, L.; V. DI PRADO

Latin American Antiquity

Society for American Archaeology

Año: 2013 vol. 24 p. 451 - 466

1045-6635

Human burial and base camps at sites located in raised grounds of the landscape, represent a characteristic feature of the prehispanic occupation pattern of the Río Negro Basin. The study of some of these sites and, specifically, of the human burials found in them, has been used by several scholars to explore the different ways in which hunter gatherers interacted with death, and to discuss issues of a social nature such as ritual and religious practices, mobility patterns and processes of social complexity. The present paper provides chronological and contextual information of several sites, where domestic activities and mortuary practices coincide spatially and discusses the contextual relationships among them. On the basis of previous information and new data, the issue concerning the interpretation and conceptualization of these sites is newly analyzed, and the notions of cemetery and formal disposal area are revised. Finally, we propose that these sites, occupied recurrently during the Late Holocene, are persistent places (sensu Schalanger 1992) and their present configuration is the result of a complex confluence of religious, social and environmental constraints.