Inland and maritime adaptations in the Southern Cone

BARBERENA R.; MARIANNE CHRISTENSEN; DOMINIQUE LEGOUPIL; PRATES L.

Global Archaeology

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2022;

The southern cone of South America is the last continental landmass colonized by humans during the late Pleistocene. From a global perspective, this part of the continent can be characterized as a large peninsular territory where Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego Island are surrounded by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. In this chapter we summarize the main diachronic trends of economic and geographic change for the human societies inhabiting the Pacific coastlines and fjords in Chile and the Beagle Channel, largely characterized by a marine subsistence base and aquatic mobility, on the one hand, and for the groups inhabiting the Atlantic shed of the southern cone, which displayed highly diverse socio-economic organization. By synthesizing the available archaeological evidence for this large region, we assess the main diachronic trends including the initial human peopling, temporal discontinuities, processes of cultural and technological change in maritime societies, the existence of coastal adaptations in the Atlantic coast, and the diversity of subsistence organization in the mosaic forest-steppe ecosystems of northern Patagonia.