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

BARRIENTOS G.; PEREZ S.I.; BERNAL V.; GONZALEZ P.; BEGUELIN M.; DEL PAPA M.

Proceedings of the 5th Annual BABAO Conference

Año: 2004; p. 93 - 104

The archaeological models and hypotheses about the local evolution of hunter-gatherer populations in the southeastern Pampas of Argentina 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 mainly envisioned as a process of internal, adaptive adjustment. Based on recent developments in metapopulation biology and evolutionary geography, and in the analysis of archaeological and biaorchaeological evidence, we propose an alternative view. According to this, 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, colonisation and population replacement events may have occurred more than once during the last 13,000 years. In this paper we present and discuss the evidence - at both regional and supra-regional scale - supporting this claim (e.g., calibrated radiocarbon dates and human craniofacial morphology), exploring their implications for the archaeological study of the human peopling of the Pampas.