Gustavo Neme, Adolfo Gil, Laura Salgán, Miguel Giardina, Clara Otaola, María de la Paz Pompei, Eva Peralta, Nuria Sugrañes, Fernando Ricardo Franchetti y Cinthia Abbona

The south of Mendoza province has been characterized as the southern frontier of South American pre-Hispanic agriculture on the eastern slope of the Andes. This characterization has been based on the presence of crops at the archaeological sites and adopting a dichotomic perception of hunter-gatherers and farmers. During the last few decades, the archaeological record has shown a complex and shifting situation both at a spatial and temporal level in relation to the dependence of human groups on this type of resource. Based on a biogeographic model, we evaluated different lines of analysis from the archaeological record to assess the impact of environmental factors on the emergence of agriculture within the region. The results obtained confirm the low importance of agriculture among human groups as well as their flexibility in facing different environmental and demographic scenarios. Finally, we propose that the environmental structure of Patagonia would have played a central role in limiting the spread of domesticated plant use in this region of South America.

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Ramiro Barberena, Augusto Tessone, Paula Novellino, Erik J. Marsh, Valeria Cortegoso, Alejandra Gasco, Daniela Guevara y Víctor A. Durán

Mobility is a key issue in the archaeology of southern South America, providing a lens through which multiple aspects of past social and economic organization can be visualized. Beyond this focus, there are multiple sources of behavioral variation that have little archaeological visibility and are thus seldom considered. However, the global ethnographic record shows that these aspects play a key role which may have also been significative at the archaeological scale. To connect these analytical levels, we explore different dimensions of daily and anomalous–potentially disruptive–human mobility. We develop an ethnography-based model that centers on individual life histories and incorporates aspects of mobility and kinship organization. Building on this, we present a first archaeological evaluation based on strontium isotopes, which allows us to track paleomobility, and stable isotopes, providing insights on paleodiet and niche width. This is applied to two archaeological contexts from northern Mendoza Province (Argentina): Barrancas, located in the eastern lowlands (2000-2300 cal BP) and the Uspallata Valley, between the geological units of the Precordillera and Cordillera Frontal (1200-700 cal years BP). The analysis enables us to evaluate the scale of daily mobility, stability of life histories, existence of different forms of kinship organization, and the incidence of migration.

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Gustavo Martínez, Florencia Santos Valero, Ana Paula Alcaráz, Erika Borges Vaz, Luciana Stoessel, Gustavo Flensborg, Gustavo A. Martínez y Daniel J. Rafuse

This paper presents the first results of the archaeological investigations carried out in the interfluvium located between the middle courses of the Colorado and Negro rivers (Río Negro province, Argentina). This is an extensive arid plain with many temporary lagoons in which archaeological material is concentrated, mainly on the surface. Our analysis included distributional studies and, to a lesser extent, archaeological excavations, in order to understand the human strategies of space use and occupational intensity. The generated information is discussed in the light of archaeological expectations derived from the space use model proposed by Borrero and colleagues (2008). The results obtained indicate that the archaeological record located around these ephemeral lagoons is mainly the result of a planned and redundant use of space. Furthermore, some sectors of these lagoons were used more intensively and repeatedly, suggesting cases of specific redundancy. Although radiocarbon dates could not be obtained, the presence of pottery relates human occupations at least to the Late Holocene. The evidence discussed reveals the importance of this interfluvial space in the settlement and mobility strategies of the hunter-gatherer societies that inhabited two of the main northern Patagonian rivers.

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Vivian Scheinsohn, Florencia Rizzo y Sabrina Leonardt

In the present article, we discuss the macroscale issue in archaeological research, using the peopling model of Patagonia and the regional taphonomy proposed by Luis Borrero, and their application in our archaeological project in the Pico and Genoa valleys (Western-Central sector of Chubut Province, Argentina). In the case of the peopling model, we distinguish two types of use, which we define as strong/direct and weak/indirect. A synthesis and update of the results under this perspective is presented, as well as advances in regional taphonomy.

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