ref: Before Farming 2010/2 article 6

Rehabilitating Darwin

As a more than slightly nerdy teenager interested in most things anthropological, I found myself engrossed in Darwin’s journal of his long voyage on the Beagle. His passage through Patagonia held the greatest fascination – the end of the earth literally, well, okay, the most southerly inhabited land mass. The Land of Fire was exotic and inhabited by peoples living directly from the land and the sea. Darwin’s obvious distaste for the appearance of the locals and his uninformed assessment of their likely intellectual abilities were shocking to the budding anthropologist and still are when I read them to my students. We live in enlightened times tempered by cultural relativism. The present and past diversity of human societies is all around us and reinforced by popular media coverage of anthropology and archaeology. The daily news also reminds us that we live in a world of tension arising from ignorance or intolerance of those who hold different values.

Darwin was an intellectual and a man of his times and he carried that cultural baggage with him. It is unfair to judge him by our standards. But what a very different perspective he might have taken of the peoples of Patagonia had he been trained in the four main fields of anthropology. Of course that could never have happened, the past is past unless you have a time machine. The archaeological record is the nearest we have to that fabled instrument, and if Darwin were alive he’d appreciate the two papers in this issue that provide carefully argued faunal evidence for diverse hunting practices by the prehistoric inhabitants of Patagonia. Santiago and Salemme describe the first substantiated case for the mass hunting of guanacos in the archaeological record of the region, and Tivoli takes us along the Beagle Channel where local communities had a well structured annual cycle for maximising the use of shorebirds as sources of food. Gradually we are piecing together something of the lives of these extinct people, always bearing in mind the sad irony that it is we who destroyed them through exposure to commerce and disease.

The Editor
Liverpool, February 2011

© Western Academic & Specialist Press Ltd 2010