Late Holocene human occupation of the Quequén Grande River valley bottom: settlement systems and an example of a built environment in the Argentine Pampas

Gustavo A Martínez
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnológicas (CONICET), Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Paleontológicas del Cuaternario Pampeano (INCUAPA) Departamento de Arqueología, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, (B7400JWI), Olavarría, Argentina
gmartine@soc.unicen.edu.ar

Quentin Mackie
Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
qxm@uvic.ca

Keywords: Argentina, Pampas archaeology, landscape archaeology, organisation of technology, built environment

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary model of the occupational history of the valley bottoms at the edges of the bed of the Quequén Grande River (Argentina) during the late Holocene. The ultimate goal of the research is to situate some aspects of technology, mobility, land-use patterns and settlement systems as a proximal consequence of a long-term process of 'lithification', that is, the positioning of lithic raw material across otherwise lithic-free areas of the landscape.

In order to address this issue, distributions of lithic artefacts are used to discuss features of the regional technological organisation and settlement systems and the relationships between people and the landscape. In that sense, lithification, a variant of a 'provisioning places' strategy, has implications for other aspects of a human adaptive system. The lithification process has influenced the organisation of technology, in particular the degree of planning and anticipation necessary, which in turn affects the degree to which technological strategies (eg, curation and expediency) were employed. Lithification also has implications for the organisation of logistical and residential mobility strategies by encouraging reoccupations, changing periodicity of reoccupation, altering landscape use patterns, and making for longer seasonal or task-specific stays. One end result is an artificial conflation of resources, and a lessening of resource heterogeneity. For example, there will be more places where critical resources, such as water, fauna, and flora, co-occur with the lithic resources needed to exploit them. The lithic raw material distribution is only partially dependant on natural occurrence because the environment has been reorganised and (intentionally or otherwise) built by human activity. We propose that in the Pampas the late Holocene witnesses a process of 'building a landscape' which had implications for social organisation and hence played an important role in regional human adaptation and cultural evolution.

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Range area and seasonal campsites of Toba bands in western Chaco, Argentina

Marcela Mendoza
Department of Anthropology, University of Memphis, 320 Manning Hall, Memphis, TN 38152, USA
mmendoza@memphis.edu

Keywords: South American Chaco, western Toba,band mobility, range area, campsites

Abstract

Toba bands (co-residential groups of related families) have trekked the land at the intersection of the Pilcomayo River with the Tropic of Capricorn (Formosa Province, Argentina) since at least the 1840s. Previously, the Toba had been self-organised, mobile hunter-gatherers focused primarily on the exploitation of animals and terrestrial plants in the water-depressed microenvironments of western Chaco. My discussion of the bands' range areas and criteria for choosing campsites is based on the elders' recollection of their trekking in the 1920s. At that time, they were already living under conditions of 'regional packing' produced by cattle-posts. According to my analysis of oral information from 12 bands, the mean range area was 463 km2 and the mean distances that the bands travelled between campsites varied from 8 to 13 km. The estimated number of persons per band during the most dispersed phase of the annual cycle was between 14 and 35 or more. An estimated 553 Toba people trekked these range areas at the beginning of the twentieth century. Toba population density apparently remained low in relation to the availability of plant and animal resources. Some riverine bands carried out logistical movements while other bands practised high residential mobility. Toba campsites were consistently found on open fields near lagoons, in creek and ravines, and on riverbanks.

ref: 2003/4 (3)

Land, water and symbolic aspects of the Mesolithic in southern Scandinavia

Lars Larsson
Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Lund, Sandgatan 1, SE-223 50 LUND, Sweden
Lars.Larsson@ark.lu.se

Keywords: Southern Scandinavia, Mesolithic, coastal settlement, submerged settlement

Abstract

The dynamics in the relation between eustasy (sea level changes) and isostasy (changes in the bedrock) combined with deglaciation have had a major effect on the shape of land in Scandinavia. Large areas of the present southern Baltic were land during the Early Mesolithic. From a low level during the Pre-Boreal the water level rose and reached the present situation in the Early Atlantic. The complicated effects of isostasy and eustasy make it very difficult to present an interregional perspective. These relations are best noticed at a regional or even local level. It is only rather recently that any research has been aimed at surveys and consequently the excavation of submerged sites. Results from excavations of submerged sites are presented here, with particular emphasis on work in the strait of Öresund between Denmark and Sweden.

In contemporary Mesolithic studies it is believed that the landscape was not used exclusively as an economic resource; the shaping of the landscape also had an important cognitive dimension. The perception of the landscape is changed by human impact, but also as a result of natural processes, such as shifting relationships between land and water in connection with transgressions and regressions. These processes altered not just the availability of food resources but the landscape itself, especially the boundary between land and water. Such changes must have affected the worldview of Mesolithic peoples and these can be inferred from mortuary behaviours and the placement of rock carvings in the landscape. The excavation of submerged sites is contributing to our understanding of continuity in settlement strategies from the Early to Later Mesolithic, and providing new data for posing questions about belief systems.

This article was originally given as a conference paper in session ARQ-9: The Use of Space by Hunter-Gatherer Societies at the 51e Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Santiago, Chile. The Spanish version of the conference paper is available here, free of charge, to download. Please note that this version has been made available to assist those for whom English is not their first language. It is NOT the refereed paper. The refereed paper should be used for academic reference and is published in English here as a PDF file, full text available to subscribers only. (For information on subscription rates (discounts available in South America) please click on the Subscriptions button on the front page of this issue of Before Farming. Please do not cite this paper as a Before Farming article, it is for information only and has not been edited or formatted. Please refer to it as you would to a paper given at the conference, accessed on the following URL, giving the date of access:

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Often crude and quaint: some Australian conceptions of nature, ecology, and rock-art

David Bennett
Executive Director, The Australian Academy of the Humanities,
GPO Box 93, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia
hoopoe378@mweb.co.za

Keywords: Australian Aborigines, traditional ecological knowledge, extinction, thylacine, Tasmanian tiger, Tasmanian wolf

Abstract

The title and topic of this paper are drawn from a statement by Baldwin Spencer: 'Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures, often crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given place to higher forms. This applies equally to the aboriginal as to the platypus and kangaroo.'
This paper investigates the ecological priorities and concepts of some Arnhem Land peoples as illuminated through their rock-art and attempts to understand some aspects of human perceptions of nature. While the paper is not specifically about Baldwin Spencer it addresses through his words some aspects of the aptness or otherwise of his perception in relation to the role of Aboriginal ecological knowledge in environmental concerns. This paper concentrates on 1) the crude and quaint perception of nature, 2) some cultural and philosophical aspects of Australian Aboriginal ecological knowledge, and 3) some connections of the first two to rock-art.

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Plant motifs in Kimberley rock-art, Australia

David M Welch
1/5 Westralia Street, Stuart Park, NT 0820, Australia

Keywords: Flowers, Kimberley, meanders, plants, rock-art, yams

Abstract

Flowers, leaves, stems, branches, fruit, vines, inflorescence, roots and tubers are all depicted in the rock-art of the Kimberley region, Australia. The ecological knowledge of Aboriginal people with regard to plant usage for food, housing, utensils, weapons, string-making and ceremonial regalia is enormous, and some of this knowledge is reflected in rock-art. Sometimes plant features are combined with human and animal forms to represent mythological figures.

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Out of the underworld: landscape, kachinas, and pottery metaphors in the Rio Grande/Jornada rock-art tradition in the American Southwest

Polly Schaafsma
Research Associate, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, Museum of New Mexico, PO Box 2087, Santa Fe, NM 87504-2087, USA
shingo3@aol.com

Keywords: Landscape, rock-art, clouds, masks, pottery vessels

Abstract

Tied as it is to landscape, rock-art is a powerful vehicle for identifying and reconstructing past ideological systems regarding human relationships to natural environments. Rock-art can be used to help rediscover and define past cultural landscapes that have been rewritten by highways, cities, and other artefacts of the technological ideology of western culture. This study aims to show how rock-art - framed within its locational and graphic symbolism - may be used together with ethnographic information to understand the archaeological Puebloan landscape in connection with the Puebloan preoccupation with rain-making. Pueblo people of New Mexico and Arizona see themselves as integral parts of the historical/ecological processes that form their world (Anschuetz et al 2000:3.55), and the distribution of images on rocks in the Pueblo landscape - as is true elsewhere - is the result of a culturally prescribed, as opposed to random, interaction between people, their terrain, and their ideology of place. In essence, people project culture on to nature (Crumley & Marquardt 1990:73). Landscape as a cultural construct is derived from a people's patterned perceptions and interpretations of their natural environment (Anschuetz 1998). Worldviews embrace comprehensive ideas of how cultures conceive of the relationship of human society to the natural order. As part of worldview, the cultural landscape and its various features are invested with meanings and spiritual qualities, which in turn will affect where imagery, especially rock-art, is located. Pueblo people today link their identities with and establish spiritual connections to special places through words, thoughts, and feelings (Cajete 1994:43). Greg Cajete from Santa Clara Pueblo writes (1994:85): 'Traditionally, the connection of Indian people to their land was a symbol of their connection to the spirit of life itself.' Further:

The American Indian sense of place, and the importance of being in harmony is embodied in all cultural traditions. Our collective experience with the land, integrated by myth and ritual, expressed through social structures and arts, combines with a practiced system of environmental ethics and spiritual ecology to create a true connection with places and a full expression of ecological consciousness (ibid).

© Western Academic & Specialist Press Ltd 2003