Record of Late Holocene Human Occupations in Coastal Deposits of the Middle Uruguay River

Abstract

The archaeological record recovered in fluvial deposits of the Uruguay River has been widely used to build interpretative frameworks about the South American prehistory. The interpretation of these records helped to consolidate the North American Clovis First paradigm and, currently, to contribute to its discussion. They are useful as well to understand the technological divergences of lithic, pottery, and agricultural pre-Hispanic industries on a continental scale. The information of this sector mostly corresponds to the fieldwork carried out by the Archaeological Rescue Mission of Salto Grande before the beginning of the construction of the hydroelectrical dam in the middle Uruguay River. Recently, an international and interdisciplinary team of archaeology begun to develop systematic investigations in order to recognize and actualize the information of this area. One of the main goals of this work is to reconstruct the paleoecological scenario in which the pre-Hispanic populations lived and interacted with each other and with the environment. To this purpose, different stratigraphic successions on the middle littoral Uruguay River were surveyed. They allowed to define and date a succession of fluvial erosive–aggradational episodes that characterized the fluvial dynamics during the Late Holocene. These episodes can be linked to the evolution of paleoclimatological phenomena supported by regional models. On the other hand, the archaeological records registered in the successions of the studied sites allowed to understand the coast of the Uruguay River as a hot spot area since its early human colonization.