Climatic changes and hunter-gatherer populations: Archaeozoological trends in Southern Patagonia

Abstract

Archaeozoological studies in Patagonia have tended in the past to focus on evidence provided by rock-shelters. However, a regional perspective, such as the one employed in this paper, allows us to identify trends and patterns during the Late Holocene (last 2,500 years) that could remain in the shadows if a microregional scale alone were used. Climatic changes occurred during the Late Holocene and specifically during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA), ca. 900 BP that were very different from the preceding times. It was proposed that lower lacustrine basins (lowlands) were residentially used by hunter-gatherer populations while the high basaltic plateaus (highlands) show an archaeological signal related to a seasonal logistic strategy. Consequently, it is expected that regional archaeozoological records obtained in different type of basins should follow these archaeological patterns. Spatial distribution of the zooarchaeological record present important differences between the Middle and Late Holocene in terms of skeletal part frequencies and processing evidence that is in agreement with the proposal.