Ernesto Luis Piana

Sea Nomads of the Beagle Channel in Southernmost South America: Over Six Thousand Years of Coastal Adaptation and Stability

ABSTRACT At the southern tip of South America, the archaeology of the Beagle Channel-Cape Horn region documents a clear specialization on the exploitation of littoral and nearshore resources that began at least 6400 years ago. The use of marine resources varied through space and time, but the main staple was pinnipeds. To regularly obtain these marine mammals it was essential to use canoes and harpoons with detachable points. This paper explores two aspects of this interesting maritime sociocultural system: its success, which occurred despite its simple social and technological organization; and its stability, which spanned over six millennia up to the nineteenth century AD.

The Southern Top of the World: The First Peopling of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and the Cultural Endurance of the Fuegian Sea-Nomads

Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego include contrasting environments and populations. Both were settled more than 10,000 years ago, although the coastal resources were not intensively exploited until four millennia later. The littoral resource exploitation had very different characteristics on the Atlantic compared to the Magellan-Fuegian coasts. Generalized strategies were maintained in the former, while in the latter the inhabitants developed a specialization—they became intensively dependent on the littoral and marine resources and designed special technological means for their procurement and processing, including navigation capability. This process began some 6,400 radiocarbon years ago and these sea-nomads colonized the southernmost archipelago from the Beagle Channel down to Cape Horn. After synthesizing the settling of Patagonia, this paper focuses on the process of colonization and cultural endurance of the sea-nomads until the time of European contact.

Shifting niches of marine predators due to human exploitation: the diet of the South American sea lion (Otaria flavescens) since the late Holocene as a case study

Abstract. Stable isotope ratios of carbon and nitrogen in archaeological and modern bone samples have been used to reconstruct the dietary changes of the South American sea lion Otaria flavescens from the late Holocene to the present in the southwestern Atlantic. We sampled bones from archaeological sites in northern-central and southern Patagonia, Argentina, and bones housed in modern scientific collections. Additionally, we analyzed the stable isotope ratios in ancient and modern shells of intertidal molluscs to explore changes in the isotope baseline and allow comparison between bone samples from different periods after correction for baseline shifts. Results confirmed the trophic plasticity of the South American sea lion, demonstrated the much larger impact of modern exploitation of marine resources as compared with that of hunter-gatherers, and underscored the dissimilarity between the past and modern niches of exploited species. These conclusions are supported by the rather stable diet of South American sea lions during several millennia of aboriginal exploitation, in both northern-central and southern Patagonia, and the dramatic increase in trophic level observed during the twentieth century. The recent increase in trophic level might be related to the smaller population size resulting from modern sealing and the resulting reduced intraspecific competition. These results demonstrate how much can be learned about the ecology of modern species thanks to retrospective studies beyond the current, anthropogenically modified setting where ecosystem structure is totally different from that in the pristine environments where current species evolved.

Palaeogeographic changes drove prehistoric fishing practices in the Cambaceres Bay (Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) during the middle and late Holocene

Fishing intensification is evidenced in the archaeological record of the Beagle Channel region (Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) during the late Holocene by significant diachronic increases in both the representation of coastal taxa and the diversity of pelagic fish species taken. Faunal evidence from the Imiwaia I site, however, shows a different pattern in temporal variation in the exploitation of coastal fish in contrast to that of the regional trend. By comparing data from palaeogeography and archaeoichthyology, we have been able to evaluate how changes in Holocene coastal geomorphology near the Imiwaia I site influenced hunter–gatherer subsistence. The results show that the abundance and taxonomic diversity recorded in ichthyofaunal assemblages at the Imiwaia I site coincide with the environmental expectations arising from palaeogeographic reconstructions of the Cambaceres Bay during the middle and late Holocene.