Jordi Estévez Escalera

Chronicles of 'Ona-Ashaga': archaeology in the Beagle Channel (Tierra del Fuego - Argentina)+

Since the 16th century, contact with people looking and living very differently to themselves has provided Europeans with a sort of mirror. The image reflected in it serves to illustrate at any moment current philosophical ideas about the nature and evolution of mankind. Europeans were not therefore really concerned with explanations for what they saw but instead limited themselves to ethnological speculations (). Nowadays, ethnographic field work is no longer possible (ethnological analysis must seek new insights in old writings) and archaeological research is justified for three reasons: 1 From the point of view of people living in those territories today it is important to know the past and therefore to recover the history of the aboriginal groups who inhabited their present countries. The aim is to study their process of adaptation and through archaeology to expand and contrast the ethnographic record. 2 From a more general approach within archaeological research it is important also to analyse and understand the adaptive mechanisms and responses of subsis-tence economies to littoral environments. 3 Finally, for European archaeologists, the archaeological study of recent hunters could usefully throw light on their own research which lacks an ethnographic dimension.