Lithic Landscapes and Raw-Material Exploitation by Hunter-Gatherers

• Autores: Shott, Michael
• Año de publicación: 2010
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: artículo
• Materia: Paisaje lítico; Tecnología lítica; Materias primas líticas; Materiales líticos; Recursos líticos; Estrategias de aprovisionamiento; Cazadores-recolectores; Arqueología; Cono Sur; América del Sur; América Latina; Campo volcánico Pali Aike; Santa Cruz; Argentina; Charlin, Judith E.
• Institución: Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires

The Southern Cone is a vast and diverse landscape inhabited for millennia by hunter-gatherers. Prehistory in most of this area lacks a trajectory of cultural development that elsewhere in Latin America culminated in complex societies. As a result, the Southern Cone lacks the urban ruins and monumental architecture, the hallmarks of rank and copious pottery assemblages that attract the attention of most archaeologists, domestic and foreign, across Latin America. Instead, its archaeological record is dominated by the sturdy if unglamorous residues of hunter-gatherer societies: stone tools and animal bones. In the popular but misguided imagination, so apparently impoverished a body of evidence offers dim prospects by which to learn about the past. But like other archaeologists who confront the challenge of teasing pattern from sparse material remains, Southern Cone scholars are theoretically informed and methodologically sophisticated. For students of hunter-gatherers and their lithic technology, the Southern Cone is fertile ground populated by growing ranks of talented archaeologists. France supplies the intellectual roots of much South American archaeology, certainly in the study of hunter-gatherers (e.g., Vilhena-Vialou 2007). French systematics are strongly typological, befitting their own origins in Paleolithic research. In Southern Cone lithic analysis, that influence was conveyed in recent decades through Aschero (1975) and like-minded archaeologists. As a result, Bordes‟s ghost casts a shadow across much South American stone-tool research, in everything from identification of gross form with ideal type to the use of cumulative-frequency charts. In recent decades, South American archaeologists have established links with Anglophone thought, chiefly North American (e.g., Schmidt Dias 2007; sadly, the links are mostly one-way; relatively few North American lithic analysts read the Southern Cone literature seriously). The growing links to the north partly have refocused Southern Cone research upon functional or adaptive, not just typological, concerns. Among other things, this changing focus involves two related and apparently banal but deceptively profound observations that, mystifyingly, continue to elude French systematics: first, that reduction technology was adaptive, not typological, such that members of the very same identity-conscious social group could, often did, reduce similar cobbles in very different ways to produce the same kinds of tools and second, that in the course of use some tools were repeatedly resharpened such that their size and form at discard were much changed from their original size and form. Thus, archaeology today in the Southern Cone is a fascinating hybrid, part French typology, part American functionalism and its theoretical and methodological apparatus, all informed by uniquely regional concerns and innovation in scholarship (for instance, Southern Cone archaeologists are pioneers in morphometric analysis of stone tools, illustrated partly in the subject of this review). Few places reward the thoughtful student of hunter-gatherer lithic technology more than Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Párrafo extraído de la reseña a modo de resumen.
Fil: Shott, Michael. University of Akron; Estados Unidos.