Toolkits, technology and resource exploitation in the forests of Tierra del Fuego

Abstract

The Big Island of Tierra del Fuego, in the extreme south or South America, was inhabited by hunter-gatherer societies since about 11000 years ago to mid-nineteenth century, when colonizers established in the northern and southern sectors of the island. These societies were in the focus of our archaeological research, which was principally oriented to investigate the technological organization, with a special emphasis in the processes of tool manufacture and use and their correlates with exploitation of different types of resources. The environments where we concentrated this research were those of the subantarctic forests that cover most of the mountain region extending in the eastern and southern sectors of the island.Research carried out up to now included techno-functional analysis of both archaeological material and experimental series, parallel with ethnoarchaeological research. It reveals that the toolkits of these hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex than suspected. Different raw materials were used in order to knap diverse types of artifacts. These raw materials were obtained from different outcrops, sometimes far away. Pecked and polished tools were also manufactured and used in different hunter-gatherers contexts. And ethnographic collections and written sources provide information about a large variety of wood and bone tools.In this chapter, we present the principal aspects of the tool kits of the hunter-gathers societies from the subantarctic forests, and discuss their characteristics as compared to toolkits and environments of the Magellan strait, the Beagle channel and the Patagonian Atlantic coast.