Bone Awls and Basketry in Tierra del Fuego: Complementarity between Ethnography and Experimentation

Abstract

The use of rushes and bone awls for indigenous basketry is mentioned in ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources from across the Americas, including Tierra del Fuego. Our research aimed to reproduce and record the technical process of basketry and how bone awls are involved in it, according to hypotheses derived from the ethnographic data. For this study, a techno-functional approach was adopted that combines the ethnographic record, community-based research, experimentation, and microscopic functional analysis. The chaine opératoire was reproduced for basket making, from the technical processes involved in collecting and processing rushes to completion of the basket. Results confirmed the effectiveness of techniques described in the documentary sources for the manufacture of baskets of Marsippospermum grandiflorum, including the use of bone awls. Functional analysis demonstrated the formation of characteristic use-wear traces produced by this activity.