Digging photos and excavating sites: a comparative exploration of material culture patterns in Ethnographic photographs and Archaeological sites of Shelk'nam, Yamana and Alakaluf peoples from the Fueguian archipelago (Southern South America, 16th to 20th centuries)

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the results of systematic investigations which compare the archaeological and photographic records of three native societies of Tierra del Fuego (Shel'knam, Yámana-Yagan and Alakaluf) in order to search for and analyse information about their material culture practices. In order to do so, we firstly analyse a corpus of 1131 photographs taken between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries by 44 photographers and we carry out a "visual archeology", through which we analyse the formation processes of the photographic record and study some of the native habits recorded in the photos. We then analyse a total of 25 Fueguian archaeological sites of the contact period (16th. to 20th. centuries): their formation processes are assessed and the artefacts (tools and objects) found in these are compared with those recorded in the photographs in order to check to what extent these records corroborate, complement or contradict each other. Given the differences of photographic visibility and archaeological visibility of many of the Fueguian artefacts, the resulting data are relevant to discuss the informative biases and potentials of both records and to shed light on the material culture patterns of each Fueguian society, their intra-society variability and intersociety similarities and differences.