The Role of Ancient Fishing on the Desert Coast of Patagonia, Argentina

Archaeological climate proxies and the complexities of reconstructing Holocene El Niño in coastal Peru

“…Biogeographic transition zones are frontiers between biogeographic provinces and are characterized by gradients in environmental parameters such as temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, turbidity, and productivity (e.g., ref. 66). In this case, the zone forms where the cold, north-flowing Peru Current meets south-flowing, equatorial waters, deflecting the Peru Current westward, away from the South American continent.…”

Introducing Coastal Deserts

“…The characterization of desert-dwelling Holocene people living on southern Australia's Anxious Coast as keeping "their backs to the sea" provides a good example of this (Nicholson and Cane 1991:12), Though not directly covered by any of the articles included here, the use of boats, which is well attested in the coastal Atacama Desert, lets us go even further from the shoreline and the areas immediately inland of it by positioning people in the sea, inviting us to play with notion of "seascapes" (Gosden and Pavlides 1994). To a lesser degree, the fishing techniques employed in some parts of Patagonia, as described here by Scartascini (2017), also make sense if we employ such a concept. These examples encourage us to consider the processes whereby people living in coastal deserts built and perceived their environment, an environment in which "the sea is not necessarily either a bridge or a barrier: it is what people make it" (Gosden and Pavlides 1994:170) A final topic for further comparative study might be that of "deserted coasts," the identification of fluctuations in the densities at which people inhabited coastal deserts and the conditions that encouraged, or constrained, that settlement.…”

“…In this sense, coastal areas that are part of arid and semi-arid environments present major challenges to understanding how humans living there organized themselves and how this changed over the long term. The contributions of Martínez and colleagues (2017) and Scartascini (2017) deal indirectly with these issues from a Patagonian perspective, while in southern Africa both Kinahan and Kinahan and Dewar and Stewart (2017) underline how deflation and a shifting marine environment can variously expose, degrade, move, and bury archaeological materials. Conversely, tidal inundation of the edges of the Walvis Bay lagoon has preserved the tracks of animals and people in great detail (Kinahan and Kinahan 2017), while in situations where few constraints affect where people can exploit coastal resources or camp, and deflation is limited, relatively undisturbed, palimpsest-free sites may survive, often marked by accumulations of shell.…”

“…Although the cases presented here do not exhaust their ecological and archaeological variability, they nevertheless offer an interesting panorama of some of them. In this sense, for example, the Atacama Desert of South America's Pacific coast represents a hyper-arid environment that is nevertheless bordered by an exceptionally rich marine one, while the long Atlantic shore of Patagonia (Scartascini 2017;Martínez and colleagues 2017) combines arid to semi-arid inland regions with productive marine environments that are significantly enriched by the resources found at the mouths of rivers and in deltas. Across the Atlantic Ocean, extreme aridity imposed severe limits on human settlement in the world's oldest desert, the Namib (Kinahan and Kinahan 2017), limits still felt in the only marginally less arid landscapes of Namaqualand, in the far northwest of South Africa (Dewar and Stewart 2017;Orton 2017).…”

“…Drawing on multiple lines of Introducing Coastal Deserts evidence (archaeological, zooarchaeological, and geoarchaeological), they conclude that marine resources were being consumed in this region well before the Holocene and that coastal resources were not only an important part of people's subsistence, but were also being transported inland by at least 17,000 BP. The specific combinations in which those resources were exploited on Barrow Island show further changes through into the Holocene, while across the world on the Atlantic coastline of Patagonia, Scartascini (2017) gives us a detailed study of variation in the exploitation of one category of marine resourcefish-over the last 5500 years BP. Taking into account latitudinal and chronological parameters, he proposes that fish remains in the archaeological record significantly diminished at higher latitudes in response to a combination of environmental and cultural causes.…”