0000000000825485
AUTHOR
Luciano Raúl Prates
A tough travesía: Mobility constraints among late Holocene Patagonian hunter-gatherers through oxygen stable isotopes in enamel and water sources
Central-eastern North Patagonia is characterized by a severe environmental fragmentation due to the scarce and heterogeneous distribution of fresh water. The main local wet zones, the Negro and Colorado river valleys in the North and the Somuncura Foothills in the South are separated by a large and harsh dry land, the travesia. In this paper, we assess the effects of this environmental fragmentation in the mobility of the Late Holocene hunter-gatherers through the analysis of the stable isotopes of oxygen in both enamel and water sources. We analyzed the δ18O of the enamel carbonate of 64 human teeth from 42 individuals from the Negro River valley (n = 30) and the Somuncura Foothills (n = 1…
Back to the bases: Building a terrestrial water δ18O baseline for archaeological studies in North Patagonia (Argentina)
Archaeology has been using stable oxygen as an isotopic tracer linked with water consumption for decades, and it has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool to assess paleomobility in bioarchaeology. Central-eastern North Patagonia (Argentina) is an especially appropriate region to apply it since it presents a high density of huntergatherer burials, it was a nodal zone criss-crossed by an extensive network of important routes, and it is characterized by a high environmental fragmentation due to the scarcity of fresh water sources. The aim of this paper is to build an empirical stable oxygen isotope baseline of terrestrial surface waters to assess the potentiality of tracing past human movem…
Implications for paleomobility studies of the effects of quaternary volcanism on bioavailable strontium: a test case in North Patagonia (Argentina)
Strontium isotopes (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) are used as geochemical tracers for paleomobility studies because they display predictable and stable patterns in ecosystems primarily controlled by the underlying geological regimes. While bedrock geology is stable over thousands of years, geomorphological processes can influence the ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr in ecosystems over archeologically relevant timescales. Among these geomorphological processes, the deposition and reworking of volcanic sediments over Quaternary timescales are little studied but could be an important control of ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr variations in many archeological regions. North Patagonia is a key archeological region to address animal and human movements, and a…