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To the End of the World: Southern Patagonia in Models of the Initial Peopling of the Western Hemisphere

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Archaeology of Piedra Museo Locality

Part of the book series: The Latin American Studies Book Series ((LASBS))

Abstract

Far distant from the presumed entry point of the Bering Straits, archaeological sites discovered in southern Patagonia, at the very southern extremity of the Americas, have always played a significant role in the development of models of the initial settlement of the American continents. An early postglacial dating of the site of Fell’s Cave just north of the Straits of Magellan was an important component of the now-disproven “Clovis-first” model, which proposed that both continents were very rapidly populated by highly mobile specialized hunters of megafauna upon entry through an ice-free corridor just after the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. The model offered here, supported by ethnographic records of hunter/gatherer behaviour and new South American archaeological sites with chronometric dates before the Last Glacial Maximum, proposes that the settlement of the Americas was actually a very lengthy process of hunter/gatherer cultural adaptations to highly diverse environments. With the amelioration of climate in the early postglacial period, population growth increased the archaeological visibility of these populations, with a marked growth in the number of known archaeological sites. It was at this time in the early postglacial period that human groups expanded into southern Patagonia, the southernmost area of the globe to come into the human world.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

    Ruth Gruhn

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  1. Ruth Gruhn
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Correspondence to Ruth Gruhn .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CONICET, División Arqueología, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata (FCNyM-UNLP), La Plata, Argentina

    Laura Miotti

  2. CADIC-CONICET, Laboratorio de Geomorfologia y Cuaternario and Universidad Nacional de Tierra del Fuego, Ushuaia, Argentina

    Monica Salemme

  3. CONICET, División Arqueología, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata (FCNyM-UNLP), La Plata, Argentina

    Darío Hermo

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Gruhn, R. (2022). To the End of the World: Southern Patagonia in Models of the Initial Peopling of the Western Hemisphere. In: Miotti, L., Salemme, M., Hermo, D. (eds) Archaeology of Piedra Museo Locality. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92503-1_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92503-1_16

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-92503-1

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