54. Possible Relatives in the Americas
Arroyo Seco 2 site (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
by George Weber
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The Arroyo Seco 2 site is in the town of Tres Arroyos in the Argentinian humid Pampa, province Buenos Aires, 480 km south-west of the capital Buenos Aires, and 200 km east of Bahia Blanca. Do not confuse this site with the Tres Arroyos rock shelter in Chilean Tierra del Fuego! |
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The open-air site was discovered in the 1970s and excavated above all by G. Politis. The site in its lowest levels produced more than 80 stone tools and an abundance of stone flaking debris. Included among the tools found were five types of scrapers, a bone splinter , two grinding stones and half of a bola stone. Also found were the bones of extinct (e.g. various species of ground sloth, llama, horse and armadillo) as well as still living. Earliest dates from bones of animals apparently killed by humans go back to around 11,600 years before the present. |
The Arroyo Seco 2 site is most famous for the 44 complete human skeletons found there, with incomplete human bones of perhaps another 100 individuals at various levels. The complete humans were buried carefully during a period lasting from between 6,000 and 8.500 years before the present. During the time of these burials, it is likely that the burial ground had evolved from a slaughtering-feasting place into a sacred ancestral burial and meeting ground for the hunter-gatherer people involved.
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Far left: Left: |
Craniofacial analysis (Barrientos G., Politis G. and Perez S.) indicates that the Arroyo Seco 2 people differ considerably from the more or less contemporaneous Lagoa Santa people ("Luzia", Lapa Vermelha IV). This either suggests that the two belonged to different populations (or waves of migration) or that there was an early and quite rapid diversification of the craniofacial morphology on South America. On craniofacial grounds, the Arroyo Seco 2 people are closely related to modern Amerind populations.
The stratigraphy of the site is very complex in detail and we can show only a highly simplified and schematic stratigraphy here.
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There is no evidence that the graves of the people buried in layer 2 were dug through layer 3 by people living on layer 4. That the burials and the megafaune were contemporary is also confirmedby C14 dates, which consistently return results of roughly around 8,500 years for complete burials and animal remains. Layer 4 has produced scattered human remains and tools pre-dating layer 3 but no complete burials. |
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Necklaces made mostly from the teeth of large animals were buried with the dead. Two teeth (not shown here) from a Great White shark (Carcharodon carcharias ) were found at Arroyo Seco 2. They were most ikely to have come from a beached shark, salvaged by the Aroyo Seco people.The root tips of the teeth are marked by an artificial transvers groove fitted to tie a thread. They may have been used in a necklace similar to those shown here. The serrations of the two shark's teeth are strongly eroded which suggests that the teeth were also used as tools. |
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A selection of stone tools found at Arroyo Seco 2 (various size scales)
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Cut marks from stone tools on bones of long-existnct megafauna. |
Among web sites with further information are:
- http://www.cienciahoy.org.ar/hoy02/megaterio2.htm
- http://www.ele.net/LaBelle/pampas/toc.htm
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Last change 30 April 2007
