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For thousands of years, hunter-gatherer societies from southern and central Patagonia inhabited a Subantarctic landscape. In this paper, we argue against the traditional assumption that these were simple societies. We examine population diversity from ecological, archaeological, and ethno-historical data sources, emphasizing the economic and social variability while considering social change through time. We end by analyzing processes of the development of social complexity and hierarchy in recent times, when the industrial world violently disarticulated those societies. All this evidence suggests levels of social variability and complexity archaeologists have not expected. The paper critically reviews traditional archaeological approaches and suggests new research lines that allow for a better understanding of social dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lowering of global sea level during the Pleistocene by more than 100 m and subsequent inundation of coastal areas constitutes a problem in terms of general research on early maritime-oriented societies. However, post-glacial isostatic rise in glaciated regions has produced raised shorelines of Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene age, e.g., in Scandinavia, Patagonia, and North America. As these regions contain the oldest preserved coastal areas, they are imperative for the understanding of the development of maritime hunter-gatherers. The extensive Norwegian coastline appears to have been colonized in the course of the few hundred years around 9500 cal B.C. An overwhelming majority of Early Holocene sites are found in the fiord/skerry coastal landscape, indicating that marine resources were vital in the subsistence pattern of people occupying the region. The lithic tradition is clearly linked to specialized megafauna hunters in the continental plains (the Ahrensburgian complex of northwestern Europe), but the facts about and dynamics of the development of the marine subsistence pattern are unclear. This paper focuses on this problem-with comparative perspectives towards the emergence of maritime foragers in Patagonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego include contrasting environments and populations. Both were settled more than 10,000 years ago, although the coastal resources were not intensively exploited until four millennia later. The littoral resource exploitation had very different characteristics on the Atlantic compared to the Magellan-Fuegian coasts. Generalized strategies were maintained in the former, while in the latter the inhabitants developed a specialization—they became intensively dependent on the littoral and marine resources and designed special technological means for their procurement and processing, including navigation capability. This process began some 6,400 radiocarbon years ago and these sea-nomads colonized the southern- most archipelago from the Beagle Channel down to Cape Horn. After synthesizing the settling of Patagonia, this paper focuses on the process of colonization and cultural endurance of the seanomads until the time of European contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]