Native Americans of Middle and South America

Article Outline

Introduction; Culture Areas; History; Native Americans Today

Post-Contact History

The Gran Chaco has long been a route of travel between the Bolivian Andes and the coastal regions of Uruguay and southern Brazil. The first known European to enter the area was a shipwrecked Portuguese sailor named Alejo García, who crossed the northern Chaco with a group of Guaraní people sometime between 1521 and 1526. He made it as far as the high Andes of southern Bolivia, near modern Sucre, but was killed by native inhabitants upon returning to the Atlantic Coast.

Except in the far northwest, very few indigenous people of the Gran Chaco retain any semblance of their traditional culture. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries white populations gradually pushed into the peripheries of the Chaco, resulting either in the assimilation of native populations or in their outright disappearance.

Southern South America

Land and Habitat

The Southern South America culture area is characterized by great extremes of environment and climate. It extends from a point just south of the Tropic of Capricorn, at 23° south latitude, to the tip of South America some 3,500 km (2,200 mi) to the south. The cold, rain-drenched Tierra del Fuego archipelago (chain of islands) lies at the southern extreme of the continent. It consists of a large main island, sometimes called Tierra del Fuego Island, and many smaller islands. Glaciers in this area reach down to sea level, and the channels of the archipelago are dotted with icebergs. On the southwestern side of the continent, the islands of the rainy Chilean archipelago contain dense stands of beech and coniferous trees, which kept the indigenous inhabitants of the area mostly confined to the narrow beaches for their settlements and to the channels for shellfish gathering. To the north of Tierra del Fuego and to the east of the Andes lies Patagonia, a cold, dry, and windswept region of treeless plains and thin vegetation. North of Patagonia lies the vast pampas, or grassy plains, of northern Argentina and Uruguay.

People and Languages

The aboriginal cultures of the Southern South America culture area at the time of European contact included the Charrúa and Guaraní of the Uruguayan pampas, the Puelche of the Argentinean pampas, the Tehuelche of Patagonia, the Ona and Aush of Tierra del Fuego Island, the Yahgan of the islands south of Tierra del Fuego Island, the Alacaluf of the southern part of the Chilean archipelago, and the Chono of the northern Chilean archipelago. The Yahgan, who lived at roughly 56° south latitude, were the southernmost inhabitants of the world prior to the occupation of Antarctica in modern times. The Charrúa and the Puelche belonged to the Puelche language group, while the other six groups belonged to the Tehuelche language group.

Early Peoples

Archaeologists have discovered dozens of sites of ancient human settlement in the Southern South America culture area. Although evidence indicates that Paleo-Indians (the earliest inhabitants of the Americas) were in the northern pampas by about 10,600 years ago, even earlier dates are associated with sites in the extreme south. For example, at Los Toldos Cave in southern Patagonia, stone tools associated with animal bones have been dated to 12,600 years ago (although this date is controversial), making this site roughly contemporaneous with the Monte Verde site 800 km (500 mi) to the northwest in Chile. And at Fell’s Cave, located just to the north of the Strait of Magellan, the earliest human occupation has been securely dated to between 11,000 and 10,800 years ago. Excavated by American archaeologists Junius and Peggy Bird in the 1930s, Fell’s Cave was one of the first Paleo-Indian sites found in South America, and the first to demonstrate that humans hunted now-extinct animals such as the giant ground sloth and the prehistoric horse. Moreover, the presence of rounded, grooved stones at both Monte Verde and Fell’s Cave strongly suggests that the earliest indigenous peoples of southern South America used the bola.

Diet and Subsistence

Agriculture was mostly unknown in the Southern South America culture area because weather conditions were too cold or too wet, or else the soil conditions were unsuitable for farming. Indigenous peoples of the pampas and Patagonia survived primarily by hunting land animals and gathering wild plants. The Charrúa relied primarily on guanaco, rhea, and other smaller animals of the pampas for their subsistence, although they supplemented their diet with fish, tubers, seeds, and berries. The Puelche had a similar diet, with the exception of fish. The Tehuelche of Patagonia relied on guanaco and rhea, as well as tuco-tuco (a large rodent), skunks, and a large variety of wild plants including tubers. After the introduction of the horse in the 16th century, the Tehuelche pursued guanacos from horseback.

In the harsher, more limited conditions of Tierra del Fuego Island, the northern and southern Ona (called Pámica and Hamka, respectively) were limited primarily to the tuco-tuco, in the north, and the guanaco, in the south. Coastal Ona here also relied on a variety of marine mammals such as seals and otters, in addition to scavenging beached whales whose (sometimes rotting) flesh was considered a great delicacy. The Alacaluf, Chono, and Yahgan of the Chilean and Tierra del Fuego archipelagos gathered shellfish, especially mussels, as their primary source of food. Women were the principal gatherers. They picked up the shellfish along the beaches or went out in canoes with shellfish spears. Where shellfish beds lay in deeper water, women dived to the bottom and brought up the shellfish in baskets. All this took place in extremely cold water ranging from 4° to 10°C (40° to 50°F). Shellfish gatherers supplemented their diet with sea lions, sea birds (cormorants, ducks, and penguins), fish, sea otters, porpoises, and a few land animals. They also gathered very limited amounts of plant foods.