PATAGONIA PATAGONIA NATURAL HISTORY, PREHISTORY AND ETHNOGRAPHY AT THE UTTERMOST END OF THE EARTH • EDITED BY COLIN McEWAN, LUIS A. BORRERO AND ALFREDO PRIETO PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY The Trustees of the British Museum © 1997 The Trustees of the British Museum gratefully acknowledge the generous Text of chapter 5 © Anne Chapman Text of chapter 7 © Promodis joint sponsorship by the Governments of Text of chapter 8 © Gillian Beer Argentina and Chile in support of this Text of chapter 9 © Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. book and the exhibition. First published in 1997 in the United States of America and Canada by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 First published in 1997 by British Museum Press A division of The British Museum Company Ltd 46 Bloomsbury Street London WClB 3QQ All rights reserved ISBN 0-691-05849-0 Designed by Harry Green Typeset in Palatino and Futura Printed in Italy by Petruzzi Origination by Bright Arts, Hong Kong http://pup.princeton.edu 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (Pbk.) Frontispiece Two Selk'nam women wearing guanaco cloaks, c. 1914. Contents Foreword by the Ambassadors of Argentina 5 The Great Ceremonies and Chile to the United Kingdom 6 of the Selk'nam and the Yamana A Comparative Analysis 82 Introduction 7 Anne Chapman Colin McEwan, Luis A. Borrero and Alfredo Prieto 6 The Meeting of Two Cultures TheContributors 9 Indians and Colonists in the Magellan Region IlO Acknowledgements 10 Mateo Martinic B. Key Dates and Events 11 7 The Patagonian 'Giants' 127 Jean-Paul Duviols 1 The Natural Setting The Glacial and Post-Glaciol Environmental 8 Travelling the Other Way HistoryofFuego-Patagonia 12 Travel Narratives and Truth Claims 140 Robert D. McCuIIoch, Chalmers M. Clapperton, Gillian Beer Jorge Rabassa and Andrew P. Currant 9 Tierra del Fuego - Land of Fire, 2 The Peopling of Patagonia LandofMimicry 153 The First Human Occupation 32 Michael Taussig Luis Alberto Borrero and Colin McEwan 10 Patagonian Painted Cloaks 3 Middle to Late Holocene AnAncientPuzzIe 173 Adaptations in Patagonia 46 Alfredo Prieto Francisco Mena 4 The Origins of Ethnographic Subsistence Bibliography 186 Patterns in Fuego-Patagonia 60 Index 197 Luis Alberto Borrero Picture Acknowledgements 200 Foreword by the Ambassadors of Argentina and Chile to the United Kingdom The Embassies of Argentina and Chile to the United Kingdom feel privileged to cooperate with the Museum of Mankind in supporting the exhibition about Patagonia. This joint sponsorship is a further expression of the strong feelings of interdependence and shared interest which now exist between both countries. Patagonia is a region of superlatives and extremes. It appears on maps as remote and mysterious, almost untouched by man, with immense pampas, wooded mountains, majestic Cordilleras, lakes of turquoise waters, fjords and colossal glaciers. Beaten remorselessly by cold winds from the south, with long and cruel winters, it was a harsh habitat for its aboriginal peoples. Today they are almost gone. Like the poet we can ask, 'Stone on stone, the man, where was he? Air on air, the man, where was he?' Aonikenk, Selk'nam, Kaweskar, Yamana. Those were the names of these peoples. They were almost wiped out by alcohol, disease and confinement, and by colonists anxious to make way for sheep or cattle ranches. Their heritage is scarce but it is enough to show us how they were able to survive for centuries, adapted to their rugged environment. And that is the aim of the exhibition and this book that accompanies it. Few subjects could serve better than Patagonia to illustrate the historic links between Argentina, Chile and the United Kingdom. The historic first navigation through the Strait was made by Magallanes, followed by the pioneering expeditions of Juan Ladrillero and Sarmiento de Gamboa and the Spaniards Malaspina and Cordoba Laso de la Vega. Later, many British navigators, explorers and scientists voyaged to Patagonia. Among these were Thomas Cavendish, John Byron, James Cook, Philip Parker King and, of course, Robert Fitzroy and his celebrated scientist on board, Charles Darwin. We are proud that the last exhibition to be held at the Museum of Mankind takes as its subject a region so dear to Chile and Argentina. Looking back at our past, at the peoples who lived, toiled and struggled in Patagonia over the centuries, our desire to cooperate and grow together in peace in the future should be increased. It has been an honour to be associated with this project. ROGELIO PFIRTER MARIO ARTAZA Ambassador of Argentina Ambassador of Chile Introduction by Colin McEwan, Luis A. Borrero and Alfredo Prieto Even to many Chileans and Argentinians Patagonia can seem a wild, remote realm which has given rise to ambition, adventure, grief and folly in equal measure. How much more so viewed from afar by Europeans in the early days of exploration when distance helped magnify accounts of the native Patagonians to 'giant' proportions. For voyagers and settlers alike the region has exerted an enduring allure and spawned a colourful skein of tales which often blend fact and fiction. One part of the story, how­ ever, remains painfully incomplete and that is the largely unwritten history of its origi­ nal inhabitants. The essays in this volume do not attempt to retell the personal travails woven into such classic narratives of recent Patagonian history as Lucas Bridges' Uttermost Part of the Earth, nor do they delve into the whys and wherefores of missionary endeavours. Still less are they a homage to a host of latter-day travellers. Rather, they pursue an elu­ sive history of peoples fleetingly glimpsed through fragmentary archaeological, textual and pictorial sources. Together they seek to contribute to the task of reconstituting a world that has nearly vanished. The arrival of the earliest human settlers in Fuego-Patagonia over ten thousand years ago marked the culmination of man's long journey to people the globe. The descendants of these original peoples came to be known by various names. The Aonikenk were the southernmost group of continental steppe hunters known collectively as Tehuelche. Closely related to them both linguistically and in terms of their hunting way of life were the Selk'nam (or Ona) and Mannenkenk (Haush) who inhabited the grassland expanses of northern and south-eastern Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. The canoe Indians that frequented the labyrinthine waterways of the Fuegian archipelagos can be divided into two broad groups. The Yamana (or Yahgan) were concentrated around the Canal Beagle1 and the islands to the south, while the Kaweskar (also known as Alakaluf or Halak- wulup) ranged throughout the remote western islands as far north as Golfo de Penas. Each of these groups possessed tools and weapons skilfully adapted for survival in the face of a harsh and uncompromising climate. Far from being culturally 'impover­ ished', we know that they also nurtured rich oral traditions and a range of vocabulary matching most other cultures. This forces us to ask the same question that Darwin asked of himself, steeped as he was in a Victorian world view: can we recognise our own humanity in these other human beings? With hindsight we can also try to ask another, more intractable question, namely what did the Fuegians make of Darwin and his companions? Can we imagine the impressions made on those who witnessed the arrival of the strange vessels and their eclectic human cargo, not to mention the succes­ sion of craft that had visited these shores intermittently in the preceding three cen­ turies? How is 'communication' effected under such circumstances? Who can judge whom? Here the labels of 'primitive' and 'civilised' begin to dissolve under the weight of mutual incomprehension. When Darwin recorded that the Fuegians were 'the most miserable wretches on earth' he invested them with a stigma that has endured ever since. He was perhaps scarcely aware that the people he came into contact with were already suffering the irreversible consequences of contact with sealers and whalers. If this most attentive observer of the natural world had stayed longer on Tierra del Fuego he would surely have noted the impact that the decimation of the seal colonies was beginning to have on the Yamana way of life. Darwin did witness the return of the Fuegians that Fitzroy had taken to England and we know that certain scenes made a deep impression, contributing indirectly to his still unformed theory of evolution. But what can we know of how Fuegia Basket, York Min­ ster and Jemmy Button felt, and what they thought? The essays gathered here touch upon these and many related questions. Much of their interest lies in the way in which they connect with each other. It is unthinkable, for exam­ ple, to try and reconstruct the archaeology of Patagonia without a thorough grounding in its natural history. Patient mapping and interpretation of the glacial geomorphology now enables us to identify when a tenuous land crossing to Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego was possible. In turn archaeological survey helps trace the lineaments of man's presence ever further south. Ultimately, the perspective that archaeology offers in recon­ structing subsistence patterns must be compared with the ethnography of the historical period which provides vital clues to ethnic distributions. Nevertheless, archaeology and ethnography represent quite different ways of 'reading' human activities and making inferences about the past. On the one hand the projectile points recovered from archaeo­ logical excavations that tell us about hunting techniques can't speak, while on the other the myths and stories recounted by shamans leave little in the way of a material record that is accessible to archaeology. Agreement between the two disciplines can never be complete, as some unresolved questions posed here make clear.