Simon Sierralta Navarro

The maritime settlement of the Northwestern Patagonian archipelagos marked one of the last frontiers in human expansion through South America. It required the development of specialized subsistence strategies and navigation capabilities, in order to occupy the margins of a rugged landscape covered by rainforests. Marine hunter-gatherers first appeared in the Middle Holocene during a period of significant landscape and environmental changes, but the way in which these processes affected maritimization is not well understood. This project proposes a multiscale geoarchaeological approach focused on understanding sea-level changes, fire regimes, climate and vegetation shifts, and oceanic conditions as variables that interacted with human dispersal. The goal is to evaluate how these phenomena interplayed at a site, local and regional levels, positing opportunities and challenges to human mobility and settlement dynamics. To achieve that, it combines sedimentological and pollen studies, chronological database analysis, and GIS processing of digital elevation and oceanographic models. With that, it expects to provide a better understanding of how settlement location related to coastline changes, and how local and regional dynamics faced the conditions imposed by the Middle Holocene transformations.