The strategies of production and consumption of lithic artifacts implemented by the hunter-gatherer societies who participated in the first peopling (final Pleistocene - 13,000/10,000 BP - and early Holocene - 10,000/7500 BP) of the southern end of the American continent are investigated in this book. The analyzed materials were recovered from rock shelters in the Central Plateau of Santa Cruz, Patagonia Argentina. The lithic materials are approached from a dynamic concept of technology. This research extends the knowledge of the dynamics of tool production and resource exploitation, rather than just analyzing the procurement and manufacturing practices. The differences in and continuities of the technological preferences of the early hunter-gatherer societies are recorded, especially regarding the use and design of edges. This study presents a model of how to analyze the variability in use of artifacts from a perspective which goes beyond the idea of tools having a univocal nature.

AUTHOR
Manuel Enrique Cueto is an anthropologist specializing in archaeology. He obtained a PhD from the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires in archaeology. He is a Postgraduate Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas (CONICET) and works in the Archaeology Division at the Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he teaches “Prehistoria Extra-Americana del Viejo Mundo”. He has studied the ways of life of the first hunter-gatherer societies which inhabited Southern Patagonia, focusing on the analysis of lithic technology and on the understanding of the use given to stone tools through the functional analysis of use-wear and microscopic residues. Manuel is co-director of the project of scientific communication: Primeros pobladores de nuestro suelo: Arqueología y Comunicación en la Comunidad de Puerto San Julián. In this project he works together with the present inhabitants of the study area in the critical analysis of “human nature” and social reality, trying to highlight the wide variety of cultural productions, ways of doing, being and seeing the world of the ancient indigenous people of Patagonia.