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Seven Plagues of Tierra del Fuego All Galleries
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3. Cultural Extinction

15 images Created 23 Jul 2014

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  • Small unmarked crosses tumble over the graves of now extinct Shelknam Indians in the cemetery of the Salesian mission in Río Grande, Argentina. The Shelknam were relocated in the 19th century to missions scattered among the islands of Tierra del Fuego to be civilized, educated and clothed, as well as to free land for grazing. They suffered greatly in confinement. Many died of European diseases such as influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis. Those still hunting ancestral lands found themselves the targets of European guns as ranchers paid by the head for their eradication. "Competition between cattle raisers and hunters leads to an ideology that supports genocide," said anthropologist Ernesto Piana, a researcher at Argentina's Austral Center for Scientific Research (CADIC) in Ushuaia, Argentina.
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  • Ledgerbooks filled with penmanship exercises sit on display at the museum of the Salesian mission in Río Grande. On the wall behind a photo shows a nun teaching knitting to a clothed Shelknam girl. One of four tribal groups of Indians originally found on Tierra del Fuego, the Shelknam suffered most directly from the colonization of the Fuegian archipelago, losing land and nomadic freedom to white settlers. Priests hoping to save lives and souls paid one British pound per Indian brought to the mission in Río Grande and to another on Dawson Island, Chile, where more than 800 died. "You have more than one death per day," noted Piana, of the high rate of disease and the depression of confinement for a once nomadic tribe.
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  • Artifacts from virtually-extinct Yamaná Indians await study at the Museo del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina. Though spared the conflict over land with European settlers, Tierra del Fuego's sea-going Yamaná may have been on the decline before Darwin arrived in the 1830s. After centuries of seal hunting, settlement and disease, only a handful of people claiming Yaman&aacute ancestry survives.
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  • Overlooking Lapataia Bay in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego National Park, a midden -- or waste pile of mussel shells, seal bones and other discarded material -- forms a ring around an indentation where a Yamaná hut once stood. Unlike their Shelknam counterparts who suffered directly from the colonization of the archipelago, the Yamaná probably suffered rapid population decline as a result of the growth of commercial seal hunting for oil. "The extinction started before Fitzroy entered the Beagle Channel," Piana said, naming the captain of the ship that brought Charles Darwin to Tierra del Fuego. Europeans and Americans that began hunting seals in Antarctic waters early in the 19th century destroyed the tribe's principle food source, he said.
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  • A mural on the walls of the post office in Ushuaia paints a stylized image of the area's original inhabitants. "These were the most abject and miserable creatures I any where beheld," Darwin wrote after his first encounter with Yamaná Indians in 1832. "These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world." Early perceptions of Fuegian Indians as a lower form of humanity continue to color their image today.
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  • Researchers Ernesto Piana of Argentina's Austral Center for Scientific Research, left, Joan Anton Barceló of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Ana Cristina Araújo of the Portuguese Institute of Archeology, discuss the formation of a Yamaná shell midden along the Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego. Because the sites are a valuable source of information on how the Yamaná survived the harsh Fueguian climate and why they disappeared, Piana hopes to study and preserve as many as possible before bulldozers arrive to build a new road along the coast of the channel.
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  • Barceló, student Alícia Casas Arbós and others scrape at 4,000 years of deposited mussel shells, seal and guanaco bones, and other Yamaná litter beneath a tent at Estancia Remolino in Argentine Tierra del Fuego. The site, which Piana and his colleagues hope will lend insight into the lifestyle and demise of the Yamaná, is one of 62 such archeological sites along the Beagle Channel originally threatened by a road project. Using careful diplomacy and helping to reroute the planned road, Piana reduced the damage to the sites so that now only this one will be destroyed and two will be damaged.
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  • Piana, Araújo and Casas brush gently at the strata of shells deposited through millennia by semi-nomadic Yamaná Indians who inhabited the site between 800 and 4,800 years ago. White stripes in the four-foot-deep shell piles are the result of intentional fires set atop the litter. Piana speculates that the Yamaná burned the moisture and soil out of the shell piles to better insulate their huts from the frozen sub-Antarctic ground for long stays at the site. Such long stays suggest to him a food bonanza. "If you have a whale maybe you can predict you'll stay a couple months," he said.
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  • Student researcher Martin Vazquez sorts through large objects of interest found among thousands of crumbling mussel shells in the dig. At right a giant barnacle, found among other litter from 800 to 1,000 years ago, awaits study. The barnacle is a species only found in Antarctic waters, hundreds of miles to the south. "It could only have arrived on the head of a whale," Piana said.
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  • Casas and Barceló work to define the upper limit of a strata of shells at Estancia Remolino. Though mussel shells predominate in the Yamaná middens, the bivalves were only a supplemental food source for the Indians — they couldn't provide enough fat calories to ward off the cold. "You may die of starvation with a belly full of shellfish," Piana said. Most calories came from seals hunted in local waters. "You would need more than 50,000 mussels to equal one sea lion," he said.
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  • Ana Cristina Araújo and Alícia Casas Arbós discuss how to proceed with excavating a Yamaná shell midden in Tierra del Fuego. Yamaná physiology reflected that of the Inuit of the north more than it did their other Fueguian neighbors like the Shelknam. They were short, noted Ernesto Piana, five to five-and-a-half feet tall, and had barrel chests of 40 to 45 inches. "The barrel shape has the highest lung surface," Piana said. "This is what you need to burn grease and fat." <br />
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Though gout and other diseases would be common if people from another ethnicity consumed so much fat, these diseases are not evident in the skeletons of the Yamaná. They were perfectly adapted to consume the incredible amount of fat needed to survive the cold climate, says Piana. This amount of fat could only come in sufficient amounts from seasonal stocks of<br />
passing seals, stranded whales and a few captured penguins — all sources hunted heavily by Europe and the United States as early as the beginning of the 19th century.
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  • Araújo examines a bone drill found among the thousands of mussel shells at the site of a Yamaná settlement last occupied 800 years ago. During the period that the excavation site was occupied, Piana notes, the Yamaná population was very high, 20<br />
to 40 times the density of other hunter-gatherer tribes across the Strait of Magellan in continental Patagonia. Despite their high population, the Yamaná couldn't destroy their food supply, Piana says. Seal rookeries are hundreds of miles south in Antarctica, and only far-ranging adults could be caught by the canoe-bound Indians. They could not overhunt.
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  • Student researcher Valeria Bartoli blocks the sun as Oriol Vicente Campos photographs the strata of a shell midden inexcavation by the international team of anthropologists. "This lifestyle depended on one main thing," Piana said, reiterating theneed for fat. "Any vegetarian here died."<br />
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"Before Fitzroy arrived the seal hunters had already cut the energy flux," Piana said. European and American sealersoverhunted in places the Yamaná could not reach, destroying the rookeries that produced the Indians' prey. Piana figures thatsome 20,000 tons of seal oil — burned as a source of light in Europe and North America before electricity — arrived inEngland between 1819 and 1821. During those same years explorer James Weddell searched for new seal hunting grounds toreplace those already depleted. Weddell failed. Already the stocks of Antarctic seals were dwindling for both Europe and theYamaná of Tierra del Fuego. "The light of London versus the survival of the aborigines," Piana said.
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  • Researcher Ernesto Piana pauses in front of two replicas of Yamaná huts built of beech branches for the tourists who visi Estancia Remolino through the summer. Much of what is known of the language, culture and religion of the region's Indians is based on speculation. Tribal groups were reluctant to allow outsiders to see ceremonies or learn the spiritual side of language. In the 20th century much was lost to the westernization of their lifestyle.<br />
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"The Fueguian wigwam resembles, in size and dimensions, a haycock," Darwin wrote. "It merely consists of a few broken branches stuck in the ground, and very imperfectly thatched on one side with a few tufts of grasses and rushes. The whole cannot be so much as the work of an hour, and it is only used for a few days."
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  • Unmarked graves at the Salesian mission in Río Grande, Argentina, echo the quick end met by Tierra del Fuego's four native ethnic groups after the arrival of seal oil and land hungry, disease-carrying Europeans and Americans. On his arrival in the 1870s, Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges estimated the Yamaná population at 3,000. Some dozen years later he closed the door of the mission and took up sheep ranching due to a lack of souls to be saved. By the 1920s, Fr. Martin Gusinde counted perhaps 40 Yamaná living traditionally. Today only two 70-year-old sisters claim to be full-blooded Yamaná. They are the last Fueguian Indians of any tribe.
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