The Peri-urban Concept in Historical Archaeology. An Approach from the Nineteenth.-Century Southern Frontier of Argentina

Peri-urban spaces are usually understood as transition areas, with both urban and rural characteristics, where different economic and social practices are developed, mainly linked to agricultural production. The notion of peri-urban spaces has been widely used in different sciences, such as geography and economics, referring to heterogeneous cultural landscapes in which activities typically assignable to both rural and urban environments are carried out. This concept was also applied in studies related to the rural history of the Río de la Plata area (Buenos Aires Province, Argentina) between the eighteenth. and nineteenth. century; however, it has not yet been used in studies on historical archaeology in Argentina, a research line that continues to classify archaeological sites in a dichotomous way by their association with urban or rural contexts. In this work, we propose an archaeological approach to the concept of peri-urban applied to the study sites related to the southern frontier of the Pampean and Northern Patagonia regions from the last 25 years of the nineteenth century. In this frame, the following is analyzed: (1) the process of construction of the landscape and the material record present in the site “Boliche Lucanera,” a commercial establishment located at Bahía Blanca city (Buenos Aires Province), and (2) the settlement called “Pueblo Avellaneda” (Río Negro Province), founded in the framework of the military campaigns of territorial conquest carried out by the state of Argentine against the original populations. Finally, both cases are compared and the relevance of the peri-urban concept for archaeological studies is discussed.