Evidence of Social Interaction in the Pampas: The Case Study of Hangar Site (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina)

The Hangar site is located in the Pampas region and has a high relative occurrence of silicified limestone, a raw material not available in the nearest outcrops usually exploited. The main objective of this chapter is to evaluate and discuss the frequency and use of this rock at Hangar. These data are compared and integrated with information from other sites where silicified limestone is represented to analyze its distribution in the region. We focus on the evidence of silicified limestone in the site by analyzing the chaîne opératoire, together with the petrographic study of five thin sections. We also conduct a bibliographic survey of the sites with silicified limestone in the Pampas. These data are used to construct fall-off curves by plotting the proportion of silicified limestone against the distance to the sources. Results indicate that the raw material found in Hangar comes from El Carancho, a source that is 340 km far from the site. These analyses allowed us to propose that during the final Late Holocene, there was an increased social interaction and a broadening of the territories of the hunter-gatherer bands that occupied the Pampas.