Visualizing animal management in hunter-fisher-gatherers from Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) through spatial analysis

It is argued that “visualizing” is not the same as “seeing”, but an inferential process to understand reality. In this paper we intend to apply statistical visualization methods to analyze the way animal resources were socially managed. Our excavations in different hunter-gatherer settlements from ethnographic times in the southernmost part of America (Tierra de Fuego, Argentina) have provided a lot of animal remains including mollusks, fishes, birds, mammals, etc. Each different class of remains explains different aspects of resource social management and has to be analyzed in its own individuality, what includes also different systems of sampling and the identification of the respective formation process. This research integrates the statistical results of all categories of remains in a single interpretive framework on a 4D basis.