POUR · POttery Use from the earliest Records of Patagonia through biomolecular analysis

Since its birth in East Asia during the Late Pleistocene, ceramic technology has become almost universal, allowing the exploitation of new environments and fostering different kinds of cultural expressions. This worldwide relevance for human development has positioned the uses of early pottery as one of the most debated topics in archaeology. Traditional models that linked this technological breakthrough to the development of farming and sedentary lifestyles are currently being revisited, and new data from the Northern Hemisphere suggest that it would have been a hunter-gatherer innovation widespread by the processing of aquatic resources during sporadic episodes. However, some key regions of the Southern Hemisphere have remained unexplored. This is the case of the southernmost limit of pottery dispersal in America, the Patagonia region, where pottery was spread by foragers over a vast and marginal environment during 2000 years, but it remained as a scarce and low-scale technology. What was the initial motivation that drove Patagonian foragers to use and spread this technology in such an environment without engaging in intensive production? Could the stability of aquatic resources trigger this process and delineate a world-wide trend that transcends the ecological and cultural settings? By applying the latest biomolecular analysis and data interpretation methods, POUR seeks to answer this unsolved question implementing the first large-scale systematic research on the uses of early pottery in this part of the world.