Abstract
The projectile points known as Fishtail or Fell represent a specific design associated with the earliest hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in South America. Brazil was traditionally considered as a marginal area of their distribution because in the past there were only a small number of findings known, often inadequately documented. In this paper we present a general and unified overview of the Brazilian record, including previously unpublished metric, technological and stylistic features. Also, we report on new findings of fishtail points in order to expand the amount of information currently available. Some issues related to these records are also evaluated by comparing them with data from the Uruguayan plains and the Argentinean pampas. The general picture that emerges after this analysis shows a growing record of fishtail projectile points in southern Brazil, demonstrating a significant presence of these early paleo-South American populations.
Highlights
The projectile points known as Fishtail or Fell have been taken as an indicator of early hunter-gatherer populations during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in South America, with known dated contexts ranging from 11,000 to 10,000 uncalibrated radiocarbon years BP
Fishtail projectile points have a wide distribution in Central and South America, covering the entire western portion of the subcontinent and reaching as far as the southern extreme of Argentinean and Chilean Patagonia (Bird, 1938, 1969; Schobinger, 1969, 1971, 1974; Mayer-Oakes, 1963; Bell, 1960, 1965; Chauchat & Zeballos Quiñones, 1979; Nami, 1987, 1992, 2013; Ardila Calderón, 1991; Nuñez et al, 1994; Grosjean et al, 2005; Jackson et al, 2007; León Canales, 2007; Díaz Rodríguez, 2008; Briceño, 2010; Miotti et al, 2010; Maggard & Dillehay, 2011; Flegenheimer et al, 2013; Patané Aráoz & Nami, 2014)
Fishtail points are highly abundant in the nearby Uruguayan plains, clearly extending to the border with Brazil (Nami, 2007, 2013; Flegenheimer et al, 2013), and it would be extremely unlikely that the current political frontier between the two countries represented a sharp limit to the distribution of these groups in the Late Pleistocene since it does not reflect any sort of real geographical or ecological barrier
Summary
The projectile points known as Fishtail or Fell have been taken as an indicator of early hunter-gatherer populations during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in South America, with known dated contexts ranging from 11,000 to 10,000 uncalibrated radiocarbon years BP. Some of these projectile points show a very distinctive technological feature: a fluted channel on one or two faces (Bird, 1938, 1969; Bell, 1960, 1965; Mayer-Oakes, 1963; Dillehay, 2000; Meneghin, 2004; Flegenheimer et al, 2013; Nami, 2007, 2011a, 2001b, 2013, 2014a, 2014b). A complete analysis of fishtail records in Patagonia, the Pampas, and Uruguay was performed by Flegenheimer et al (2013)
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