Declared Extinct, the Yaghan Rise in the Land of Fire
hakaimagazine.com
hakaimagazine.com
1. An Indigenous community that’s made Tierra del Fuego home for thousands of years, the Yaghan, currently lives on Navarino Island, Chile, and across the Beagle Channel (Onashaga in the Yaghan language) in Ushuaia, Argentina
2. While the roughly 100 Yaghan alive today continue to assert their place in the here and now, archaeologists are in pursuit of a deeper and broader story of their ancestors who made the land and sea their home since possibly as far back as the end of the last ice age
3. Archaeologists spend weeks each summer excavating along the Beagle Channel/Onashaga, searching for evidence of the thriving communities that made Tierra del Fuego home for thousands of years
4. The two oldest dates along the Beagle Channel—and the second- and third-oldest dates for Tierra del Fuego as a whole—come from the bottom of shell middens excavated during that 1998 dig, and by Orquera and Francisco Zangrando between 2010 and 2013
5. Those two older dates are mystifying, though—where do they fit into the story? What are the archaeologists missing? Archaeologists contemplate evidence while keeping in mind that they have no idea what they have not found
6. The story that captured the imaginations of Tivoli and Francisco Zangrando was of an ancient people so well adapted to their environment that they thrived for 6,000 years, until the arrival of Europeans, relying on a simple toolkit and a stable seafood diet
7. When did people adapt to a maritime lifestyle? What lured them into the sea? The oldest sites along the Beagle Channel/Onashaga were found at Imiwaia and Tunel
8. 5,000 years ago, they’re still eating sea mammals but go big on guanacos and seabirds, and in the last 1,000 years, they’re more into fish
9. Their creation stories tell them, over and over, nothing is free on the land and sea, they have to work hard to live in balance with the sacred world around them, and their reward is not an afterlife, it’s the unquantifiable, almost infinite generations of life