Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Estimated Population of Indigenous Peoples
of the Southern Cone, 1492
Location Estimated Population
Argentina 900,000
Paraguay-Uruguay-southern Brazil 1,055,000
Chile 1,000,000
Total 2,955,000
Source: Denevan, William M., ed.
TheNativePopulationoftheAmericasin1492
. 2d ed.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. xxvii.
The original inhabitants of the region that became modern Argentina
were either agriculturists who had to supplement their diets with hunt-
ing and gathering or nomadic peoples who subsisted entirely on hunt-
ing and gathering. They may have numbered almost 1 million people
in 1492, when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean.
They lived dispersed over an area that now supports 41 million
Argentines. Today one might wonder why these indigenous peoples
were so impoverished when they inhabited a land of such rich and
now-proven agricultural potential. The answer lies in their lack of
technological sophistication. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the
native inhabitants used only Stone Age technology. Their chiseled
rock tools and their chief agricultural implement, the wooden dig-
ging stick, could not cut the deep roots of the Pampas grasses or clear
the land to cultivate crops. Instead, they carried on agriculture only
in the softer valley soils of the Andean highlands, today Argentina's
northwestern provinces. The prairies remained rich only in animals
and birds for the hunt. The ancients did not have tempered metals,
draft animals, or the wheel. For that matter, they did not suffer from
the diseases that ravaged Europe, Asia, and Africa and so had no
immunity to them.
These early inhabitants did not form a cultural or ethnic whole.
There existed many separate language groupings and dozens of
ethnic and cultural differences, giving rise to intensive political
decentralization. In each region of the Southern Cone, one cultural
and ethnic group might have predominated, but it always had to
share—unwillingly for the most part—the fringes of its territory
with smaller groups of different cultures and ethnic identities. They
