page_title: Mapuche history
section_title: Mapuche expansion into Chiloé Archipelago
hierarchical_section_title: Mapuche history / Pre-Columbian period / Mapuche expansion into Chiloé Archipelago
caption_attribution_description: Español: Reconstrucción de una dalca en el museo de Dalcahue, Chiloé, Chile.
context_page_description: The Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina have a long history dating back as an archaeological culture to 600–500 BC. The Mapuche society had great transformations after Spanish contact in the mid–16th century. These changes included the adoption of Old World crops and animals and the onset of a rich Spanish–Mapuche trade in La Frontera and Valdivia. Despite these contacts Mapuche were never completely subjugated by the Spanish Empire. Between the 18th and 19th century Mapuche culture and people spread eastwards into the Pampas and the Patagonian plains. This vast new territory allowed Mapuche groups to control a substantial part of the salt and cattle trade in the Southern Cone.
  Between 1861 and 1883 the Republic of Chile conducted a series of campaigns that ended Mapuche independence causing the death of thousands of Mapuche through combat, pillaging, starvation and smallpox epidemics. Argentina conducted similar campaigns on the eastern side of the Andes in the 1870s. In large parts of the Mapuche lands the traditional economy collapsed forcing thousands to seek themselves to the large cities and live in impoverished conditions as housemaids, hawkers or labourers.
context_section_description: A theory postulated by chronicler José Pérez García holds the Cunco settled in Chiloé Island in Pre-Hispanic times as consequence of a push from more northern Huilliche who in turn were being displaced by Mapuche.
  Evidence for a Chono past of the southernmost Mapuche lands in Chiloé and the nearby mainland are various placenames with Chono etymologies despite the main indigenous language of the archipelago at the arrival of the Spanish being veliche (Mapuche). This is in line with notions of ethnologist Ricardo E. Latcham who consider the Chono along other sea-faring nomads may be remants from more widespread indigenous groups that were pushed south by "successive invasions" from more northern tribes.
  The Payos an indigenous group in southern Chiloé encountered by the Spanish may have been Chonos en route to acculturate into the Mapuche.
caption: Reconstruction of a dalca in the museum of Dalcahue. This king of boats were used by both Chonos and the Mapuche of Chiloé (Cunco, Huilliche, Veliche). More northern Mapuche used simpler watercraft called wampu.
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