Patagonia
Subtitle: natural history, prehistory, and ethnography at the uttermost end of the earth
By: edited by Colin McEwan, Luis A. Borrero, and Alfredo Prieto.
Contributors: McEwan, Colin.; Borrero, Luis Alberto.; Prieto, Alfredo.
Series: Princeton paperbacks
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
Subjects: Indians of South America -- Patagonia (Argentina and Chile); Natural history -- Patagonia (Argentina and Chile); Patagonia (Argentina and Chile) -- Description and travel
Description: Some fourteen to ten thousand years ago, as ice-caps shrank and glaciers retreated, the first bands of hunter-gatherers began to colonise the continental extremity of South America - 'the uttermost end of the earth'. Their arrival marked the culmination of mankind's epic journey to people the globe. These intrepid nomads confronted a hostile climate every bit as forbidding as ice-age Europe as they penetrated and settled the wilds of Fuego-Patagonia.

Much later, sixteenth-century European voyagers encountered their descendants: the Aonikenk (southern Tehuelche), Selk'nam (Ona), Yomana (Yahgan) and Kaweskar (Alakaluf), living, as they saw it, in a state of savagery. The first contacts led to tales of a race of giants and, ever since, Patagonia has exerted a special hold on the European imagination. Tragically, by the mid twentieth century the last remnants of the indigenous way of life had virtually disappeared. The essays in this volume trace a largely unwritten history of human adaptation, survival and eventual extinction.

They are published to accompany an exhibition on Fuego-Patagonia at the Museum of Mankind, London.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [186]-196) and index.