Today’s menu:
Breakfast: coffee with milk, toast with butter and jam or honey. Or the famous “dulce de leche" (sometimes translated as milk candy)...
By midmorning, we stop digging to eat biscuits and dink something hot (a refreshing drink would not be welcome: last weather figures for Ushuaia, indicates that although the temperature is about 4º, if we add variables such as wind and humidity (it has been raining for 4 days now…), you can feel as if the temperature is about 6º below zero).
Lunch: beef stew with vegetables. For dessert, fruit, and then we drink a lot of tea.
Dinner: vegetables and grilled sausages accompanied with milk candy cake with nuts (that’s because today is Lorena Salvatelli’s birthday!!!).
How the Yamana diet was?
It was also very, very caloric: lots of meat and fat. Sea lion and mussels. That’s what ethnographic sources say. But what archaeology is telling us about the diet?
Although shellmiddens are telling us about a very important consumption of mollusks, and that the ethnographic sources insist on the consumption of sea lion, the real situation is that the Yamana society exploited a wide variety of costal resources from the region.
The importance of mollusks is clear: we have the shellmiddens. But its great volume is indicative of their role in the Yamana diet, or indeed, is the residue of mollusk (the shell) occupying a lot of space? A sea lion has a great capacity as a consumption element. But his role in the diet is as important as we assumed? Let’s excavate Lanashuaia II. In the site we find, also, a great diversity of birds consumed (seabirds or from the coastal area), and fish accumulations are abundant and they tell us of an important fishing effort (as ethnographic sources say, this job was developed mainly by women). The analysis of seeds and phytoliths also speak about vegetable consumption (despite the poverty that provides the forest to European eyes).
The Yamana diet consists in sea lion, whale, penguins, mollusks, guanacos, sardines, but also different kinds of berries and forest fruits. Yamana people had a great capacity to manage marine resources, the fruit of their own history, of their knowledge, their social and technological changes. Or better said, management of marine and coastal resources in the coastal zone, from the sea to the interior forest. Developing an exploitation that allowed regeneration. During the first return of the Beagle to England, York Minster (Kawésqar) reprimanded a sailor for shooting a female animal: females will not have descendents, better to hunt males. And by the way, Darwin and Fitzroy were spectacularly wrong: in the Yamana diet human flesh is not present, although they said that several times.
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