The Uruguay river to the north, ran along the spacious valley that could be seen from the heights of the river bank, being just 20 mts. wide.

The entrance

Icy winds crossed the land which was barely covered by bush and hard gramineous. Prints of a Mylodont could be observed on the fine dust deposited on the grounds, while an enormous swamp hart (both today extincted) climbed hastily to the heights of the next hill, which was still covered by snow.

A small group of human beings, including women and children wearing long furry mantles, bordered the scarp with attentive eyes to the new panorama that presented to their eyes. This must have been the landscape during the arrival of the first inhabitants into our territory. Our calendar would indicate that there was still more than ten thousand years left to the birth of Christ.

From that anecdote, the prehistory of Uruguay begins to be written. A vast period, extensive, complex and changeable, because it is 40 times larger than the one named as historic period of the country. A prehistory that is also almost unknown to the great majority of Uruguayans, and expressly ignored on its educational programs.

Along thousands of years, different human groups inhabited this territory. It was a land that some times was fertile and fecund to them, while others was desolatingly mortifying. It got to have desert-like areas to the northwest about 7000 years ago, with extensive sandy grounds where llamas and guanacoes shifted. And it also held important forest galleries on its central region, hardly three thousand years afterwards.

An Uruguay where the ocean covered nowadays touristic beaches submerging them below six meters, going back on other moments leaving more than 70 to 100 kms. of new coasts, and an enormous as well as an unknown coastal territory to inquisitive investigation.

A changing panorama with respect to its geography and climate. Almost always surprising and where the aborigines had an extraordinary role: to adapt to dramatic changes on flora and environment, on which not only they survived but also had to develop varied and complex social and cultural relationships. All that, accompanied by a renewed capacity to invent and modify their tools, but also of reconstituting their settlement systems (forms of occupation of the environment) and the most complicated processes of obtaining food and large resources for subsistence.

This prehistory is a long epopee of anonymous heroes that remains hidden on the few texts that mention it, below the inadequate and limited label of "the indigenous culture".

Really, there was not just one indigenous culture. There were several and very different: always alert to respond to the changes of the environment with new cultural changes, with an ability to modify not only tools but the systems to relate among the members as well. Establishing some times permanent villages and, other times, adopting a small band strategy for easy maneuverability, superior speed of shifting and reduced environmental impact.

Engraved lithic

Changing situations were not resolved only by morphological change on tools, and less with a supposed and invented increase of its complexity. Moreover, as cited in the example, they were resolved by the complex handling of social relations as a different but equally effective strategy, to dominate the environment.

It is inside that frame of constant change and adaptation that we will understand that vast prehistoric past in Uruguay. It is inside those parameters that we will examine and understand the material changes that Uruguayan archeologists are investigating. They could never be understood, if we pretend (as today text books suggest) that they occurred in an Uruguay similar to the present.

Several solutions were taken for such an extensive period, as part of firm strategies of resource management, in order to achieve stability on the environment.

On the coast of the Uruguay river and on the isles that nowadays remain under the international dam of Salto Grande, excavations allowed the finding of a great amount of fine lithic artifacts. Many of them show a detailed manufacture technic and a great knowledge and handling of technical aspects for obtaining bifacial instruments (that is that they were worked on both sides) that have just 3 to 4 mms. of thickness. Retouched flakes that still show damage on their sharp edges, which was produced for its intensive use more than five thousand years ago. Projectile points known as "fish tail" (due to its peculiar form), that besides surprising for its high technical quality, are indicatory of remote traditions that go beyond eight thousand years of antiquity.

With the big climatic changes came along a moving in the location of the sites, and the archaeologists find now a great amount of them on the central areas of the country. Tools change there, not only because the source of supply changes (quarries), but also because they change adapting to the new fauna and environment.

Detail of excavations in Yacaré-Cururú (Artigas)

About five thousand years before present, a series of mounds built artificially appeared across the entire country. In some opportunities they are isolated; in others they form groups of twenty or more. Some times these structures seem to be arranged by chance, while others they are distributed adopting circular, elliptical or even a horseshoe shape.

The function they accomplished is as complex as the behavior of their different builders. Some times, it emerges intricated burial forms from them, individual as well as multiple. The variety of the funeral offerings suggests a strong search for social or sexual differentiation. Other times, mounds are just used as a secondary deposit for the dead or for occasional horticultural work.

Recent work in Artigas province, close to the areas with prehistoric engravings, indicates the presence of pottery one thousand six hundred years before Christ. That is when Mycenae stopped being a limited village to increasingly fortify itself, or while the majority of the Pacific islands did not show human presence yet.

Funerary urn

Complex societies of horticulturists and fishermen established and prospered on the mouth of the Uruguay river and Negro river. There, they developed elaborated forms of ceramics, additioned by an even more complex and varied decoration. Appendixes with representations of the fauna, decorated in a three-dimensional way the edges of plates and vessels. Meanwhile to the north, other ceramic forms imitated birds to be used in the ceremonies of introduction to altered states of consciousness. Several investigations point to explain that particular cultural phenomenon.

Rock painting in Chamangá (disappeared today)

Since about two thousand five hundred years ago, simple as well as complex forms, predominantly geometrical and of red color, were carefully painted on hundreds of stone blocks on the central provinces of Uruguay. Of them, just about forty still remain besides of the intense vandalism with which they neglectfully come to be damaged, erasing another of the last sources of knowledge from the past.

To the Northwest, research still continues in order to documentate groups of engravings that start more than six thousand years ago, reflecting a permanent artistic activity that continues until the year 800 of the present era.

Around the year 1500 BC, from the north and sailing on speedy canoes, arrived invaders that raised important camps along the banks of the main rivers. Among their most

Invasions from the south

outstanding practices we can find the use of horticulture with the introduction of new species, and religious cannibalism: they were the "Guaranies".

Curiously, and almost at the same time, from the south another invader group appeared, navigators too. As the one above, they also chose to establish themselves along the mouths of the rivers or prominent harbors. Instead of canoes, they moved on ships that brought some strange extended cloth to help on the displacement. Unlike the other invader group, their skin was white and showed some hair on their faces that covered the neck. They used long cutting swords and small devices that launched death along fire and smoke. This death was massive and indiscriminated for aborigines, but it did not have ritual characteristics. Besides of new vegetal species, they also left cows and horses on the territory.

The latter produced a real revolution on the way the existing indigenous groups managed the territory. Distances that were measured on days, reduced themselves to hours. The carefully balanced subsistence on the handling of the environment turned totally dependant on livestock, which was easier to hunt and provided a better volume of supply.

This double invasion from the South and the North, changed radically the indigenous cultures that inhabited Uruguayan territory. They were confronted now with the struggle for the possession of their environments, the dispute for wild and untamed cattle, having a larger limitation of movements due to the slow but progressive invasion of the countryside. They suffered another invasion from the North just one hundred years afterwards, that selectively felt over the groups and their huts, imprisoning all of them to get new slaves to transport to labor camps in Brazil.

In just 200 years, the indiscriminated hunt due to slavery, new diseases brought by the Europeans, the continuos harassment and destruction of their settlements, included the "Reducciones" established by the church, and the unequal armament on battle altered completely their presence on this land. On one side, the number of aborigines dropped abruptly up to 30% (which also came as a result of massive migration towards the southeast of actual Brazil and to the coastal provinces of the Argentinean Mesopotamia). On the other side, their visibility reached minimum degree, in order to avoid being noticed on the landscape, as an strategy for survival.

Aborigines adopted other social conducts: aboriginal groups brought to the maximum performance the high mobility that offered horses and alongside, they used a double method of reducing the members of groups and avoiding

Cacique Chare

permanent settlements in order to survive. Their physical presence (increasingly less evident which did not mean that they were equally scarce) was limited to brief and flashing appearances on locations where they could get supplies and rapidly disappear: the farms. A tactic that was imitated by the "caudillos" (leaders) of the new nation that was forming.

Nevertheless, these valuable survival strategies have been interpreted erroneously by many historians when referring to nomadism and the absence of permanent settlements of the aborigines, by viewing them as negative characteristics of these cultures, as well as attributing the pursuit low visibility in the environment as a real physical absence. Was it possible, perhaps, to avoid elaborating such behavioral modifications, without being on the way to collective suicide?

Ethnocide finally came when the aborigines abandoned those strategies, when they were persecuted to death in programmed slaughter, when they integrated the main army corps of the independence, at the request of promises that were ignored later by their ignoble self appointed white chieves, or due to the integration of the "caudillos" that commanded them, to the highly unstable political systems that were forming.

All this has determined Uruguay to be one of the three American countries without living indigenous cultures, and that its political and educational systems could not expiate the inventory of its guilt yet.

This abstract only attempts to be a big preamble to an extense as well as a complex prehistory of Uruguay, where humans, environment, fauna and flora have changed along more than 100 centuries, providing multiple answers and novel solutions to the only reality that has perdured: change.

A lesson that neo-Orientals (as they identified themselves in those years, and nowadays true "Uruguayans") have not learned yet.