of the preceding years had to be dealt with. There was a need for more locally based theoretical paradigms and for the optimization of the formation of academic groups. Various theoretical approaches, such as the cognitive, historicist, structuralist, neopositivist, symbolist, materialist, and postprocessualist approaches, have been helpful and will continue to be useful in maximizing the interpretative options of past events. In this context, the changing perspectives of the present range from a genetic neodiffusionism to a static deductive localism, from morphological discourse to the legitimization of computerized verification per se, and from an aversion to globalizing materialistic views to sterile descriptivism.

Some analytical models have recently surfaced in Chile that offer unequivocal signs of theoretical and methodological advancements. For example, the fact that the peopling of the coast of the country took place at such an early date (10,000 years ago) has reopened the relevant issue related to the articulation of two synchronic socio-adaptive processes: the Andeanization and maritimization of Chilean society.

Aside from the reconstitution of the general and specific behavior patterns and the ideological perceptions of the human phenomenon, there were also utopian aspirations to attract the younger generations of investigators to the quest for a vision of the society of the future. The aspirations of the newest generations of archaeologists are geared toward finding jobs and toward more specialized knowledge but with less alienating theory. In this sense, their propositions are perceived as consistent and well documented. Thus, it is now necessary to employ postgraduate archaeologists and to generate a museological (museum studies) policy that will contribute to a new educational strategy.

Epilogue

We should expect the emergence of “other” archaeologies later on, related to the 500 years of recent existence: colonial, industrial, subaquatic, urban, and forensic archaeology. The last is of particular importance as can be seen by detailed expert assessments made public during the judicial processes surrounding the “disappearances” that occurred during the military regime.

Another expected outcome would be the optimization of current knowledge about the original inter-American cultural processes, through the 30,000 to 12,000 years of human occupation, making it more difficult to divide it into two areas of study: prehistory and history. In a similar vein, it would be appropriate to find an approach with the discipline of history based on theories, methods, and techniques proper to archaeology in order to elucidate a reconstitution of the greater history of the Latin American peoples both before and after the linkage to the history of the west. In this context, we should strive to advance toward an appropriate paradigmatic synthesis, which would integrate the best of the proposals on particularities and regularities, in an explicit discourse directed toward those peoples who, until now, have received only the official and elitist histories.

I am describing an archaeology incorporated into a scientific and multidisciplinary history of the peoples of the Americas, a history that would go beyond its “intellectual” orientations, not forgetting its social meaning and its objectivity, to a proper understanding of the complexity of past and present human behavior. In today’s world, when many people proclaim that history is defunct, archaeologists and their “extended chronologies” are the best equipped to attempt to change this apathy to a historic utopia, one that ascends from the depth of human nature and aspires to the sustainability of human society in search of the ideal of transformations that are more just and ecumenical.

A. Lautaro Núñez;

translated by Armando Anaya Hernández

References

Bird, J. B. 1938a. “Antiquity and Migrations of the Early Inhabitants of Patagonia.” Geographical Review 28, no. 2: 250–275.

———. 1938b. “Before Magellan.” Natural History 41, no. 1: 16–79.

———. 1943. “Excavation in Northern Chile.” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 38, part 4. New York.

———. 1946. “The Archaeology of Patagonia.” In The Marginal Tribes: Handbook of South American