Boca de Potrerillos

What to Know?

• It is encountered in inhospitable, cactus-filled, dry, desert territory. A dry river bed and the vestiges of vegetation make investigators believe in the possibility that centuries ago, this place was a friendlier habitat in terms of flora and fauna.
• The work of the scientists has managed to identify more than 25 botanical species that lived in the region. The findings, as much fossil as archeological, allow them to imagine a settlement ecologically conditioned by means of an interaction between man and nature.
• Because there are coinciding settlements in the United States, the University of Texas conducted dating studies by means of carbon 14 testing. The results indicate 20 different periods of settlement, with the most remote being 9,000 B.C.
• The findings make one think of prehistoric people, semi-nomads, which were guided by the stars or by nature; thus their geometric and environmental abstractions were carved in or painted on rock as illustrative and didactic mediums.
• In addition to the petroglyphs (images carved in stone) and the fogones (ovens made from piles of rocks and which baked with coals), they have also discovered spear points, carving tools, mills, pots, and necklaces with marine beads and amulets.
• Curiously, the amulets have replicas of some of the petroglyphs. Their rituals linked their observations of nature with their social attitudes, that is, their cosmogony, and they applied it, principally, to themes like hunting, migration, gathering, and fertility.