Camps rural laborers during Patagonia rebelde. Description and formulation of archaeological expectations from documentary sources

Abstract

A few years ago, we began historical and archaeological studies on the strikes of rural laborers that occurred in Santa Cruz between 1920 and 1921, focusing mainly on the northeast of this territory. We are interested in recovering the memory of these tragic events that affected the Santa Cruz society of those times and that ended up consolidating a preponderant economic activity based on sheep farming through the exploitation of rural labor in very hard work conditions. In this context, and given that the scarce existing information -beyond the pioneering work of Osvaldo Bayer- were focused on contextual and interpretative aspects of the strikes, it is that we intend to advance in the knowledge of how these events developed and how they affected the territory and its inhabitants. In this work, in particular we analyze the characteristics of the strikers’ camps from unpublished documentary sources -judicial acts, military documents and manuscript accounts- to establish in an exploratory way a series of hypotheses that could generate archaeological expectations about the location and material remains expected in the camps. These can then be contrasted with the material record in places where there were presumably camps of the strikers