Small mammal taphonomy and palaeoecological Holocene interpretations in the Andean piedmont (southern Mendoza province, Argentina)

ABSTRACT

Salamanca cave (southern Mendoza province) is in the Andean piedmont, a transitional area in which small mammal communities may have been affected by climatic pulses. The site yields three archaeological components covering from the early to the late-Holocene with a mid-Holocene occupational and sedimentological hiatus. Taphonomic analyses of the small mammal assemblages indicate that barn owls (Tyto furcata) were the main accumulation agent, ensuring accurate palaeoecological inferences. Taxonomic composition of the site shows the dominance of Eligmodontia sp. followed by Thylamys pallidior, Phyllotis cf. P. vaccarum-pehuenche and Ctenomys sp., all of them indicative of shrubland and bare ground habitats. Palaeoclimatic inferences indicate a trend to warmer temperatures from the lower to the upper component with a slight increase in humidity in the middle component. This humid pulse is also supported by post-depositional taphonomic processes. The taxonomic structure and abundance of small mammals do not show deep changes amongst the three archaeological components, following the general trend observed in other archaeological sites from the Pampean region, southern Mendoza province and the arid and semi-arid zones of north Patagonia, in which changes in the taxonomic composition of small mammal communities are almost absent since Pleistocene–Holocene transition to late Holocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Southern Mendoza
• Salamanca cave
• palaeoecology
• stable conditions

Acknowledgments

This work has been financed by the project PIAR-201938015 from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, Spain), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid through a research stay in the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) (EB25/22) and by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (PID2021-126933NB-I00). SGM has a predoctoral grant financed by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Banco Santander (CT42/18-CT43/18). DMM has a postdoctoral grant financed by CONICET [RESOL-2020-134-APN-DIR#CONICET]. Authors want also to express their gratitude to Pablo Teta, curator of MACN, that gently provided Akodon oenos material used in comparisons and to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to the early version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2022.2147004

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CONICET [RESOL-2020-134-APN-DIR#CONICET]; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas [PIAR-201938015]; Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [PID2021-126933NB-I00]; Universidad Complutense de Madrid [CT42/18-CT43/18,EB25/22].