Seventy years after the investigations of Oswald Menghin and Marcelo Bórmida in the caves of Tandilia

The beginning of the mirage

Abstract

In 1950, Oswald Menghin and Marcelo Bórmida published  the results of their first investigations in the Pampean region, in the Gruta del Oro in the hill system of Tandilia in the journal Runa. Based on very few lithic artifacts and making long-distance paleoclimate correlations, they proposed the existence at around 5000 BC of an epiprotolithic cultural complex of inferior hunters which they called Tandilense. This article gave rise to a whole series of archaeological investigations in the region strongly aligned with the Austro-German historical-cultural paradigm. The article was the foundation stone of a theoretical current that would dominate Pampean Archaeology for the next thirty years. This essay summarizes and discusses the findings and interpretations of Menghin and Bórmida on the materials of the Gruta del Oro and analyzes the theoretical and political context to explain why the model proposed by Menghin and Bórmida was dominant until the 1980s.