Argentina Before Argentina

What does it mean to be Argentine? When did that identity begin to take shape? Where does it come from? Or rather… does it come from anywhere at all? The common-sense answer, when we reflect on “the national,” usually points to criollo culture and the influence of European migration. That narrative is so entrenched that, in 2021, then-President Alberto Fernández said: “Mexicans came from the Indians, Brazilians came from the jungle, but we Argentines came off the boats.”

In that same vein, anthropologist Alejandro Grimson, in his book Mitomanías argentinas (2012), highlights a set of stories Argentines tell themselves. Grimson argues that the claim “Argentina is a European country” functions as a foundational myth—one that occupies a central place in the pantheon of national narratives. Beneath it sit several derived myths: “there is no racism in Argentina because there are no Black people,” “Argentina is a country without Indians,” or the already mentioned “we Argentines come off the boats.” Today these myths circulate as memes, a sign of their persistence, adaptability, and transgenerational reach. From a president to your soccer-obsessed nephew who lives on TikTok, many people have internalized the idea of the Argentine as white and European.

The Biological Dimension: The “Boats” Myth

On November 5, an article was published in Nature by a team that included archaeologists and bioanthropologists from CONICET (Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council) and several universities across the country. Using DNA analysis, the researchers identified a genetic lineage specific to central Argentina with an antiquity of about 8,500 years. And that’s not all: this genetic component is present in the population today, and it is possible to detect genetic traits that link present-day Argentines directly to populations from more than 80 centuries ago. By comparison, ships only appeared on the horizon of the Río de la Plata less than six centuries ago.

This contribution underscores something bioanthropology has discussed for quite some time: the current Argentine population reflects multiple ancestries—not only European, but also Native American and, even, sub-Saharan African. Still, the fact that non-European ancestry is present in people’s genes does not necessarily mean we know it—or that, even if we do, we incorporate it as a constitutive element of identity. That is where the “boats” myth becomes especially powerful.

The 2022 National Population, Household, and Housing Census shows that 1,306,730 people identify as Indigenous or as descendants of Indigenous or Native peoples, representing 2.9% of the total population. Yet if we could conduct a genetic ancestry study across the entire population, it is very likely that Native American ancestry would appear in far more than 2.9%. Even so, genetic ancestry is biological data, while identity is a social and historical construction—so genes do not confer identities, nor do they cancel them. The gap between what genetic studies show and what people declare in censuses is not a “mismatch,” but the product of historical and political processes. Genetics alone does not explain culture, but it does point to something fundamental: the population living in Argentina today has a deep and remarkably diverse history.

The Cultural Dimension: What Makes Us Argentine

If there is one word with multiple definitions in the social sciences, it is probably “culture.” I won’t get into the concept’s finer points here, but rather into a feature that cuts across most meanings: culture is shared and transmitted across generations. Unlike genes, however, cultural components are learned, debated, and transformed through social life.

Reflecting on a country’s culture is a challenge because it involves selecting and building shared meanings. Every time we talk about “Argentine culture,” we are implicitly highlighting certain elements and practices while excluding others. We do so not only to recognize ourselves, but also to be recognized by others. From its earliest days, the Argentine state chose and promoted a model of identity to produce a “model citizen” and, at the same time, to position itself in the world. European and criollo elements were elevated, while Indigenous and African elements were pushed aside and rendered invisible.

Since the 19th century, various elements have been incorporated into the national self-image—yet almost always on that foundational base associated with the idea of “civilization.” So today, “Argentine” becomes asado (the barbecue and the social ritual around it), dulce de leche, mate, and the countryside. It becomes Sundays with family, gathering with friends, passion, and collective effervescence. It is also resilience, nostalgia, and arrogance. It is nerve, versatility, and viveza criolla—that street-smart quickness celebrated as national character.

But this selection—so deeply rooted, and so ready-made whenever someone is asked to define “what’s ours”—leaves questions open. How much of what we recognize today as Argentine can also be found in a more distant past, prior to the formation of Argentina as a nation-state? Can we identify those practices through archaeological remains? If “the Argentine” was not built from nothing, how important—how influential—was the substrate on which it was erected?

Looking for “The Argentine” in Pre-Hispanic Archaeological Remains

Archaeology studies past human societies through their material remains. All archaeological materials occupy a place in space and can be assigned to a slice of time. So is it possible to trace continuities between the pre-Hispanic past and the traits we tend to label as “Argentine”?

Rather than attempting to draw a direct line from past to present, the proposal here is different: to recognize that many traits we attribute to the national may have existed in the pre-Hispanic societies that inhabited this same territory. The point is not to claim that a group represented at a given site was “Argentine,” but to show that certain practices we now link to national identity can be, in fact, extremely long-lasting.

1) Asado

The word asado, like “culture” in anthropology, is polysemous: it can refer to a cut of meat, a spread of cuts on the grill, a cooking technique, or a social event. An asado can happen without the specific cut known as tira de asado, but it typically implies beef on hot grates over coals. Even if Martín Fierro tells us that “every creature that walks ends up on the grill,” a chicken roasting over embers does not automatically become asado. The essence lies in the conjunction of beef, fire, and companionship: asado is, above all, social.

Many Argentine archaeological sites show evidence of gatherings around a fire pit that may have been used to roast an animal. The earliest fire pits associated with hunter-gatherers have been identified in sites as geographically diverse as Piedra Museo (Santa Cruz), Cueva Tixi (Buenos Aires), and Huachichocana III (Jujuy).

Piedra Museo is an archaeological locality with evidence of human activity from nearly 13,000 years ago. Researchers propose a brief occupation episode that brought together a small group around a fire to process and consume parts of multiple prey species: guanaco, rhea (ñandú), and extinct animals such as the mylodon and the “American horse.” At Cueva Tixi, two fire pits dating to around 10,000 years ago were identified alongside animal remains: again guanaco, Pampas deer, coypu, armadillo, and Eutatus seguini, an extinct giant armadillo. Finally, at Huachichocana III, the earliest occupation—nearly 9,500 years old—includes a large fire pit around which different activities unfolded, including the consumption of newborn guanacos—perhaps the era’s version of veal.

Just as beef holds a central place in asado today, in the past the preferred animals were South American camelids. Across much of the territory, people hunted guanaco and, after domestication in northwest Argentina, llama. These camelids dominate pre-Hispanic archaeofaunal assemblages from both hunter-gatherer and agropastoral societies, and their nutritional use included not only meat but also bone marrow (caracú) and possibly viscera (achuras).

Whether it is a fire pit or a grill, guanaco ribs or beef short ribs, a group of hunter-gatherers or you and your friends, the scene repeats across millennia: people gathered around the glow of a small fire, meat sizzling over embers, and a meal—and time itself—shared together.

2) Community Feeling and Collective Effervescence

The coming together of a group under a flag, an image, a demand, or a celebration is deeply characteristic of national life. What stands out, in Argentina’s case, is the intensity with which we do it: from the pilgrimage to Luján to World Cup celebrations in every public space across the country; from political marches to packed stadiums cheering a team or singing along to a favorite band. The Argentine is, above all, a “fan of the fans,” and the crowd becomes the protagonist—whether the occasion is a concert, a mass, 22 players on a pitch, or the reading of a statement in Plaza de Mayo.

La Rinconada, in the Ambato Valley (Catamarca), is among the earliest sites in today’s Argentina showing evidence of construction beyond the strictly domestic. The architectural complex was occupied between 700 and 1100 CE. Alongside residential spaces, it includes a large plaza and a platform that may have functioned as a stage. While the living spaces could have accommodated no more than 200 people, the plaza’s capacity is estimated at around 1,000. For that reason—and considering other regional findings linked to the so-called La Aguada cultural tradition—researchers have proposed that La Rinconada served as a ceremonial center drawing communities from elsewhere in the valley and possibly from more distant regions. The events held there would have reproduced the dominant ideology of the time, materialized in the figure of the jaguar (yaguareté).

Pilgrimage, congregation, and shared experience—so central to what many consider “Argentine”—find an early antecedent in sites like La Rinconada. One detail matters: around 1100 CE, the site was deliberately destroyed, burned, and abandoned by its inhabitants. This practice of physically and symbolically destroying a place of ritual importance can also be traced in contemporary Argentina—one of the last and most iconic examples occurring on June 26, 2011.

3) Successive Crises and the Search for Solutions

Being Argentine (or living in Argentina) often means living with the sense that another crisis is always around the corner: periods of stability are only brief pauses between two crises, and the next social, political, or economic disruption may be imminent. That tends to produce two non-exclusive strategies: living day to day and developing responses to adapt to circumstances that will arrive—without anyone knowing exactly when. Dollars tucked away at home, or stockpiling nonperishables, are familiar 21st-century Argentine behaviors.

Pre-Hispanic societies in this territory faced crises of their own and managed to confront and overcome them through changes in behavior and strategy. For example, around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene, megafauna declined and eventually went extinct. Hunter-gatherers had developed specialized hunting technology for these massive animals: the so-called fishtail projectile points. When megafauna disappeared, these points were no longer necessary, and hunters reorganized their toolkits, prioritizing weapons suited to hunting guanaco, deer, and huemul.

Another crisis—this time linked to shifts in environmental humidity—triggered changes among hunter-gatherers in the Argentine Puna. Between roughly 6,000 and 3,500 years ago, conditions were markedly more arid than the periods before and after. Yet some areas remained relatively wetter, concentrating water, plants, and animals—and, as a consequence, people. In this scenario, hunters reduced their mobility and began to specialize in capturing guanaco, decreasing the hunting of other species. This increasingly close relationship with guanaco may have favored its habituation to humans and, over time, opened the path toward domestication and the emergence of the llama.

A final example is the abandonment of an agropastoral village in the Fiambalá Valley (Catamarca), occupied during the first millennium CE (0–1000 CE), due to volcanic activity that affected water, flora, and fauna. People responded by relocating to nearby mountainous areas, likely less impacted by volcanism. Later, after environmental recovery, the valley was reoccupied around 1250 CE.

These cases show that crises were not exceptional events but recurring conditions that past societies lived with—conditions that made problem-solving part of everyday life. Between uncertainty and adaptation, instability and response, crisis and innovation, the long history of this territory offers more continuities than we tend to recognize.

4) Political Rosca

One form of resilience is negotiation. That reflex—“Couldn’t we fix this another way?”—invites people to weave strategies, alliances, relationships, and ties that might have seemed unlikely, yet become possible under certain conditions. This is not necessarily about jumping from one camp to another without reason, but about the ability to give ground in some areas to preserve others—for individual or collective benefit.

Material traces of political rosca can be harder to identify archaeologically, but it is not impossible. The Inca Empire’s expansion into what is now Argentine territory involved strategies developed on the imperial frontier. Any state that expands its political domain requires military force, but coercion is not the only tool: diplomacy and political maneuvering matter too. For negotiation to occur, there must be parties willing to engage.

The societies living in northwest Argentina around the 15th century CE were the first to witness the Empire’s arrival. One strategy adopted by local authorities was precisely to negotiate—to do rosca. In those dealings with imperial representatives, the security of leaders and their communities was at stake. Under the new leadership, they retained some degree of power, so long as they paid tribute and remained loyal to the Inca. A number of archaeological sites in northwest Argentina show Inca installations built onto existing settlements. In some cases, local authorities’ willingness to negotiate may have made that imposition less traumatic and reduced the degree to which everyday life was radically transformed.

Diego Maradona—perhaps one of the most iconic figures of Argentineness—once said: “I’m either black or white; I won’t be gray in my life.” Yet that authenticity coexists with a negotiating, deal-making side. In the realm of grays—unglamorous but pragmatic—often lies survival, then and now.

The Depth of “The Argentine”

As archaeologists excavate, layers appear: successive sediment units that can differ in composition, thickness, content, color, or grain size. A surface layer of sand, for instance, may be followed by a more clay-rich layer and then a stonier one. No two excavation units are identical, because sedimentation is always local and shaped by specific environmental dynamics. Digging is always a surprise.

With that image in mind, we can reflect on Argentineness. Just as layers do not replace one another but pile up, “the Argentine” is formed by an accumulation of practices, narratives, customs, memories, and omissions. European immigration and the 19th-century nation-building project are fundamental strata—but not the only ones, and certainly not the deepest. Below them, much older layers surface, constituting a deeper stratigraphy of the national. Recognizing that depth does not mean searching for a “pre-Hispanic Argentine,” but accepting that what was shaped and built in recent history as national identity dialogues with what came before: a solid, ancient, complex bedrock.

Many pre-Hispanic practices mentioned here were not exclusive to this territory; with local variations, they extended across large regions of the continent. Each American state was built upon its own stratigraphy, selecting, hiding, or elevating certain layers of the past to forge a national identity. In Argentina’s case, the story does not begin with ships on the surface of the Río de la Plata: to understand it, we have to look deeper.