Actualistic Taphonomy in South America

In 2016, Matias do Nascimento Ritter, Claudio G. De Francesco, Fernando Erthal, Gabriela S. Hassan, Eleonor Tietze, and Sergio A. Martínez published the Manifesto of the South American School of (Actualistic) Taphonomy in PALAIOS. It argued that the region offers exceptional conditions for testing taphonomic ideas.

Sea-level oscillations since the Pleistocene left numerous lagoons and estuaries along the coast, including the Patos Lagoon in Brazil, the largest coastal lagoon in the world, and the Río de la Plata between Uruguay and Argentina. Inland, the gentle slope of the Pampas and southern Argentina holds many permanent and temporary lakes and fluvial systems born in the high Andes. Fossiliferous accumulations from the continental shelf, coastal plains, and freshwater basins can be compared directly with modern death assemblages.

The authors highlighted research themes already under way: the comparative taphonomy of mollusks and brachiopods on the southern Brazilian shelf; the contrasting preservation of diatoms and mollusks along gradients of conductivity and alkalinity in Pampean lakes; the role of spatial scale in live–dead fidelity; experiments on dissolution and encrustation; and contributions to conservation paleobiology and to distinguishing natural from anthropogenic shell accumulations in archaeology.

The text also acknowledges the pioneers who inspired the group, especially Marcello G. Simões, and closes with the hope that the school's conversations would keep producing knowledge with international reach. That vision inspired the first workshop.

Read the 2016 manifesto

In 2025, members of the South American School of Taphonomy published the first continental overview of the field. The review compiled the actualistic taphonomy literature produced in South America and accessible internationally, and showed a steady rise in studies from 1985 to the present.

The first record in the survey is a two-year monitoring of guanaco skeletons in Tierra del Fuego, designed to answer an archaeological question. Archaeology and vertebrate paleontology shaped the early decades, so most of the literature concerns terrestrial settings. Marine and coastal studies, mostly on mollusks, followed, with the Brazilian contribution rising from the early 2000s. Since about 2015, paleontological applications have grown quickly.

Experimental work started in 1991 and increased markedly after 2009, synthesis papers appeared from 2007, and theoretical and methodological papers since 2016. The authors also point to gaps: estuarine and lagoonal systems, plants, arthropods, and many other materials remain poorly studied, and Portuguese-language publications are rare. These are the questions that a meeting such as the TAAS can help to address.