Historians interested in Native Americans will find valuable the seven contributions by anthropologists in this book. Examining several groups of the 260,000 indigenous peoples of the Gran Chaco, most authors concentrate on developments of the 1980s and 1990s.

The introduction by José Braunstein and Elmer S. Miller surveys the post-contact ethnohistory of the Chaco, now in Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. They outline its geography, ecology, and subsistence patterns. They provide new information on recent Chaco missions and on increasing contacts between indigenous peoples and dominant societies, mostly resulting from military clashes and wage labor. The environmental decline of the Chaco in the late twentieth century has coincided with new Argentine, Paraguayan, and Bolivian policies favoring indigenous autonomy.

John-Åke Alvarsson explains how the ‘Weenhayek (Mataco) of Bolivia and Argentina have adapted aboriginal foraging patterns to urban life. He concludes that the pressures of modernity have strengthened the ‘Weenhayek as an ethnolinguistic...

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