ORIGINAL PAPER A traceological approach to the use of Laguna Azul during the Late Holocene (from ca. 2000 years BP) in Norpatagonia, Argentina V. Lynch 1 & E. Terranova 1 Received: 14 May 2018 /Accepted: 28 January 2019 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The lagoon environments were places recurrently visited and inhabited by hunter-gatherer groups throughout different areas of North Patagonia. These places were very important in the life of these mobile groups; they were part of their itineraries and they regularly returned to their shores. The Somuncurá plateau’ s lagoons (Rio Negro province, Argentina) represent one of these spaces, where, in addition to a vital resource such as water, it can be found a greater variety and biological abundance, facilitating a certain shelter during mobility. The Laguna Azul site is one of these places, where the hunting blinds (known as Bparapetos^) are the most outstanding anthropic modification of the landscape. In this paper, we present the results obtained from the lithic material recovered from one of these structures, which is the most abundant material in the record. The knowledge about the specific uses of these stone tools, obtained through the functional analysis, is deepened to determine trends in the manufacturing process and designs chosen. The studies developed in this paper will expand the understanding about the technological decisions implemented by the hunter-gatherers that inhabited the Somuncurá plateau during the Late Holocene. Keywords Late Holocene . Norpatagonia . Hunting blinds . Lithic technology . Functional analysis Introduction In this paper, we present the new advances of archeological researches developed in the Laguna Azul locality, situated in the northeast area of the Somuncurá plateau (Río Negro, Argentina). This research is framed within regional archeological problems focused on expanding the available information in relation to the peopling area and landscape use during the Late Holocene (from ca. 3000 years BP, Martinez 2008/09). The interpretative model proposed in this paper is interest- ed in the practices and interactions of people who inhabited this area, considering that the spatial and material order active- ly shape and reproduce social life. In this sense, it is argued that materiality and spatiality allow an approach to different aspects of past societies. Thus, the space is defined as regu- larities and concrete forms of human materiality (Malafouris 2010; Lillios et al. 2010; DeMarrais 2014; Criado-Boado 2015); all space is transformed into place through human in- tervention, and landscapes are formed from a set of relation- ships between people and places, which provide the context of daily life. Therefore, the idea of place as a built space incor- porated into daily practices is a key element to understand past societies and the materiality of all practices (Tilley 1994; Thomas 2001; Criado-Boado 2015). With regard to the latter, several hypotheses have been proposed about the peopling of the northeast of Patagonia during the Late Holocene, and previous studies proposed a possible expansion towards the north and west of this Argentinean region (Barrientos 2001; Barrientos and Pérez 2004; Novellino et al. 2003). Based on this, a population model of the area was generated. This model linked the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA) from ca. 1200–800 AD (Stine 1994; Stine and Stine 1990; Schäbitz 1994) character- ized by semi-arid conditions with a higher frequency of rain- fall (ca. 1080–1250 BP), that would have favored the lagoons’ expansion during the final phases of this period (Villalba 1990; Schäbitz 1994; Stine 1994). However, these events at a regional scale may present variations, and in the study area, * V. Lynch lynchvirginia@gmail.com E. Terranova quiqueterra@gmail.com 1 División Arqueología, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo de La Plata (FCNyM-UNLP), CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-019-00806-7