Fell’s Cave and the Fishtail projectile-point tradition

Record summary

Fell’s Cave is a foundational southern South American site associated with fishtail projectile points, extinct fauna, hearths, and early hunter-gatherer occupations. Although the original excavations predate this period, publications and reassessments during the 1970s and 1980s kept the site central to arguments about early migration, technological connections, and the chronology of Patagonian settlement. It offers a comparative case against North American projectile-point models. The principal uncertainties involve old excavation methods, stratigraphic mixing, and how widely the fishtail tradition should be interpreted as a migration marker.