ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the ways in which body painting was involved in the creation of social identities among the Selknam and Ymana populations of Tierra del Fuego, which has been inhabited by hunter-gatherer groups since at least 11,800 years b. p. Social identity is conceived in the chapter as a set of cultural perceptible features produced by a group of people that serves to define the group as distinctive. In the past, ethnography has been used as an empirical basis from which direct analogies with the archaeological record were constructed. The Fuegian ethnographic record both textual and visual is used as a complementary source of data that is spatially and temporally parallel to the recent archaeological record of Tierra del Fuego. The Selknam mythology was very rich and complex and included the belief in numerous spirits and characters that shaped the Selknam world during the time of their ancestors.
