Space perception and geographic description between them river Bio-bio and Tolten

Abstract

The geographic location of the original towns has been reason for special attention on the part of anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and etnohistorians. The efforts to determinate the occupied spaces were developed during century XX initially. In the case of mapuches the precursors were Ricardo Latcham and Tomás Guevara who through their investigations delimited the spaces of this culture. The chronicles and colonial documents allow forming only an ample and confused idea about the precise location of the mapuches' territories. This is explained by the absence of cartography in century XVI. On the other hand, at the present time the descriptions of those spaces don't agree due to the transformations caused by the climatic and environmental factors. So the need to identify that geographic space and to represent it finally appears. In this article we will try to identify the characteristics of those territories comparing the colonial stories with the recent geographic studies.