Argentina has 35 indigenous people groups (often referred to as Argentine Amerindians or Native Argentines) officially recognized by the national government. As of the , some 955,032 Argentines (2.38% of the country's population) self-identify as indigenous or first-generation descendants of indigenous peoples.
The most populous indigenous groups were the Aonikenk, Kolla, Qom, Wichí, Diaguita, Mocoví, Huarpe peoples, Mapuche and Guarani Many Argentines also identify as having at least one indigenous ancestor; a genetic study conducted by the University of Buenos Aires in 2011 showed that more than 56% of the 320 Argentines sampled were shown to have at least one indigenous ancestor in one parental lineage and around 11% had indigenous ancestors in both parental lineages.
Jujuy Province, in the Argentine Northwest, is home to the highest percentage of households (15%) with at least one indigenous resident or a direct descendant of an indigenous person; Chubut and Neuquén Provinces, in Patagonia, have upwards of 12%.
History
Pre-Columbian history
The earliest known evidence of indigenous peoples in Argentina is dated 11,000 BC and was discovered in what is now known as the Piedra Museo archaeological site in Santa Cruz Province. The Cueva de las Manos, also in Santa Cruz, is over 10,000 years old. Both are among the oldest evidence of indigenous culture in the Americas, and have, with a number of similarly ancient sites on other parts of the southern hemisphere, challenged the "Clovis First" hypothesis on the settlement of the Americas (the assumption, based on lacking evidence to the contrary, that the Clovis culture was the first in the Western Hemisphere).
Indigenous peoples after European invasion
By the year 1500, many different indigenous communities lived in what is now modern Argentina. They were not a unified group but many independent ones, with distinct languages, societies, and relations with each other. As a result, they did not face the arrival of the Spanish colonization as a single block and had varied reactions toward the Europeans. The Spanish people looked down on the indigenous population, considering them inferior to themselves. For this reason, they kept very little historical information about them.
In the 19th century major population movements altered the original Patagonian demography. Between 1820 and 1850 the original Aonikenk people were conquered and expelled from their territories by invading Mapuche (that called them Tehuelches) armies. By 1870 most of northern Patagonia and the south east Pampas were Araucanized. During the Generation of 1880, European immigration was strongly encouraged as a way of occupying an empty territory, configuring the national population and, through their colonizing effort, gradually incorporating the nation into the world market. These changes were perhaps best summarized by the anthropological metaphor which states that “Argentines descend from ships.” The strength of the immigration and its contribution to the Argentine ethnography is evident by observing that Argentina became the country in the world that received the second highest number of immigrants, with 6.6 million, second only to the United States with 27 million, and ahead of countries such as Canada, Brazil, Australia, etc.
The expansion of European immigrant communities and the railways westward into the Pampas and south into Patagonia was met with Malón raids by displaced tribes. This led to the Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s, which resulted in over 1,300 indigenous dead. Indigenous cultures in Argentina were consequently affected by a process of invisibilization, promoted by the government during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th.