Puelche

Puelche (Mapudungun: "pwelche", " people of the east") is the name that the Mapuche used to give the ethnic groups who inhabited the lands to the east of the Andes Mountains (in Argentine territory and some valleys of Chile) including the northern Tehuelches and Hets, these last ones were also known as the Pampas or Querandíes. By the end of the XVIII century the survivors of the plagues and epidemics that decimated these ethnic groups were aculturated in a process of Araucanization by Mapuche immigrants, so that in the XIX century the ethnically mixed group formed was basically Het and Tehuelche but araucanized linguistically and culturally.

Sources

* Thomas Falkner, Description of Patagonia and the adjoining parts of South America, Pugh, Hereford, 1774.
* [http://books.google.com/books?id=Sm4eAAAAMAAJ Juan Ignatius Molina, The Geographical, Natural, and Civil History of Chili, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, London, 1809]
* Bruce G. Trigger, Wilcomb E. Washburn , Richard E. W. Adams, [http://books.google.com/books?id=it0UYFYaLFUC The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol III South America Part 2. , Cambridge University Press, 2000.]