Sanaviron

The Sanavirones, also called Salavinones, were an Indigenous people of central Argentina whose ancestors split from the Tonokote around Salavina in Santiago del Estero. In the fifteenth century, under pressure of growing numbers and prolonged drought, they spread southwest into the Sierras of Córdoba, taking land from the Comechingones.

They farmed with Andean techniques, hunted and fished, and lived in large communal huts of branches and grass. Men fought with the macana, a heavy wooden club. Though never conquered by the Inca, they took in many Quechua words after 1480 through captives held among them.

Spaniards called them Yugitas in the sixteenth century; mixing with settlers began early, and by the eighteenth century the Sanavirones had ceased to exist as a separate people. Their language, once a common tongue in colonial administration, survives only in six or seven recorded words.