  The chemical abundances of a galaxy's metal-poor stellar population can be
used to investigate the earliest stages of its formation and chemical
evolution. The Magellanic Clouds are the most massive of the Milky Way's
satellite galaxies and are thought to have evolved in isolation until their
recent accretion by the Milky Way. Unlike the Milky Way's less massive
satellites, little is know about the Magellanic Clouds' metal-poor stars. We
have used the mid-infrared metal-poor star selection of Schlaufman & Casey
(2014) and archival data to target nine LMC and four SMC giants for
high-resolution Magellan/MIKE spectroscopy. These nine LMC giants with
$-2.4\lesssim[\text{Fe/H}]\lesssim-1.5$ and four SMC giants with
$-2.6\lesssim[\text{Fe/H}]\lesssim-2.0$ are the most metal-poor stars in the
Magellanic Clouds yet subject to a comprehensive abundance analysis. While we
find that at constant metallicity these stars are similar to Milky Way stars in
their $\alpha$, light, and iron-peak elemental abundances, both the LMC and SMC
are enhanced relative to the Milky Way in the $r$-process element europium.
These abundance offsets are highly significant, equivalent to $3.9\sigma$ for
the LMC, $2.7\sigma$ for the SMC, and $5.0\sigma$ for the complete Magellanic
Cloud sample. We propose that the $r$-process enhancement of the Magellanic
Clouds' metal-poor stellar population is a result of the Magellanic Clouds'
isolated chemical evolution and long history of accretion from the cosmic web
combined with $r$-process nucleosynthesis on a timescale longer than the
core-collapse supernova timescale but shorter than or comparable to the
thermonuclear (i.e., Type Ia) supernova timescale.
