In the eastern part of this area near the Coppename River (Figure 17.1), in the borderlands between Hertenrits and Kwatta territory is the Peruvia site, situated on a wide chenier near large clusters of raised fields. This site is not a mound. Still, it deserves to be discussed in relation to the mounds of the Hertenrits culture, because of its interaction with these sites.
The Peruvia site has a thick top layer of terra preta on the yellow sand of the chenier, marking long-standing human occupation. The color of Peruvia pottery is orange to greyish-brown. In this respect it deviates from the pottery of the Hertenrits sites which, on average, is more grey. Kwatta pottery is orange, ranging from light brownish-orange to bright orange. Peruvia fits somewhere in between these two groups.
The same is true for the decorations: the incisions and round indentations and the way they were applied to walls and rims are typical of Hertenrits. But the double rows of round impressions (Versteeg 1985: fig. 38a-c) are characteristic of Kwatta culture, as are the painted sherds and the simple faces on the inside of bowls (Versteeg 1985: fig. 40 h). The remaining traits are characteristic of Hertenrits rather than of Kwatta, specifically of Early Hertenrits, which would fit in with the earliest date of ca. AD 650 for the Peruvia
Site. The raised fields north and south of the village also link Peruvia to the other Hertenrits sites. Such fields have not been found up to now in Kwatta sites.
Peruvia is an Early Hertenrits site situated just inside Hertenrits territory. Peruvia pottery has strong Kwatta influences. It is a typical frontier village that received influences from both cultural centers: from Hertenrits in western Suriname and from the Kwatta Tingiholo site of central Suriname.
I have one more comment on the dating of Peruvia: one result suggests that human occupation continued into Late Hertenrits times, i. e., after AD 1000. It is possible that the site actually was inhabited that long, but there are no typically Late Hertenrits materials, comparable to that of the topmost layer at Hertenrits and Prins Bernhard Polder. The peripheral location of the settlement may account for this.
Among the other finds at the Peruvia site is a unique burial. The skeleton of a 9- to 10-year old boy was found distributed over two burial urns during the 1979 excavations.
One of the urns had a complete inverted vessel as a lid. The urn without a lid contained the skull. The same urn also contained burnt bone of an individual who died between the ages of 40 and 70 years.
The Hertenrits culture seems to have had very complicated burial practices. The primary and secondary burials in the Hertenrits site and the burial that combines the primary and secondary processes (Boomert 1980:90) suggest the same.
The stone material at Peruvia is more varied than that at either Hertenrits or Wage-ningen-1. Much untouched or half-worked stone suggests that at Peruvia stone was either worked or traded in different stages of production. No natural stone outcrops are found in the coastal plain in which Peruvia is situated. All stone material is therefore imported from the interior. In this respect Peruvia is comparable to Kwatta Tingiholo in central Suriname (Versteeg 2003: 155-157). Or perhaps the stone was traded to Peruvia from Kwatta Tingi-holo as a result of the close trade relationships between Kwatta and Peruvia.
World History
