Charles Barrington Brown (1926) was the first to report preceramic sites on the coast of South America. However, it was not until the 1930s and 40s that American Museum of Natural History archaeologist Junius Bird really put the coastal preceramic on the map, with excavations in northern Chile (Bird 1943) and then in northern Peru at the Late Preceramic Peruvian site of Huaca Prieta (Bird et al. 1985; see Figure 10.1 for the location of this and other sites mentioned in this chapter). Although in both areas Bird found evidence for intensive fishing, most attention focused on his characterization of Huaca Prieta’s inhabitants as America’s first farmers (Bird 1948).
During the 1950s, Frederic Engel began research on preceramic coastal archaeology in Peru. He, too, found evidence of marine resource utilization but chose to focus on other issues, in particular the use of the lomas (fog meadow) resource zone. Engel was the first to acquire radiocarbon dates from multiple coastal sites (e. g., Engel 1957, 1980).
Research into preceramic maritime adaptations began in earnest in the 1960s. On the central coast of Peru, at and around Ancon, Edward Lanning studied a series of preceramic sites and produced the first detailed sequence for the coastal preceramic epoch (Lanning 1963, 1967). Maritime adaptations played a role in his reconstruction of events: he found no significant use of marine resources before 5800 cal yr BP and an increasing importance of seafood thereafter. In his landmark text, Peru Before the Incas, Lanning (1967) used this sequence as a model for all of coastal Peru. Unfortunately, as Richardson (1981) pointed out fourteen years later, Lanning failed to take into account the possible effects of postglacial eustatic sea level rise on the preservation of archaeological sites. This phenomenon had been recognized long before the 1960s, and by that time the approximate chronology and magnitude were understood (for the current standard sea level curve see Fairbanks 1989). Because the continental shelf is relatively wide and shallow at Ancon, the shoreline there lay many kilometers to the west when people first arrived in the region about
13,000 cal yr BP. Consequently, most early maritime sites probably lay to the west of the modern shoreline, on the now-drowned coastal plain. The ocean only reached its modern position at about 6000 cal yr BP—the same time that Lanning first found evidence for marine resource use.
Figure 10.1. Map showing location of sites and places mentioned in the text. (Daniel Sandweiss)
Sites stand out on the desert coast of Peru and northern Chile. If Fanning had not found early maritime sites, then it was easy to think that none existed. Other archaeologists naturally followed Lanning’s lead. Working in the same region in the late 1960s, Michael Moseley (1968, 1975) excavated Late Preceramic (ca. 5700-4000 cal yr BP) sites near Ancon. Confirming Lanning’s observation that animal remains were predominately maritime, he placed these data in the broader context of the central coast Late Preceramic archaeological record. Noting that the first large coastal temples dated to this time and region, Moseley proposed the controversial “Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization”
Hypothesis—that seafood, not just agriculture, underwrote the first formation of Andean civilization.
While Moseley was digging on the central coast, Richardson (1969, 1973, 1978) was working on the far northern coast of Peru, near the oil port of Talara, where the continental shelf is extraordinarily narrow. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he found Middle and even Early Preceramic Period sites that contained abundant evidence of marine resource use, especially shells of edible mollusks. One of these shells, from the Amotape campsites, produced a radiocarbon date of about 12,200 cal yr BP (Richardson 1978). During the Late Preceramic Period and more recent epochs, the Talara region was a relative backwater compared to the central coast of Peru; in the 1970s there was no reason to believe that this was not true in the Early Preceramic Period. Why, then, would the earliest Talarenos take advantage of seafood while the innovative inhabitants of the central coast ignored this easy and abundant source of nutrition? It made no sense.
In 1981, Richardson published his answer to this question, as noted above: central coast-dwellers of the Early and Middle Preceramic Periods probably were using marine resources, but most sites containing evidence for this practice lay on distant shorelines now drowned by rising sea level. At issue is the preservation of whole sites and entire landscapes: where the continental shelf is narrow, as at Talara, the 60 m of sea level rise between
13.000 and 6000 cal yr BP (Early and Middle Preceramic Periods) caused relatively little horizontal displacement of the shoreline, while in areas of wider shelf such as the Ancon-Chillon area, the shoreline would have moved significant distances over this period and inundated many more sites.
As a test of this hypothesis, Richardson suggested that early maritime sites should be located on those parts of the coast—like Talara—where the shelf is narrow and the shoreline moved only a short horizontal distance as sea level rose. Appropriate areas of narrow shelf included the far northern Peruvian coast near Talara and the Peruvian coast from the Paracas Peninsula south through northern Chile. In the 1970s, Chilean archaeologist Agustin Llagostera (1977, 1979) excavated a shell midden site at La Chimba 13 (formerly called Quebrada de las Conchas) in northern Chile. His two original dates were almost
11.000 calendar years old. This site now fit into the emerging picture.
In 1983, Richardson and I began excavations at the large shell midden known as the Ring Site (Figure 10.2), in southern Peru not far north of the Chilean border (Sandweiss et al. 1989). There, we found a subsistence system in which all kinds of marine animals were exploited: fish, shellfish, sea urchins, sea mammals, and sea birds. There were almost no bones of land animals. The Ring Site people probably used plant foods, but no evidence survived. A shell from the bottom of the Ring Site yielded a date of 11,400 cal BP, but all the other dated materials, both shell and charcoal, had ages between about 9100 and 5850 calendar years ago.
Meanwhile, in southern Ecuador, a few hundred kilometers north of Talara, excavations by North American archaeologist Karen Stothert at the Las Vegas site had shown a mixed economy that included marine resources. Dates ranged from ca. 11,400-7500cal BP; a pre-Vegas occupation dated between about 13,000 and 11,400cal BP, but the scanty remains did not show what sort of food these people ate (Stothert 1985, 1988, 1992). More recently, analysis of microscopic plant remains (phytoliths) has shown that the early Las Vegas people cultivated cucurbits (squashes) (Piperno and Stothert 2003). At the same time, Claude Chauchat’s work at sites of the Paijan culture of northern Peru showed people with an inland adaptation who were in contact with the shoreline as far back as 12,250 years ago (Chauchat et al. 1992). The Paijan sites are on the inland side of the modern coastal plain, and the shoreline 12,000 years ago was many kilometers further west. The Paijan people must have had stations near the ocean to exploit marine
Figure 10.2. Profile of Pit C at the Ring Site, an Early to Middle Holocene shell midden near Ilo, Peru. (Daniel Sandweiss)
Resources, but because of rising sea level the only evidence we have are a few fish bones and shells carried to their interior camps (Wing 1992; see also Dillehay et al. 2003). We cannot know whether there were separate coastal and interior groups who traded products or whether Paijan groups moved back and forth between beachfront and foothills.
By the end of the 1980s, archaeologists had excavated numerous Middle Preceramic maritime sites dating between about 9000 and 5000 years ago along the Peruvian and Chilean coasts. No longer was there any doubt that South American maritime adaptations were far earlier than Lanning and others had believed in the 1960s and 1970s. Still, none of the well-dated maritime occupations approached the time of the first settlement of South America. They had nothing to say about migration routes and could be classified as a peripheral development by those who saw the transition from terrestrial hunting and gathering to farming as the crucial transformation of Andean civilization. The early dates from Amotape and the Ring Site could be dismissed—shell is a difficult material to date—and neither date was supported by similar results from the same site (e. g., Lynch 1991). Even the dates then available from La Chimba 13 in northern Chile post-dated 11,400 cal yr BP and therefore are later than the initial settlement of the coast.
Below, I review the best-dated and studied early maritime sites from Peru and northern Chile. As will be apparent, there is no longer any question about the antiquity of aquatic adaptations in the region, but we are just beginning to understand the nature of this early coastal settlement and much remains to be done.
World History
