CONCLUSION

During the first millennium BC, most of northwestern South America became significantly more sedentary. Throughout the highlands and lowlands most populations lived in sedentary villages by the end of the millennium. Increasing population size and density probably, at least partly, played a causal role. As communities found themselves competing increasingly with neighboring communities for resources, they began to focus their economies more intensively on localized food production.

With respect to the sequences of change delineated for the lowland regions of southwest Ecuador, Pacific Panama and northern Colombia, it is difficult to identify a common cause for the development of sedentism. The precocious and dramatic change from the mobile society of Las Vegas to the sedentary villages of Valdivia raises the question of whether the latter evolved out of the former or whether Valdivia was an intrusion from elsewhere, e. g., the nearby Guayas Basin.

The dearth of early evidence of village sites in the river valleys of Panama contrasts with the evidence from Ecuador and frustrates any attempt at empirical generalization. The evidence from the San Jacinto region of Colombia fits well with a scenario in which competing communities of foragers were forced to intensify their reliance on fewer resources and circumscribe their territories more and more, a process that eventually led

To agriculturally intensive sedentary communities. In Ecuador and Panama cultivation of domesticated plants began a few thousand years before permanent settlements appeared on the scene. Pottery, often regarded as the hallmark of sedentism, was being produced in northern Colombia and Panama more than a thousand years before year-round settlements, whereas in Ecuador permanent villages and ceramics co-occur in the record.

Clearly, much more archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research is needed before we can understand the significance of the similarities and differences in the respective paths to sedentism.