QUEBRADA JAGUAY

In 1970, as part of his program to explore the preceramic epoch of the Peruvian coast, Engel (1981) recorded a site on the banks of an ephemeral stream near Camana in southern Peru. As part of this work, Engel made a sketch map of the site and dated charcoal from one of his three test pits at the site, Quebrada Jaguay 280 (QJ-280). In the early 1990s, Peruvian archaeologist and former Engel assistant Bernardino Ojeda called my attention to this date (ca. 11,800 cal yr BP) and recalled that the site contained abundant remains of shells and fish, a fact that we confirmed from Engel’s open pits during a brief site visit in 1992 (Figure 10.3). In 1996, I began excavations at Quebrada Jaguay (Sandweiss et al. 1998, 1999) and continued with a second season in 1999. I also carried out a full cover survey in the area between Quebrada La Chira and the Camana River, from the shoreline inland to about 750masl. Working with a team of Peruvian, Canadian, and U. S. archaeologists and analysts, we determined that Quebrada Jaguay was a fishing site occupied between about 13,000 and 8300 cal yr BP, based on a suite of 41 charcoal dates (Sandweiss et al. 1998, in prep.). Distinctive assemblages and an additional 20 dates from sites recorded and tested during survey established the following local chronology (Sandweiss et al. 1998, 1999, in prep.):

Jaguay Phase, ca. 13,000-11,400 cal BP. Early Preceramic Period.

Machas Phase, ca. 10,600-8000 cal yr BP. Early Middle Preceramic Period.

Apparent hiatus, equivalent in time to the “archaeological silence” postulated for the Atacama region of northern Chile (Grosjean et al. 1997; Nunez et al. 2002).

Manos Phase, ca. 4000 cal yr BP. Late Preceramic Period.

Basal dates from the Jaguay Phase, found only at QJ-280, are as early as any well-established dates from anywhere on the Peruvian coast and may well represent the first settlement of the region. This phase clearly dates to the Terminal Pleistocene Epoch and is equivalent in age to the North America Paleoindian Period. During the Jaguay Phase, QJ-280 was a domestic center for fishermen who targeted drum fish (the corvina or sea bass family) and wedge clams (Sandweiss et al. 1998; McInnis 1999). These people built houses, apparently rectangular (Figure 10.4), and modified them frequently, perhaps when

Figure 10.3. Frederic Engel's 1970 Pit A at Quebrada Jaguay (site QJ-280), seen in 1992. (Daniel Sandweiss)

Returning after prolonged absences. Within the houses were hearths, food remains, and abundant lithic debitage but almost no finished tools. The vast majority of the lithics were local (Tanner 2001), but the inhabitants also brought obsidian from the highland Alca source some 165 km away in the adjacent highlands (Sandweiss et al. 1998; Burger et al. 1998). The Jaguay fishermen employed reeds, probably for building, used medicinal plants such as horsetail, and ate prickly pears (Sandweiss et al. 1998, 1999; A. Cano, personal communication; D. Piperno, personal communication). They may well have consumed other plants, but no evidence has survived. In short, the primary site function was domestic—shelter, food preparation and consumption, and tool making for use elsewhere.

Despite running basal dates on 17 of the more than 60 sites discovered during survey of the region, only QJ-280 falls in the Jaguay Phase. All the other sites are Machas or Manos Phase. Combined with the presence of highland obsidian and prickly pear cactus seeds (not likely to grow wild below 1,000 masl), the most parsimonious explanation for this pattern is that QJ-280 was a coastal base camp in a seasonal round that included other areas—certainly the adjacent highlands and possibly also the floor of the nearby Camana and Ocona rivers. Further work in the highlands near the Alca source may uncover contemporary sites that will help us assess this idea.

During the subsequent Machas Phase, sites spread across the landscape near Quebrada Jaguay, while exotic materials (obsidian, prickly pear) drop out and poorer grade lithics (sandstone from the quebrada bed adjacent to the site) become more frequent in the assemblage. These changes suggest that at the start of the Holocene (after 11,400 cal yr BP), the local population had settled in to the coastal landscape and no longer ranged into the highlands.

Figure 10.4. Postholes from a Terminal Pleistocene house at Quebrada Jaguay (site QJ'280), Sector II. 1999 excavation. Grid is 1 m. (Daniel Sandweiss)