INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, archaeologists have redefined the age and complexity of early fishing societies of the Pacific coast of South America, resulting in a paradigm shift for the entire New World driven primarily by Andean research. Like most breakthroughs, the new paradigm builds on deep roots in Andean archaeology, stretching back at least to the pioneering research of Junius Bird in northern Chile and northern Peru in the 1930s and 1940s, and continuing from the 1950s to the 1990s with the work of Frederic Engel, Edward Lan-ning, Michael Moseley, James B. Richardson III, Agustin Llagostera, Robert Benfer, and others (see details below). Some, in particular Richardson and Llagostera, astutely recognized the true antiquity of Andean maritime adaptations from scattered and inconclusive data, and Richardson (1981) figured out why the data were so scant (particular sectors of ancient shorelines were inundated as sea level rose with deglaciation from 21,000-5800 cal yr BP; see Chapter 6 in this volume). His work has informed all subsequent research on this issue.

The simultaneous publication in 1998 of two Terminal Pleistocene, Paleoindian-age fishing sites in southern Peru demonstrated conclusively that fishing is very nearly as old in the New World as the presence of humans (Sandweiss et al. 1998; Keefer et al. 1998). Why is it important whether or not some of the first settlers of the New World knew how to fish? In a seminal review of the anthropology of fishing, James Acheson (1981: 277) wrote, “fishing poses some very unusual constraints and problems. Marine adaptations are one of the most extreme achieved by man”. Among other factors that together contribute to the unique nature of such adaptations, Acheson noted human beings’ lack of physiological adaptation to aquatic environments, physical and social risk, non-transferability of most terrestrial hunting technology, high degree of faunal diversity, periodic and unpredictable stock failure, low visibility of prey, and the problems of common property resources

Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell.

Springer, New York, 2008

(Acheson 1981: 276-277). Given these distinct biological, technological, and social correlates of fishing, as archaeologists working in coastal zones, we should be concerned with tracking and analyzing maritime adaptations through time (see for instance Erlandson 2001). Nowhere is this more true than the coast of Peru and adjacent countries in western South America, one of the world’s most productive marine ecosystems.

In this chapter, I briefly review the history of study and synthesize the current state of knowledge concerning early maritime adaptations in this region, and point to some implications of these new data. I limit my discussion to southern Ecuador, Peru, and northern Chile as this is where the majority of early coastal sites have been excavated. Sites of similar antiquity are as yet unknown elsewhere in the New World, with the exception of Daisy Cave on one of the Channel Islands of southern California (e. g., Erlandson et al. 1996). With the past decade of research in the Andes, we can now confirm the Richardson hypothesis about bias in the archaeological record of early fishing and thus help guide the search for more early maritime sites throughout the western Americas.