Summary

Villages do not require pottery or intensive plant production to grow and prosper. Paloma fishermen cultivated some plants. Villages more focused on farming came later, as represented by Valdivian sites such as Real Alto in Ecuador. Valdivia culture persisted over a long time, whereas in central Perif dramatic changes in settlement pattern and monumentality of structures followed abandonment of the earliest fishing villages.

Early Ecuadorian villages were larger than early Peruvian ones. The Valdivian sites are associated with larger numbers of species of domesticated plants and represent more densely settled populations, and people were less healthy as adults than were the Paloman fishermen.

Findings from the Paloma Project support the celebrated hypothesis by Michael Moseley that maritime resources were the critical ones in the development of Andean civilization, at least at the level of the first permanent villages. The larger Valdivia sites support Moseley’s more recent reformulation of the hypothesis, that fishing and farming resources formed necessary parts of a dual economy. In Peril, the large, complex monumental sites that followed Paloma date to earlier times than equivalent ones in Ecuador. Thus, early villages in Ecuador and Peri! suggest two paths that permitted populations to grow from villages to towns. Present evidence favors the hypothesis that resources from the sea and the land were necessary for the precocious construction, between 5000 and 4000 BP, of large, monumental Peruvian sites such as Chupacigarro/Carhl, Aspero, and El Paraiso. Adjustment to the dryer and more variable climate encountered at the ending of the GCO may have been the stimulus for important changes in subsistence practices. Cotton, essential for construction of large nets, was domesticated after the abandonment of fog oasis sites and resettlement in river valleys. Increased farming of agricultural food products may also have been simultaneously pursued. With large cotton nets, yields of fish could have been dramatically increased over a wider variety of beach habitats. Subsistence level fishing at Paloma was replaced by fishing that produced the large surpluses necessary to tide agriculturalists and fishermen over during ENSO years when all their food crops could be lost to flood or drought and marine foods would also be scarce.