Coastal Peru was Rest Stop for Early Americans, Archaeologists Say

A Vanderbilt University-led team of archaeologists has made a remarkable discovery in Peru: thousands of 15,000- to 10,000-year-old artifacts, including stone tools, elaborate hand-woven baskets and the remains of maritime and terrestrial foods, from two mound sites in the Chicama Valley on the north coast of Peru reveal that early humans in the region were a lot more advanced than originally thought and had very complex social networks.

Huaca Prieta mound situated on the Sangamon Terrace: buried terrace surface with Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene cultural deposits is indicated by dotted line below the mound; arrows show location of individual units excavated from the top of the mound down through and to the buried cultural deposits in the terrace. Scale shown by humans standing on the mounds. Image credit: Tom D. Dillehay, Vanderbilt University / Science Advances, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1602778.

Huaca Prieta mound situated on the Sangamon Terrace: buried terrace surface with Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene cultural deposits is indicated by dotted line below the mound; arrows show location of individual units excavated from the top of the mound down through and to the buried cultural deposits in the terrace. Scale shown by humans standing on the mounds. Image credit: Tom D. Dillehay, Vanderbilt University / Science Advances, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1602778.

The excavated sites are sealed and covered by two ritual mounds called Huaca Prieta and Paredones and are located on the Sangamon Terrace, a raised flat, natural platform of land about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long.

The mounds are about 7,500 years old, but the team found that an earlier wave of humans had made the terrace their home long before the mound-builders did, arriving at least 15,000 years ago and occupying the area until about 9,000 years ago.

This fits with the timeline of other sites being discovered along the Pacific coast of both North and South America, reinforcing the theory that one of the ways humans migrated into the Americas was to follow the coast.

The finds from Huaca Prieta and Paredones include stone tools, remains of plants and marine animals including fish and sea lions.

“The artifacts retrieved from Huaca Prieta include food remains, stone tools and other cultural features such as ornate baskets and textiles, which really raise questions about the pace of the development of early humans in that region and their level of knowledge and the technology they used to exploit resources from both the land and the sea,” said co-author Dr. James Adovasio, an archeologist with Florida Atlantic University.

Stone tools dated between 15,000 and 12,000 years before present (BP): lithics representative of the 15,000-13,500 years BP period (a-b) and of the 13,500-11,500 years BP period (c-g). Image credit: Tom D. Dillehay, Vanderbilt University.

Stone tools dated between 15,000 and 12,000 years before present (BP): lithics representative of the 15,000-13,500 years BP period (a-b) and of the 13,500-11,500 years BP period (c-g). Image credit: Tom D. Dillehay, Vanderbilt University.

The archaeologists also analyzed the extensive collection of basket remnants retrieved from the Huaca Prieta site, which were made from diverse materials including a local reed that is still used today by modern basket makers.

More elaborate baskets included segments made from domesticated cotton and were colored using some of the oldest dyes known in the New World.

“To make these complicated textiles and baskets indicates that there was a standardized or organized manufacturing process in place and that all of these artifacts were much fancier than they needed to be for that time period,” Dr. Adovasio said.

“It may be that we’ve captured, archeologically, an instance where people just did not move quickly down the coastline but rather settled in for a good long while,” said lead author Prof. Tom Dillehay, from Vanderbilt University.

Today the Sangamon Terrace sits right on the shoreline, but during the Ice Age, before the glaciers melted, the sea level was much lower and the shore further away — about 9 miles (15 km) to the west.

The team used NOAA water depth data and historic sea level data to reconstruct the ancient shoreline.

“We wanted to see how far Huaca Prieta was from the shore 10,000 to 15,000 years ago to see if it made sense for these people to be using marine resources,” said co-author Prof. Steven Goodbred, also form Vanderbilt University.

“And it did. Huaca Prieta was located just at the point where the ancient shoreline was closest to the mountains, which would have been connected by a verdant river valley that led to shallow wetlands and coastal lagoons where people could hunt and fish.”

Left: 10,500-year old fragment of a mat woven from rush stalks. Right: basket remnants retrieved from the Huaca Prieta site were made from diverse materials including a local reed that is still used today by modern basket makers. Image credit: Tom Dillehay, Vanderbilt University / Florida Atlantic University.

Left: 10,500-year old fragment of a mat woven from rush stalks. Right: basket remnants retrieved from the Huaca Prieta site were made from diverse materials including a local reed that is still used today by modern basket makers. Image credit: Tom Dillehay, Vanderbilt University / Florida Atlantic University.

Thanks to the region’s arid climate, organic remains were especially well preserved.

The archaeologists discovered that these ancient people had a rich, varied diet of marine life from the shoreline and wetlands to the west and wild plants native to the foothills to the east.

There were also a few remains of deer and birds from the mountain forests, also to the east, but these appear to have been eaten less frequently.

No evidence was found of fishhooks, harpoons or bifacial stone tools, so they were unlikely to have been a seafaring people.

“Our examination of more than 350,000 shell fragments and shell artifacts did not produce any signs of harpoon and fishhook production,” the authors said.

“There is also no evidence of a boat or raft technology for the period under discussion.”

The ancient people likely trapped or clubbed marine animals in the wetlands, where they would have washed in with the tide or a storm surge and become stranded.

They also grew crops like chili pepper, squash, avocado, beans and some form of a medicinal plant.

The presence of food from both environments suggests the people who lived there traveled back and forth in both directions to hunt and gather and bring the food back home to eat.

Once they had collected their ingredients, they would use simple, unifacial stone tools, usually made to order on the spot, to scrape away scales and cut meat and plants.

It was the presence of the distant plants, as well as the presence of a few stone tools made from non-local materials, that tipped the researchers off to the possibility that the campsites on the Sangamon Terrace endured longer than usual.

“Our data is indicating that these people pretty intimately knew the different environments of the area, and that takes time, experimentation and knowledge,” Prof. Dillehay said.

“The north coast of Peru is incredibly rich in marine life, which may have made it an appealing place to linger.”

“What’s remarkable is that the lifestyle we describe still exists today,” he said.

“There are still fisherfolk who work the seashore and wetlands, still using very similar technologies like knocking off a stone flake from a cobble to scrape the scales off fish. So there’s a continuity of this very rustic coastal adaptation.”

“Though far too much time has passed to consider them descendants of those early inhabitants or even describe them as sharing a culture, the persistence of these survival strategies over so many millennia offers a unique window into humanity’s very distant past,” Dr. Dillehay concluded.

The research is reported in the May 24 issue of the journal Science Advances.

_____

Tom D. Dillehay et al. 2017. Simple technologies and diverse food strategies of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene at Huaca Prieta, Coastal Peru. Science Advances 3 (5): e1602778; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1602778

About Skype

Check Also

, Prehistoric New Guineans, #Bizwhiznetwork.com Innovation ΛI

Prehistoric New Guineans

As early as 18,000 years ago, early foragers in the montane rainforests of New Guinea …

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Bizwhiznetwork Consultation