Where the Land Meets the Sea: Preceramic Complexities on the North Coast of Peru

Summary

Interdisciplinary investigation of the large coastal mounds of Huaca Prieta and Paredones and their associated domestic settlements represent Preceramic human occupation as far back as ∼14000 cal BP. Research at these sites has documented a long Preceramic sequence from the activities of the first maritime/terrestrial foragers from the late Pleistocene to early Holocene to the construction of the mounds and the introduction and development of agriculture and monumentality from the middle to late Holocene. The community of sites in the study area emerges as innovative, complex and ritualized, with long distance contacts in several areas of the Central Andes. As yet this early community has no known antecedents in the wider Andean region. The social and ontological complexity of the sites is discussed and related to later societies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Landscapes of Change: Integrated Socio-ecological Histories in the Chicama Valley, Peru

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14729