Horizontality Revisited: Evidence for 3,000 Years of Prehistoric Biocultural Continuity of Fisherfolk at Huanchaco, North Coast of Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The importance and distinctiveness of Peruvian fisherfolk, or pescadores, and their complementary role in coastal valley economies feature prominently in numerous ethnohistoric accounts, while archaeological evidence indicates that large, permanent fishing communities existed for centuries before. What is unclear is the degree to which, if any, these communities remained biologically distinct from other contemporaneous inland agricultural communities. Here we present preliminary dentally derived biodistance results for recently excavated Salinar (400 BC - AD 100) and Viru (AD 100-550) era coastal skeletal populations from Huanchaco, Peru. Comparisons with other skeletal samples from the Moche Valley indicate that the coastal Salinar, Viru, and lower valley Moche era (AD 200 – 750/800) populations show long-standing continuity with one another beginning as early as the early Initial Period (1500 – 1200 BC), and that lower valley Salinar and Viru fishing residents were slightly distinct from contemporaneous middle Moche Valley Salinar and Viru agriculturalists from Cerro Oreja. These results suggest that, despite cultural similarities between middle and lower valley populations, a degree of breeding isolation and differential gene flow from the adjacent highlands existed between them. We consider the implications of these results.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25843