Beyond Coarse Correlations: Climate, Chronology, and Culture in Chicama, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent interest in applying archaeological datasets to climate change analyses have identified issues of data interoperability and challenges aligning cultural and climatic chronologies. Archaeology on Peru’s north coast has significant potential to address paleoclimate and future climate change adaptation. Despite this potential, reliance on imprecisely dated cultural phases limits our ability to correlate climatic and cultural events. In part, this is a methodological issue: conventional excavation and survey approaches are not typically designed to broadly sample contexts for chronological purposes.

We present an approach for improving absolute cultural chronologies, developed for contexts in Peru’s Chicama Valley. We capitalize on the unfortunate damage to archaeological sites by illicit looting and development to rapidly document, sample, and radiometrically date exposed contexts with minimal archaeological intervention. We use drone photogrammetry, RTK GNSS mapping, conventional inventories of ceramics, adobe brick and profile documentation techniques, sample flotation, and Bayesian 14C analysis to establish a high-precision absolute chronology for these exposures and associated artifacts. With this approach, we can strategically gap-fill existing chronologies and improve the precision of cultural chronologies with minimal disturbance to extant archaeological contexts. This strategy further allows us to better align absolute cultural and climatic chronologies to address issues beyond correlation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37430.0