Foraging behavior and landscape knowledge in the early sites of the central Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Early Human Dynamics in Arid and Mountain Environments of the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Can materials in the earliest archaeological sites of a region tell us where people came from, which environments and resources they were familiar with, and how much landscape knowledge they possessed? I will discuss evidence from terminal Pleistocene sites in the hyper-arid Pacific coastal desert and the high Andes mountains of western South America. Early transfers from many geologic obsidian sources along the Andes provide a temporal baseline for thorough knowledge of the topographically complex highlands. Our team has developed fine-grained provenance information for Quebrada Jaguay and Cuncaicha rockshelter, providing a clearer view of diverse foraging patterns and inter-zonal movements among quasi-contemporary early sites in distinct ecozones. The origins of these distinct patterns remain elusive and are not well explained by simple models positing colonization of the Andean highlands from the Pacific coast. Current evidence allows for multiple migration models for the peopling of western South America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Early Human Dynamics in Arid and Mountain Environments of the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51161