A Prehistory of South America: Ancient Cultural Diversity on the Least Known Continent

4. Archaic Adaptations

94 Chapter 4: Archaic Adaptations For any given region of South America, aspects of Willey and Phillips’s definition are true, others are not. First, the initial colonizers of the Americas hunted various game—not just Pleistocene megafauna—and they also fished, collected shellfish, and used a variety of plants (see chapter 3). Watercraft and various stone-grinding tools were used by Paleoindians, technologies Willey and Phillips considered markers of the Archaic. Finally, Archaic practices occurred much earlier than Willey and Phillips suggested. Despite these objections, the term Archaic is useful shorthand for extraordinarily complex and varied human responses and innovations, such as different forms of settlements, new architectural patterns, and unprecedented forms of social practice—including emerging social distinctions and new funeral patterns among these hunting-and-gathering societies. The archaeologist Lewis Binford introduced a useful model for thinking about variations in the ways hunters and gatherers organize their activities, a model envisioned as an array along a continuum.3 At one extreme, entire groups move regularly to new areas with untapped resources—whether plants, game animals, or clams—and set up a temporary camp. Ranging out from this camp, people collect food resources and transport them back to the base camp, where the foods are prepared and consumed. This continues until locally available resources are depleted. At this point the entire group moves on, establishes a new base camp, and forages for foods—a process that is repeated. Since this foraging strategy requires the movement of the entire residential group, Binford called the practice “residential mobility.” At the other extreme, people may live relatively permanently in one place, but work parties travel to a location where a resource occurs in a specific season, for example, a grove of nut trees that can be harvested in the fall or a rocky river rapid where salmon swim through each spring.The work party goes to that place, acquires large quantities of the seasonally available food, and transports the food back to the base camp, where it can be stored and eaten by the entire band throughout the year. Binford named this strategic acquisition of resources “logistical mobility.” These different approaches to hunting and gathering leave behind different suites of archaeological sites. Under residential mobility, there are two essential classes of sites: places where people live (home bases) and places where resources are acquired (locations). With logistical mobility, a greater range of sites is created : home bases, locations, seasonal camps, storage areas, specialized work camps, and so on. With residential mobility, a group’s material culture tends to be relatively limited and portable. Under logistical mobility, a group’s repertoire of tools and artifacts tends to be more diverse and less portable. Finally, hunters and gatherers practicing residential mobility move camps more often than the more sedentary groups engaged in logistical mobility. Again, these are not absolute categories but instead polar extremes on a conceptual continuum, useful tools for thinking about variations in hunting-and-gathering strategies during the Archaic period in South America. Ironically, the definitional “looseness” of the term Archaic contributes to its utility, and an examination of Archaic societies requires us to be alert to the di- 95 Chapter 4: Archaic Adaptations verse accomplishments of South American peoples. The following archaeological case studies range across the continent and among very different hunting-andgathering strategies, a cross-section of some of the varied Archaic societies found in South America (figure 4.2). Figure 4.2 Locations of sites discussed in this chapter 96 Chapter 4: Archaic Adaptations The Las Vegas Culture (10,000–6,000 BP) One hundred and twenty kilometers (74.5 miles) west of the sprawling modern metropolis of Guayaquil, Ecuador, the Santa Elena Peninsula juts into the Pacific Ocean (figure 4.2). The Santa Elena Peninsula is arid and covered with dry thorn scrub vegetation. A four-month rainy season is followed by eight dry months, unlike most of Ecuador where rain can occur throughout the year. The Santa Elena region is watered by small drainages and short rivers that flow briefly during the rainy season but shrivel once the rains cease.This area was home to one of the oldest known Archaic societies in South America, the Las Vegas culture. Our knowledge of the Las Vegas culture results from more than four decades of sustained research by the archaeologist Karen Stothert, whose broad interests in Ecuador’s archaeology and ethnography are documented in...