Peru before Pizarro

Extract

Two notable events in Peruvian archaeology, which are of wide general interest, have recently taken place. One was the discovery of pre-ceramic horizons on the Peruvian coast, and the other was a conference held in New York in July 1947, at which several acknowledged experts felt that the time had come to explain the known facts in terms of a general scheme of development, and attempted to do so independently with strikingly similar results. The papers read at the conference on this and other matters have recently been published, and they include the fullest summary so far available of the preceramic discoveries.

Mr Junius Bird has long been known for his work on the prehistory of unpromising and difficult regions in South America. He has studied successions in Tierra del Fuego and on the southern end of the Chilean mainland, which contain stone and bone artifacts but no pottery, from which he estimates, by such methods as the rate of rise of land and of accumulation of deposits, that human occupation began about 5000 years ago, i.e. at the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C.. His methods of course involve some very large assumptions, but the results are reasonable when considered in relation to the usual estimate of about 10,000 years for Folsom man. He has also discovered non-pottery and non-agricultural horizons in the middens of the north part of the coast of Chile, but these may not be of any great age and their poverty may be due to the inhospitable nature of the region.