Arqueologia  em   Conexão

ARCOX                                          Nº 8 - June, 2004

www.arqueologia.arq.br

 

	Problems and Issues in the Peopling of the Americas Tom Dillehay Vanderbilt University  - Department of Anthropology
Tom Dillehay

Paper presented at the 2001 Brazilian Archeology Society (SAB) Meeting held in Rio de Janeiro

Introductory Statement:
 

        In this study, I am not interested in considering the historical dimensions of the peopling of the Americas and particularly South America. Instead, I wish to discuss several conceptual and methodological issues relevant to the peopling process which I hope will be of interest to a broader group of scholars. Before, I turn to these issues, however, I will state briefly my position on the peopling process in the Americas.

        As I have stated in several recent publications, it is my belief that the first immigrants adapted to South America quickly, creating a mosaic of contemporary different types of hunters and gatherers (such as big-game hunters, general foragers, littoral foragers) immediately after they entered new territory. In my opinion, a key issue is not rapid blitzkrieg migration (sensu Martin and Haynes) but rapid social change--adaptation of technological, socioeconomic, and cognitive processes over several generations (Dillehay 2000). As the early archaeological record of South America suggests, this was not a single unitary process, but many. While hunter and gatherer groups were colonizing one new territory, others were probably just penetrating neighboring areas for the first time. All of these processes must have begun sometime before 15,000 b.p.

        More explicitly, the rapid efficient adaptation of regional Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene populations to diverse environments may partially explain why some forms of incipient socio-economic complexity appeared early in South America. For instance, cultigens appeared perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago at Guitarrero Cave in Peru, while pottery production was established by at least 6,000 b.p. in parts of Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador, mummification by 7,000 b.p. in northern Chile, monumental architecture by 5,000 b.p. in Ecuador and Peru, and so forth. What triggered these early cultural developments in diverse environments is not well understood. I suspect that it might relate to advanced hunter and gatherer societies intensifying broad-spectrum diets in lush, circumscribed areas such as low wetlands in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, in highly compacted ecotones along the western and eastern flanks of the Andes, and in the confluences of large rivers in the eastern lowlands from Venezuela, to Paraguay, Uruguay and northern Argentina. In each of these areass?e is growing archeological evidence to suggest that different social and historical processes were acting in Early Holocene times to form early food producing and more territorial, if not permanently settled, groups in some areas, especially in the Central Andes.

        Whether small founding populations were engaged in initial dispersion or colonization (meaning more territorial, see below), they surely had demographic requirements. That is, other people were a crucial resource that probably placed limits on how far away a group could venture from its nearest neighbor. Any small founding group needed to maintain networks of potential mates, social interaction, and exchange of information on foods and other resources. Such social ties would help to explain the general uniformity of a technology across vast areas of the continent, such as the similarities in the unifacial industries stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. I believe the most important factor determining the long-term and long-distance movement of founding populations across different landscapes was their ability to adapt their technologies and social organization to the exploitation of new food sources and yet maintain social ties with neighboring or splinter groups. Any constraints on this movement were likely to be greatest where resources were limited. In homogenous, relatively static environments such as the grasslands and coastal deserts of Peru and Chile or the arid savannas and grasslands of Brazil and Argentina, where resources were patchy in time and space, groups probably had little choice but to move more often. The lowland deciduous forests of the Andes, Brazil and Venezuela, which were more heterogeneous and richer in foods, may have supported many different economies, and groups may have stayed longer in some areas. Further, because people would have spent more time exploring these areas and getting to know the variety of resources available, these longer stays would have led to the beginnings of permanent settlement. Temperate and tropical forests, in particular, probably gave people many subsistence options and the opportunity to reside longer, but less incentive to specialize or concentrate on particular resources.

        I say all this because, archeologists are accustomed to proposing macro-scale explanatory models of artifact patterning in terms of regional adaptations to environmental conditions and fluctuating resource availability. Yet, this approach has never made it necessary for us to think about material variability in terms of interpersonal social dynamics nor to see interacting social agents as the explanatory culprits. Different opinions exist about the role of the environment in determining movements and lifeways. Many archaeologists are reductionists, however, believing that late Pleistocene people were strictly controlled by climatic change. Others, such as Luis Borrero, suggest that these early populations were not greatly affected by environmental changes--that early immigrants were used to adjusting quickly to new environments and could adapt to almost any change in almost any setting. And in some regions, for instance the steppes of northern Patagonia, there was no great change of the climate in the late Pleistocene, so it could have had at most a limited effect on people’s movements and adaptations. Still, local environment undeniably plays an important role in determining the kinds of foods and other resources people may exploit, and these local adaptations are in turn a key to people’s movements, both seasonal and not. Yet, contemporary models of technological and environmental change and population pressure have left little room for people and for their social dynamics and how they organized their functionally adaptive activities from site to site. Ties of extended cooperation, and later exchange alliances, probably helped diffuse knowledge of technologies and ideas and favored still more change and innovation as groups partitioned and settled into new areas.

        Now, after having said all this, I am interested in critically reviewing ways to improve our understanding and study of these events and processes from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. I also am interested in examining the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene periods from a different perspective; I want to consider how cultural developments of early complex societies in the northern Peruvian Andes, for example, were predicated on the cultural diversity and broad spectrum economies of earlier hunters and gatherers. Traditionally, archeologists have treated the Late Pleistocene period as a separate historical and cultural phenomenon, not paying much attention to the fact that this was the period that planted the initial seeds for the social and cultural foundations of later more complex societies.

1) Mobility and Peopling

        Movement of early hunter-gatherers is often seen as a uniform stage of development from rapid entry to colonization. Many archaeologists still apply a single model to all early people, generally involving small mobile groups carefully adapting their own numbers to the capacity of locally changing food sources, with rather fluid though important social relations beyond the immediate group. This does not make sense to me. Although much of the variations in the archaeological record can be explained by time depth, local adaptations and culture change, much is also a product of differences in human movements. Instead of just one pattern, I have argued that there are at least four patterns of human movement within an environment: initial entry, opportunistic dispersion, migration, and eventually settling in or colonization (Dillehay 1999). Each of these patterns has characteristic effects on the ways people organized their technology, economy, and social organization.

        Entry, the first human presence in an area, is probably followed by random but opportunistic dispersion and exploration in virgin territories, with no particular goal in mind. After people have gained some knowledge of regional environments, they may begin to migrate. This is a relatively permanent moving away from a geographical location to a known destination. The last stage is colonization, when a budding population, previously on the move, explores and eventually settles into a home territory for good.

        These movements probably were not the same for dispersing and colonizing populations of the twelfth or fifteenth millennium as they were for those of the eleventh millennium or the tenth. Nor were they the same across North and South America. Furthermore, these movements were not necessarily sequenced or uniform across a continent but probably occurred in a mosaic of simultaneous and occasionally overlapping stages. While some hunter-gatherer groups were dispersing, migrating, or colonizing in certain environments, others were making the first movement into virgin territories. Other parts of the continent remained unexplored.

        We don’t know how much overlap existed between these movements or whether the archaeological record truly reflects adaptive differences among distinct dispersing, migrating, or colonizing populations. It’s reasonable to spouse that different types of population movements must have been associated with different rates and different purposes, and have therefore produced different archaeological signatures. For instance, entry and dispersion probably produced more ephemeral archeological records. The technology would have been more generalized and the sites small, with smaller amounts of cultural debris and less internal patterning of material into specialized activity areas. This stage may be represented by the deeper levels in caves such as at Pachamachay, in the highlands of Peru, or Tres Arroyos in southern Patagonia, which contain only a few flakes and a firepit.

        Migration and colonization should be associated with more conspicuous records characterized by both generalized and specialized technologies and large sites with a high degree of internal artifact patterning, such as some Paijan sites, the Monte Verde site, and perhaps the pre-Las Vegas site. The archaeological record should ideally reflect a chronological sequence of entry to colonizing populations employing different types of adaptive mobility. Unfortunately, we presently do not have the hard evidence to identify and sequence these movements. Nonetheless, what the different records suggest about early people’s movements in different periods is important.

2) Social Organization and Later Complexity.

        As noted earlier, I am becoming more convinced that social organization and internal site structure are extremely important to our understanding of the early peopling process. We don’t know if people were organized in large or small bands. In fact, we discuss all late Pleistocene societies as if they were the same kinds of social groups when, in fact, it is likely that the social organization varied greatly from one environmental zone to another, for instance the arctic and the tropics, and from initial highly mobile and specialized hunters and gatherers to territorial generalized foragers. Perhaps this is most seen in the development of specialized hunting strategies and of logistical behavior during the last 10,000 years of the Ice Age. Both strategies required planning, foresight, assessment of risk and uncertainty, and a consensus among members of a social group. It may also imply the development of techniques of preserving or storing meat and other foods, which also would prestage important changes in human activity during the post-Ice Age.

        Under temperate climatic conditions in the Early Holocene, large hunter-gatherer bands operating collectively and sharing resources to reduce economic risk may not have been the most productive way to exploit diverse resources (sensu Boguchi 1999). Perhaps smaller, more flexible groups would have been more able to forage more efficiently under the new climatic conditions of the post-glacial period. In many parts of the globe, Boguchi (1999:151-52) believes that a “transition in human organizational behavior took place during this period, beginning with the automization of late Pleistocene foraging bands into smaller family-centered units and ending with autonomous co-residential family groups with stable foci of residence.” He calls these atomized units of late forager society “proto-households” to distinguish them from the more advanced households that developed with later agricultural societies. More specifically, Boguchi notes that:

“the most important consequence of a transition from large cooperative bands to autonomous proto-households is that the smaller protohouseholds could exercise initiative and resourcefulness and take risks. Clearly, the potential for failure exists as well, but the post-glacial environment may have offered so many new possibilities (and probably redundancies of resources) that for the first time the risk may have been relatively low or at least manageable. The need to share in order to mitigate risk may have suddenly diminished in a number of key parts of the world between 13,000 and 9,000 years ago....Local, autonomous proto-households freed of the sharing norms of late Pleistocene band societies also would have been free to experiment with new methods of plant and animal use. If sharing obligations were lessened or eliminated, a late forager proto-household for the first time could feel free to maximize its exploitation and to use it the way it saw fit for its own benefit. For instance, it might exchange it for a desirable commodity. Or they could have stored the excess food and given energy to non-food foraging activities. Given the resource rich habitats present at the end of the Pleistocene, it would have been possible for more groups to have become more territorially circumscribed and localized"
(Boguchi 1999:152)
 

        In my opinion, this is the kind of scenario that may help us explain the rise of later complex societies in some areas of South America where we know that large nomadic hunter-gatherer bands eventually settled down to establish productive food economies and dynamic social systems. Not known are the conditioning factors that brought about these changes in regional settings.

        On the north coast of Peru, during Paijan times dated between 10,800 and 9,000 b.p., it is likely that localization in rich, diversified, and compressed environments is a fundamental aspect of these changes. In this setting, localization was associated with the exploitation of small, highly productive and compressed micro-environments (i.e., Pacific littoral, arid coastal plains, river bottoms, vegetated hillslopes), all within a one to three hour walk of centrally located campsites. It is the appearance of increasingly localized and aggregated, but not necessarily larger, social systems in this kind of ecological setting that may have been the most critical aspect of the development of risk reduction, exploitation of resource rich habitats, excess food and energy, and new social structures, all of which helped to plant the seeds of early civilization.

        The archaeological evidence for a proto-Archaic economy is weak in some areas. Only in the past twenty years we have come to realize how widespread this type of economy was in Pleistocene South America. This is probably a result of better recovery techniques (i.e., flotation studies) to find new foods which have opened archaeologists’ minds to the idea that not all early people were big-game hunters. Examples of “new” foods are the thousands of snails recovered from Paijan sites; the variety of seeds, nuts, soft leafy plants, tubers and seaweeds recovered from residential floors at Monte Verde; and the abundant remains of palm nuts and other plant types found at caves in Brazil dating between 11,500 and 10,000 B.P. Despite these new foods, other groups developed economic practices that relied on a specific species, for instance hunting high quantities of camelids (guanaco) or a few other species. These differences may have come from partly conscious cultural decisions.

        I discuss the slides and early social aggregation and beginnings of complexity in Paijan culture on north coast of Peru.

3) Several Issues Related to Internal Site Structure and Artifact Analyses:

    a) Although processual archeology has long been concerned with behavioral and functional norms, it is surprising that there has been so little explicit concern with comparative studies of artifact variability at the site level and at the intersite site level in circumscribed territories. There has been little concern for these matters in late Pleistocene period and early Holocene periods because so many sites are caves and rockshelters that don’t present much internal site structure.

Discuss and show slides.
 

        It seems to me that if we want to systematically integrate our knowledge of different sites across time and across space and to study internal site structure, we must pay more attention to analysis and to site formation processes and activity areas. We see in Europe during the Neanderthal and Magdalenian periods that the organization of living space at sites reflects an important step in human social behavior. Once space is demarcated in some way it ceases to be completely communal, even if the general ethos of the society is one of sharing. But the need to share in harsh environments versus more temperate productive environments surely fostered different settlement patterns and different communal patterns. As several archeologists have pointed out before, at many sites the hearth became a focus of human activity. In the late Pleistocene, as Binford has noted, hearths became part of larger activity areas, including specific locations.

    b) If we are to understand and relate the distinct types of mobility discussed earlier (dispersion, migration, and colonization), it seems that variation has to be a center piece of regional projects and this requires measurement and definition of artifact attributes within different contexts. We also need to examine very closely what we are measuring and observing in the early archeological record. An important part of our work must relate to the units of analyses we are employing to study the past and how they are constructed. Are we measuring attributes, artifacts, location, cultural stages, time periods, geographic groupings, and socio-economic groupings? And what it is we are measuring to study the early human social unit, for instance? Here is where burial and genetic data may become even more important indicators of early processes.

        Most archeological studies describe central tendencies rather than variances. For instance, any aberration in the early record of North America is usually seen as a disturbed context or as a threat to the Clovis-first model and thus not taken very seriously. Consequently, many existing sites and units of analysis are largely inadequate for studying developmental or evolutionary descriptions. Thus far, most specialists have created units at scales of the attribute or artifact class, and the population, such as the Clovis point. We need to create units that appropriately incorporate the dimension of time into the description of variation and the modeling of change.

    c) I also think we need to be precise in our identification of certain kinds of artifacts and artifact assemblages and what they can and can not tell us about the past. Most projectile points, for instance, demonstrate historical significance and exhibit a narrow range of technological and morphological variation that make them valuable analytical units. Yet, microscale variability and to inter-site organization in open air sites. In the past several years, archeologists have given much more time to detailed mapping of the internal aspects of sites, to quantitative when it comes to constructing the culture and the social organization, they become more limited.

    d) Wandsnider and others has distinguished between concepts of tempo of locale use and spatial structure of material remains across several related sites and within sites resulting from occupational events. We need to demonstrate that tempos of place use and reoccupation will necessarily result in distinctive spatial distributions. When archeologically documented, this spatial structure may tell us something about the tempo in which an area has been occupied. Although the literature on the subject is not well developed, Brooks and Yellen have distinguished between reuse, redundant place use that is spatially congruent with previously established facilities, and reoccupation, repeated place use without spatial redundancy.

        I discuss implications of reuse, reoccupation and use tempo for local dispersion and colonization and for types of archeological records observed on regional and local levels

(Brief Conclusions and Suggestions)

Conclusion:

        This brief paper has attempted as much to point out some of the limitations of our thoughts as to suggest different avenues of research on migration and colonization in South America. Although not a primary theme here, little attention has been given to the concrete steps we need to take toward more profitable future research. It thus seems fitting that this paper should end in emphasizing, not the inferences to which the current evidence seems to point, but rather ways to improve that evidence. One way to improve it is to enlarge and fill out the archaeological data base in traditional terms. The relatively few sites and assemblages mentioned in this paper, and fewer still which are fully published, are an obvious handicap. Second, dating methods need to be more widely applied if we are to identify regional trends and processes of migration and colonization with greater precision. Third, systematic attention must be applied to faunal, floral, settlement, and other data, which in turn must be integrated with other data sets in order to study more closely the changing relationships between independent and dependent variables. And fourth, specialists need to model their data and interpretations more in terms of process-dependent and context-dependent culture change. in order to test the kinds of relationships discussed above, both single and multi-component sites require investigation for the purpose of identifying the dynamics of big and little culture traditions. And finally, relatively new methods that have been successfully applied elsewhere to relate artifactual variation to the cultures producing it should be brought to bear on the problems discussed here. Much of this suggested research could be done with existing collections, which unfortunately become slower and more expensive as they become more methodical and informative.

   
Bibliography:

G. Ardila and G. Politis, “Nuevos datos para un viejo problema: Investigación y discusión en torno del poblamiento de América del Sur”, Revista del Museo del Oro, 1989, 23:3-45. Bogotá. Colombia.

J. Briceño Rosario, “La Tradición de Puntas de Proyectil ‘Cola de Pescado’ en Quebrada Santa María, y el Problema del Poblamiento Temprano en los Andes Centrales”, Revista Arqueológica “SIAN”, 19977?6. Trujillo. Perú.

A.L. Bryan, “ Paleoenvironments and cultural diversity in Late Pleistocene South America”, Quaternary Research, 1973, 3:237-256.

C. Chauchat, “The Paijan Complex, Pampa de Cupisnique, Perú”, Nawpa Pacha, 1975, 17:143-146. Perú.

C. Chauchat, J. Briceno y C. Galvez, Sitios Arqueológicos de la Zona de Cupisnique y Margen Derecha del Valle de Chicama. (Instituto Nacional de Cultura La Libertad-Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, Lima, Perú, 1998).

C. M. Clapperton, M. Hall, P. Mothes, M. Hole, J. W. Still, K. F. Helmens, P. Kuhry and A. M. Gemmell, “A Younger Dryas Icecap in the Equatorial Andes”, Quaternary Research, 1997, 47:13-28.

T. D. Dillehay. The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory. Basic Books. ( New
York, 2000).

T. D. Dillehay, G. Ardila, G. Politis and M. C. Beltrão. “Earliest Hunters and Gatherers of
South America.” Journal of World Prehistory, 1992, 6:145-204

T. D. Dillehay, J. Rossen, and P. Netherly, “The Nanchoc Tradition: The Begginings of Andean Civilization”, American Scientist, 1997, 85:46-55.

T.D. Dillehay, P. Netherly, y J. Rossen. Late Pleistocene and early Holocene Social and Economic Changes on the North Coast of Peru. Ponencia presentada en la Sociedad de Arqueologia Americna realizada en New Orleans, 2001.

B. Fagan, The Great Journey : the Peopling of Ancient America. (Thames and Hudson, New York, 1989).

E. Lanning, “Pleistocene Man in South America”, World Archaeology, 1970, 2:90-111.

Lavallee, D. The First South Americans. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2000.

M.A. Malpass, “ The Paijan Occupations of the Casma Valley, Perú”, In D. Sandweiss, ed., Investigations of Andean Past, pp. 1-20. (Cornell Latin American Studies Program, Ithaca, New York, 1983).

D. Meltzer. Search for the First Americans. (St. Remy Press, New York, 1993).

J.H. Mercer, “Chilean glacial chronology 20,000 to 11,000 carbon-14 years ago”, Science, 1972, 176:1118-1120.

M.E. Moseley, The Incas and their Ancestors. (Thames and Hudson, London, 1992).

J. Ossa, “Paijan in Early Andean prehistory: The Moche Valley, North Coast of Perú”, In A. L. Bryan, ed., Early Man in America from a Circum-Pacific Perspective, pp. 290-295. (Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1978).

J. Ossa and M. Moseley, “La Cumbre: A preliminary report on research into the early lithic occupation of the Moche Valley, Peru”, Nawpa Pacha, 1972, pp. 1-16. Perú.

A. Oyuela-Caycedo, “Rock versus clay: Pottery technology in San Jacinto-I, Colombia”, In W. Barnett and J. W. Hoopes, eds., The Emergence of Pottery: Technology and Innovation in Early Societies, pp. 132-144. (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington D.C., 1995).

D. Pearsall, “Domestication and agriculture in the New World Tropics”, In D. Price and B. Gebauer, eds., Last Hunters, First Farmers, pp. 157-192. (School of American Research, Santa Fe, 1995).

G. Politis. “Fishtail projectile points in the southern cone of South America”, In R. Bonnischen and K. Turnmire, eds., Clovis: Origins and Adaptations, pp. 287-302. (Center for the Study of the First Americans, Corvallis, 1991).

J. Quilter, “Late preceramic Perú”, Journal of World Prehistory, 1991, 5(4):387-435

J. B. Richardson III, ?9CEarly Man on the Peruvian North Coast, Early Maritime Exploitation and the Pleistocene and Holocene Environment”, In A. L. Bryan, ed., Early Man in America from a Circum-Pacific Perspective, pp. 274-289. (Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1978).

J. Rosqvist, “Proglacial lacustrine sediments from El Altar, Ecuador: evidence for late-Holocene climatic change”, The Holocene, 1995, 5(7):111-117.

L. G. Thompson, E. Mosley-Thompson, M. E. Davis, P-N Lin, K. A. Henderson, J. Cole-Dai, J. F. Bolzan, K-b Liu, “Late Glacial Stage and Holocene Tropical Ice Core Records from Huascaran, Perú”, Science, 1995, 269:46-48.
 

Portal de Arqueologia em Conexão.