Western North America
- Major Events:
- Mesolithic
- Neolithic
- Paleolithic Period
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In western North America, similar developments were under way during this same period. It appears that the more arid regions of the basin–range country were largely depopulated during the Altithermal dry period (from about 5600 to 2500 bce) and that in surrounding regions diversification and specialization took place. In the drainages of the major rivers of the northwest, such as the Columbia and the Fraser, the annual abundance of salmon was the basis of a cultural adjustment as early as 7000 bce. Implements of this horizon are similar to those found earlier in the Desert culture, with projectile points, the most diagnostic artifact types, tending to be long and leaf-shaped or slightly stemmed and with a few notched forms also present. Following the Altithermal drought, a broad horizon characterized by the use of indented-based points with serrate-edged blades (generally termed “Pinto-like,” after the type locality in the Pinto Basin of California) is found over much of the southern portion of western North America. In at least one of the phases representing this horizon, the Chiricahua of southern Arizona and New Mexico, it appears that corn cultivation was practiced. The site of Bat Cave in western New Mexico has produced specimens of an early type of corn that is also known from the Flacco phase in Tamaulipas at 2000 bce but that is here in association with a Chiricahua assemblage from which materials have been dated at about 1000 bce.
South and Middle America
By 2500 bce, techniques of cultivation had also reached the northern coast of Peru, where, at such sites as Huaca Prieta at the mouth of the Chicama Valley, there was a mixed dependence upon marine foods such as sea urchins, mollusks, and fish; upon wild plants, mostly tubers and roots; and upon cultivated plants, including beans, peppers, and a different genus of squash than that cultivated in the early horizons in Tamaulipas. Gourds and cotton were also grown, the gourds for use as containers and net floats, the cotton for twined fabric and cordage. The use of stone at Huaca Prieta is interesting in its simplicity. Flakes and shattered pebbles compose the entire chipped-stone industry, while pecked and ground-stone artifacts are chiefly perforated net sinkers. In the upper levels of the site are architectural remains consisting of one- or two-room, small cobble-walled subterranean houses. The absence of ceramics at the Huaca Prieta site poses a number of interesting problems. From the Valdivia site in Ecuador, several hundred miles to the north, radiocarbon samples indicate that ceramics may have been present there as early as 2500 bce, and another date from Panama indicates that the ceramics of the Monagrillo phase were manufactured by about 2000 bce. Present knowledge of the northern coast of Peru does not reveal ceramics before about 1200 bce, indicating an isolation of this area from cultural developments to the north. With ceramics, corn and other indications of Middle-American influence appear in Peru.
Village farming and towns
The appearance of village farming in the upper levels at Huaca Prieta and in the immediately succeeding Guañape phase in surrounding areas is roughly contemporaneous with the first appearance of this way of life in the Valley of Mexico at such sites as Zacatenco and El Arbolillo. Here a relatively sophisticated ceramic tradition (clearly derived from elsewhere) appears in the earliest levels. While evidence for architecture is not completely clear, it appears that by about 1500 bce there were small villages of wattle-and-daub huts scattered along the shores of the lakes of the Valley of Mexico, with inhabitants subsisting largely on corn–bean–squash cultivation, supplemented by the meat of game animals and by various aquatic resources.
Earliest evidences for the next cultural advances are apparent by about 800 bce in changes in architecture and settlement pattern in several areas of Middle America and Peru. At this time, fairly extensive public works are represented by temple structures and large sculptured monuments, which occupy a central position in towns and villages. Phases as widely separated as the Olmec of Veracruz and the Cupisnique of coastal Peru appear to be linked not only in time and patterns of basic subsistence but in specific ritual practices involving a jaguar or feline deity. Throughout Middle America and in the Andean area, this appears to have been a time of consolidation and establishment of the basic traditions that dominated the development of high cultures in the New World up to European contact.