The First South Americans: The Peopling of a Continent from the Earliest Evidence to High Culture

The popular notion that the Americas were first populated by big-game hunters who crossed the Bering land bridge before making their way slowly southward may be challenged by recent findings at Monte Verde in southern Chile. Evidence found there presents the strong possibility that people were living in South America more than 12,000 years ago. Other South American sites may eventually be dated to 33,000 B.P or earlier.In The First South Americans, Daniele Lavallee presents all current evidence and claims for the early traces of a human presence on the continent, surveying the territory from Tierra del Fuego to the Caribbean shores of Columbia and from Brazil to Ecuador. She discusses the continent's earliest occupants, then continues with an exploration of cultural developments that includes the hunters of the Holocene, the rise of horticulture and animal domestication, maritime adaptations, the Andean development of ceramics and weaving, social stratification, and finally the emergence of the first Andean civilization of Chavin. Tracing human occupation to the emergence of that civilization, Lavallee shows how little by little, people occupied this mosaic of territories over the millennia, sometimes yielding to the constraints of the environment, sometimes shaping and transforming it.