Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene fishing strategies at Quebrada Jaguay and the Ring Site, southern Perú

Abstract

Much of the discussion regarding the peopling of the Americas during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene is focussed on advocating either a terrestrial route through an ice-free corridor or a coastal route along the Pacific rim. Central to this question is the potential of marine resources to sustain human endeavours. A growing body of archaeological data from the eastern Pacific rim shows that people did use marine resources as they moved south through the hemisphere and that they took advantage of the opportunities and challenges of coastal life in a wide range of different habitats. This is particularly evident in the vertebrate remains recovered from two shell deposits on the southern coast of Perú: Quebrada Jaguay and the Ring Site. Jaguay is one of the earliest known Terminal Pleistocene coastal sites in the hemisphere and the Ring Site was occupied during the Early Holocene. The sites are located within ca. 120km of one another. Together, they document both the antiquity and the persistence of maritime strategies in southern Perú. At Jaguay the focus was on two fishes from a relatively high trophic level. The catch at the Ring Site was richer, more diverse, and drawn from a broader range of trophic levels. These data join a growing body of evidence demonstrating that discussions about the peopling of the Americas that presume marine resources were inferior to terrestrial ones, that propose simple models assuming a uniform, homogeneous “coastal” strategy prevailed, or that evaluate data in terms of stark dichotomies such as hunting versus fishing, simple versus complex, inland versus coastal, and mobility versus sedentism, fail to capture the richness of human solutions to life on this, or any, coast.