This news release describes archaeologist Tom Dillehay's discovery of irrigation canals in coastal Peru that may date as early as 6700 years ago. Recent research keeps pushing the inception of agriculture and urban life in Peru back in time. The pace of research in this important region has increased due to the more stable political situation in recent years.
On the Peruvian coast examples of settled towns and large scale communal architecture have been found as early as 5200 years ago in the Norte Chico, which could make them as early as Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia. Charles Mann has an accessible summary of recent research there in his book 1491. According to Mann and as alluded to in the description of Dillehay's work, the principal crop grown in these earliest sites was cotton. A case is made by some that the earliest domesticated plant in the area may be cotton rather than any food plants. This upsets the assumptions that we have had about the development of advanced societies - that agriculture supplied the stable food source that allowed settled life. On the Peruvian coast, the marine fisheries may have provided that stable food source rather than agriculture. Cotton was more important than food plants as it was used to make twine for fishing nets, increasing the fishing yield.
Interesting stuff and possibly another paradigm overturned.
2 comments:
I don't see that this discovery would upset any assumptions. It has been settled for decades that the Indians of the Pacific Northwest created a sedentary, complex society (nobility, commoners, and slaves) on a hunting-and-gathering economy, thanks to salmon, whales, etc.
The Northwest Coast Indians as well as the Chumash here in Southern California achieved a chiefdom level of social organization based on hunting and gathering economies, as you say. But no prehistoric society that we know of (until now perhaps) has reached a state level social organization without agriculture.
This is based on the social complexity definitions (band - tribe - chiefdom - state) used by Elman Service in "Primitive Social Organization".
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