Hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene/Early Holocene transition of Jaywamachay, Ayacucho
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15381/arqueolsoc.2023n39.e26163Keywords:
Lithic techno-typology, Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene, fishtail point, hunter-gatherers, Ayacucho-PeruAbstract
Between 1966 and 1968, Richard MacNeish led the "Ayacucho Archaeological-Botanical Project" program in the Ayacucho basin, Huamanga province. There, they found more than 450 sites with human occupations. The Jaywamachay eaves stand out for their exhumed archaeological record. Excavations in 1969 and 1970 revealed the region's oldest human occupations. Detailed descriptions were published only for specimens corresponding to hunter-gatherers living during the last millennium of the Pleistocene and using Fell points. Due to the importance of these findings, the lithic remains (n = 4,388) contained in the twelve earliest strata of the site that present an age ranging between 11,603 and 9,556 calibrated years before the present were organized and studied. The analysis allowed us to identify two clear artifactual sets of different techno-morphological characteristics and chronologies. Due to the similarities of the instruments and their association with consistent calibration dating, archaeological remains from strata H to J were left between ~≥10.3 - 9 kya by Early Holocene hunter-gatherers. From J1 to J3, human occupations lived during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition between 12.6 and 10.2 kya, and used Fell Points. These records make Jaywamachay one of the most significant sites to learn about the earliest human groups that inhabited the Ayacucho basin in the past.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Juan Yataco Capcha, Hugo G. Nami
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
THE AUTHORS RETAIN THEIR RIGHTS:
a. The authors retain their trademark and patent rights, and also on any process or procedure described in the article.
b. The authors retain the right to share, copy, distribute, perform and publicly communicate the article published in the Arqueología y Sociedad (for example, place it in an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in the Arqueología y Sociedad.
c. The authors retain the right to make a subsequent publication of their work, to use the article or any part of it (for example: a compilation of their works, notes for conferences, thesis, or for a book), provided that they indicate the source. of publication (authors of the work, journal, volume, number and date).
