Paleo American finds from Venezuela: evidence to discuss the spread of Fell Points and the peopling of Northern South America (original) (raw)
On April 21, 2012, the symposium “Early lithic technologies in South America: Beyond regional projectile point typologies” was held at the 77th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in Memphis, Tennessee. Seven articles presented in that symposium are gathered in this special issue of Chungara Revista de Antropología Chilena. Colored by the blues mood of the city and the magnificent smell of Memphis barbecue, it appeared from the start that this session had high aims. Early lithic technological studies in South America and elsewhere for years had been devoted to the description of attributes on specific formal tools and their relations in the axes of time and space. As such, the establishment of projectile point typologies using site provenience data has been a chief orientation in the analyses of the peopling of the Americas. However, these studies are geographically scattered, and currently there are few consistent discussions related to the reliability of specific tool types as temporal or cultural markers. This situation is aggravated by the fact that, contrary to North America, in South America the archaeological record from the Pleistocene to Holocene transition is characterized by apparent greater regional variability in lithic technology. No single projectile point type dominates the continent, most technologies are significant in a regional environmental scope, and many assemblages contain primarily informal short-lived tools. This South American characteristic has been elegantly articulated by Luis Borrero (2006) in his: “Paleoindians without Mammoths and Archaeologists without Projectile Points?” article. Thus far, the early peopling of South America appears as a more diversified process than that of North America, with a marked absence of pan-continental projectile point styles such as Clovis. A major question moving the participants of the session was: What does this greater technological variability signify? New research from throughout South America prompts a review of existing data and a synthesis of new advances. The SAA session aimed to gather current research on the spatial distribution and chronological associations of early lithic assemblages, regional raw material selection and procurement practices, differential representation of reduction sequences/stages at sites, possible relationships between bifacial assemblages and other designs, and the roles of early lithic technologies in subsistence and settlement patterns. Speakers from different countries gathered in order to shed light on regional variability and to illustrate different methodological approaches. Each participant or group of participants presented their up-to-date syntheses of regional lithic technological research problems and ways in which they have worked to solve them. The second major achievement was to collect the symposium contributions into this Chungara issue. In order to encourage greater interaction, papers have been written in English and Spanish, in order to promote dialogue among those working on lithic technological problems in South America, North America, and elsewhere. We acknowledge the commentaries of the two symposium discussants, Nora Franco and David Anderson, who have kindly agreed to contribute to this number. The original impetus for the SAA session and this number has been creating venues for sharing current developments and thinking on the early peopling of South America. Gathering together researchers from a wide variety of places, disciplinary traditions, and experiences has been motivated by the idea of listening to each other and writing down our results. After all, those of us working on the early settlement of America are united by one of the colonized places on earth.