Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleoamerican archaeological culture, named for distinct stone and bone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna, particularly two Columbian mammoths, at Blackwater Locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1936 and 1937, though Paleoindian artifacts had been found at the site since the 1920s. It existed from roughly 11,500 to 10,800 BCE near the end of the Last Glacial Period.
Monte Verde is a Paleolithic archaeological site in the Llanquihue Province in southern Chile, located near Puerto Montt, Los Lagos Region. It contains two separate layers, the younger Monte Verde II, dating to 14,500 cal BP, and an older, much more controversial layer suggested to date to 18,500 cal BP. The Monte Verde II site has been considered key evidence showing that the human settlement of the Americas pre-dates the Clovis culture by roughly 1,000 years. This contradicts the previously accepted "Clovis first" model which holds that settlement of the Americas began after 13,500 cal BP. The Monte Verde findings were initially dismissed by most of the scientific community, but the evidence then became more accepted in archaeological circles.
Austral University of Chile is a Chilean research university based primarily in Valdivia, with satellite campuses in Puerto Montt and Coyhaique. Founded on September 7, 1954, it is one of the eight original Chilean Traditional Universities. It operates as a nonprofit self-owned corporation under private law, and receives significant state-funding.
Paleo-Indians, Paleoindians or Paleo-Americans were the first peoples who entered, and subsequently inhabited, the Americas during the final glacial episodes of the late Pleistocene period. The prefix paleo- comes from the Ancient Greek adjective: παλαιός, romanized: palaiós, lit. 'old; ancient'. The term Paleo-Indians applies specifically to the lithic period in the Western Hemisphere and is distinct from the term Paleolithic.
Mario Pino Quivira is a Chilean geologist specialized in geoarchaeology and sedimentology that has been involved in several studies of early human settlements in Southern Chile. After Tom Dillehay's excavation of Monte Verde near Puerto Montt, where human remains estimated to be about 12,800 years old have been found, challenging the Clovis theory of the first human arrival in the Americas, Pino controversially claimed the site was 33,000 years old. Other studied sites includes the Chan-Chan settlement near Mehuín and the Gomphotherium of Osorno.
Pedra Furada is an important collection of over 800 archaeological sites in the state of Piauí, Brazil. These include hundreds of rock paintings dating from circa 12,000 years before present. More importantly, charcoal from very ancient fires and stone shards that may be interpreted as tools found at the location were dated from 48,000 to 32,000 years before present, suggesting the possibility of a human presence tens of thousand of years prior to the arrival of the Clovis people in North America.
Luzia Woman is the name for an Upper Paleolithic period skeleton of a Paleo-Indian woman who was found in a cave in Brazil. Some archaeologists originally thought the young woman may have been part of a migratory wave of immigrants prior to the ancestors of today's Amerindians, though DNA and other evidence has shown this to be improbable. The 11,500-year-old skeleton was found in a cave in the Lapa Vermelha archeological site in Pedro Leopoldo, in the Greater Belo Horizonte region of Brazil, in 1974 by archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire.
Cueva Fell or Fell'sCave is a natural cave and archaeological site in southern Patagonia. Cueva Fell is in proximity to the Pali Aike Crater, another significant archaeological site. Cueva Fell combined with the nearby Pali Aike site have been submitted to UNESCO as a possible World Heritage Site.
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt is an American archaeologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She studies human evolution and long-term human-environment interaction. She is one of the leading American archeologists studying Paleoindians in the Amazon basin. Her field research has included significant findings at Marajo Island and Caverna da Pedra Pintada in Brazil. She does additional field work in the Congo Basin. She is the great-granddaughter of United States President Theodore Roosevelt.
The Paiján culture was an archaeological culture that emerged on the northern coast of Peru between 13,000 and 10,000 cal BP. It was first described by Peruvian archaeologist Rafael Larco Hoyle in the 1940s from the Pampa de los Fósiles site. Later research, mainly by French archaeologist Claude Chauchat, identified dozens of open air sites, which include camps, workshops and quarries.
The Amotape complex is an archaeological culture on the northern coast of Peru dated to between c. 9,000 and 7,100 BCE. It constitutes some of the oldest evidence for human occupation of the Peruvian coast. The Amotape complex was identified by the American anthropologist James Richardson III, who located a dozen small camps in the Peruvian coastal desert at the foot of the Amotape hills, near the modern city of Talara. The people of the Amotope complex were hunter–gatherers who manufactured unifacial stone tools in chalcedony and quartzite to exploit a variety of local plants and animals. They also collected shellfish in the mangrove swamps which covered the coastline at that time.
Huaca Prieta is the site of a prehistoric settlement beside the Pacific Ocean in the Chicama Valley, just north of Trujillo, La Libertad Province, Peru. It is a part of the El Brujo Archaeological Complex, which also includes Moche (culture) sites.
The precolonial history of Chile refers to the period from the first human populations in the territory of Chile until the first European exploration of the region, by Spaniard Diego de Almagro in 1535-36.
As an archaeological culture, the Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina have a long history which dates back to 600–500 BC. The Mapuche society underwent great transformations after Spanish contact in the mid–16th century. These changes included the adoption of Old World crops and animals and the onset of a rich Spanish–Mapuche trade in La Frontera and Valdivia. Despite these contacts Mapuche were never completely subjugated by the Spanish Empire. Between the 18th and 19th century Mapuche culture and people spread eastwards into the Pampas and the Patagonian plains. This vast new territory allowed Mapuche groups to control a substantial part of the salt and cattle trade in the Southern Cone.
The Andean preceramic refers to the early period of human occupation in the Andean area of South America that preceded the introduction of ceramics. This period is also called pre-ceramic or aceramic.
The Chinchorro culture of South America was a preceramic culture that lasted from 9,100 to 3,500 years BP. The people forming the Chinchorro culture were sedentary fishermen inhabiting the Pacific coastal region of current northern Chile and southern Peru. Presence of fresh water in the arid region on the coast facilitated human settlement in this area. The Chinchorro were famous for their detailed mummification and funerary practices. The area of the Chinchorro culture started to receive influences from the Andean Plateau around 4,000 BP, which led to the adoption of agriculture. Much later, it came under the influence of the Tiwanaku Empire.
The peopling of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers entered North America from the North Asian Mammoth steppe via the Bering land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and western Alaska due to the lowering of sea level during the Last Glacial Maximum. These populations expanded south of the Laurentide Ice Sheet and spread rapidly southward, occupying both North and South America, by 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. The earliest populations in the Americas, before roughly 10,000 years ago, are known as Paleo-Indians. Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been linked to Siberian populations by linguistic factors, the distribution of blood types, and in genetic composition as reflected by molecular data, such as DNA.
The origin of the Mapuche has been a matter of research for over a century. The genetics of the Mapuche do not show overly clear affinities with any other known indigenous group in the Americas, and the same goes for linguistics, where the Mapuche language is considered a language isolate. Archaeological evidence shows Mapuche culture has existed in Chile at least since 600 to 500 BC. Mapuches are late arrivals in their southernmost and easternmost (Pampas) areas of settlement, yet Mapuche history in the north towards Atacama Desert may be older than historic settlement suggest. The Mapuche has received significant influence from Pre-Incan (Tiwanaku?), Incan and Spanish peoples, but deep origins of the Mapuche predates these contacts. Contact and conflict with the Spanish Empire are thought by scholars such as Tom Dillehay and José Bengoa to have had a profound impact on the shaping of the Mapuche ethnicity.
The coastal migration hypothesis is one of two leading hypotheses about the settlement of the Americas at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. It proposes one or more migration routes involving watercraft, via the Kurile island chain, along the coast of Beringia and the archipelagos off the Alaskan-British Columbian coast, continuing down the coast to Central and South America. The alternative is the hypothesis solely by interior routes, which assumes migration along an ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum.
