Quishqui puncu: a preceramic site in highland peru.

The complete campsite industry from this early site includes crude chopping tools, microblades, and numerous scraper and projectile point types. A square-based variant of the Ayampitín point is distinctive of the earliest occupation, but the incidence and distribution of other types indicate that seasonal use persisted into agricultural and ceramic periods.

Early human cultural and skeletal remains from guitarrero cave, northern peru.

An early man site in highland Peru yielded a rich cultural assemblage in stratigraphic association with faunal remains, botanical remains, and campfire remnants that furnished secure radiocarbon dates. A human mandible and teeth, showing interesting patterns of occlusal wear, were found in a stratum dated by a charcoal sample to 10,610 B.C., the oldest such date in South America.

Early Cultivated Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) from an Intermontane Peruvian Valley.

Examples of fully domesticated common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) and lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus) were recovered from deposits in Guitarrero Cave (PAn 14-102) in the Callejón de Huaylas, Ancash, Peru. Carbon-14 dates for stratum II, in which the earliest beans were found, range from 7,680 +/- 280 to 10,000 +/- 300 years before the present.

Chronology of guitarrero cave, peru.

Dating by accelerator mass spectrometry of wooden artifacts, cord, and charcoal samples from Guitarrero Cave, Peru, supports the antiquity of South America's earliest textiles and other perishable remains. The new dates are consistent with those obtained from disintegration counters and leave little doubt about the integrity of the lower Preceramic layers and their early cultivars. Re-evaluation of the mode of deposition suggests that most of the remains resulted from short-term use of the cave in the eighth millennium B.C., with a possible brief human visit as early as 12,560 years ago.