Chivateros
Chivateros is a prehistoric stone tool quarry and associated workshop located near the mouth of the Chillón river in the Ventanilla District, northwest of Lima, Peru.
Archaeological site
Excavations were led in 1963 and 1966 by archaeologists Thomas C. Patterson and Edward P. Lanning, who noticed three cultural assemblages in the Chillón valley and uncovered large quantities of debris of lithic artifact production, initially interpreted as lithic instruments.In an area of coastal lomas, excavations revealed a lithic flake industry as early as the Late Pleistocene, dating between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago. Wood fragments helped define a Chivateros I period of 9500-8000 BC. There is also a red zone with some flint chips which, by comparison of artifacts of the nearby Oquendo workshop, dates to pre-10,500 BC.
The whole industry is characterized by burins and bifaces with the upper-level containing long, keeled, leaf-shaped projectile points which resemble points from both Lauricocha II and El Jobo. Dating has been aided by the deposition of both loess and salt crust layers which suggest alternating periods of dryness and humidity and which can be synchronized with glacial activity in the Northern Hemisphere.
For a long time it was mistakenly regarded as the greatest lithic workshop in Peru, when in reality it is a large area of canteo, that is to say, a place or quarry where groups of hunter-gatherers, or paijanenses, obtained the raw material they used to make pedunculated points, known as Paijanense or Paiján points. The inhabitants of this area have been given the name "Chivateros".
Exploration of the site's vicinity, the area near the mouth of the Chillon River and the desert around Ancon, has revealed a large settlement complex of ancient hunter-gatherers near the quarries and associated workshops. Among them are Cerro Chivateros, Cerro Oquendo and La Pampilla.
The stratigraphic sequence:
- Red Zone
- Oquendo
- Chivateros I
- Chivateros II
Quarry operations
Chivateros was initially defined as a gigantic lithic workshop of the Paleolithic. Patterson and Lanning identified lithic pieces made of quartzite, such as knives, scrapers, arrowheads and hand axes. Moreover, they established a factual differentiation between what they called Chivateros I and Chivateros II, establishing equivalents in other points of America.Thanks to the works of Chauchat in Cupisnique and Chicama, this interpretation has largely been superseded. Chauchat determined that Chivateros was actually a quarry, and that there was not only one site of this type, but many Chivateros sites, for much of the Peruvian coast and Yungas, where groups of hunter-gatherers were extracting raw material, which they took to workshops located nearby or closer to their homes.
The most widely known material of these quarries are the Chivateros preforms, which were the first outline of pedunculate points. The rest of lithic materials are nothing more than waste from the activity of carving and edging.
The people who obtained raw material from Chivateros lived in Piedras Gordas and Carabayllo.There Lanning found their workshops and housing areas, which he called the Lítico Light Complex. Chivateros type arrow heads and blades were made there, of the Paijanense type. This tradition spread along the Peruvian coast from Lambayeque to Ica during the period between 10,000 BC to 6000 BC.