Cuncaicha and Pucuncho in the High Andes

The world's highest archaeological sites have been uncovered and explored in the southern Peruvian Andes. University archaeologist Kurt Rademaker and a team have investigated the site to look into human capacity for survival in such extreme environments as living at over 14,000 feet in Andean South America.
    The findings were published in the Oct. 24 2014 edition of the academic journal Science, the world's leading journal of original scientific research, global news, and commentary, first established in 1849, is currently among the most highly-regarded journals in the world for quality and selectivity. The article was co-authored by a team of researchers including University of Calgary archaeologist Sonia Zarrillo, and indicate the quick adaptation of humans to the extremes of environment found in the Americas.

The Archaeologists found that humans colonized the inhospitable high altitude and arid Andes thousands of years ago in an area of the southern highlands near Lake Titicaca. These highest-altitude archaeological sites yet identified in the world, are about 3000 feet above confidently dated contemporary sites.
    Looking for the source site of obsidian in the mountains many miles away from where ancient obsidian fish hooks were found at a village on Peru’s coast, lead researcher Anthropologist Kurt Rademaker, along with his team uncovered two Paleoindian sites high in the Andes.  Rademaker, of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maine in Orono, and at the Department of Early Prehistory at the University of Tübingen, Germany added, "This obsidian told us early on, Paleoindians must have gone to the highlands.”
    Searching in the Pucuncho Basin led his team to the newly discovered sites. They found evidence of hunter-gatherer occupation in two open-air sites called Cuncaicha and Pucuncho, that contained more than 750 tools, including likely spearheads and scrapers.
    “We don't know if people were living there year round, but we strongly suspect they were not just going there to hunt for a few days, then leaving," archaeologist Sonia Zarrillo told Popular Archaeology. As one of the researchers on the project, Zarillo of the University of Calgar, specializes in Environmental Archaeology and Paleoethnobotany, particularly in South America. "There were possibly even families living at these sites, because we've found evidence of a whole range of activities."

Located in the southern highlands of Peru, between Lake Titicaca and the Pacific coast, the Pucuncho Basin rises high in the Andes, where a nearby rockshelter with sooted ceilings and floor detritus not far away may have been a campsite. These two sites were probably used seasonally for hunting vicuña and other high-altitude prey.
    Despite the cold temperatures and low-oxygen conditions, a robust, well-preserved, and well-dated occupation sequence shows that hunter-gatherers colonized extreme high-altitude Andean environments in the early development of southern highland Peru, believed to have been shortly after the land had been initially occupied.
    Part of the problem of better understanding these and other early sites “is that most Terminal Pleistocene sites have been discovered by chance and are widely scattered, limiting our ability to understand linkages between sites and the development of diverse cultural adaptations. What is needed is investigation of Paleoindian settlement systems, series of potentially linked, contemporary early sites situated in regions,” Rademaker stated.    “Many Paleoindian sites throughout the Americas hold clues to where additional, linked sites can be discovered. These clues are provided by exotic plant, animal, and especially lithic resources, transported from sources at considerable distance ”(Kurt Radamaker, et al., “Paleoindian settlement of the high-altitude Peruvian Andes,” Science, vol.346, Iss.6208, 24 October 2014, pp. 466-469).

Cuncaicha Rock Shelter is a natural rock formation with an opening beneath a slab overhang, where remains were found

The first site the team discovered, Cuncaicha, is a rock shelter with two alcoves at 14,764 feet above sea level, with an obsidian stone-tool workshop below it. Artifacts indicate a variety of activities and indication that the site was used for extended periods of time within the year.
    This nearby vein of obsidian drew ancient people to hike up to the arid Pucuncho Basin since at more than 14,300 feet above sea level, the basin would have offered its occupants a landscape with little fuel for fires. “The cold temperatures would also have required them to eat many more calories to survive and with less than 60 percent of the oxygen at sea level, it must have been a constant search for food, both hunting and fishing. Or at least trading their obsidian to fishing villages along the coast. In addition to plant remains, bones at the site indicate hunting of vicuna and guanaco camelids and the taruca deer. The findings appeared in the journal Science.
    “At Cuncaicha,” Zarillo added, “we found remains representing whole animals. The types of stone tools we’ve found are not only hunting tools but also scraping tools used for processing hides to make things like clothing, bags or blankets.”
    The second site, Pucuncho, is an ancient workshop where stone tools were made at 14,436 feet above sea level. The Pucuncho site yielded 260 stone tools, such as projectile points, bifaces and unifacial scrapers. Tools were made from locally available obsidian, andesite and jasper, and are indicative of hunting and butchering consistent with limited subsistence options on the plateau
    “Climatic conditions in both sites are harsh, with factors including low-oxygen, extreme cold and high levels of solar radiation making life in the region a challenge for any humans.”

Showing the Nevado Coropuna volcano visible in the background overlooking the recently discovered stone age sites in the Andes of Cuncaicha and Pucuncho 

The shelter in the Basin holds ceramics, bone beads, quartz crystals, bones from hunted vicuña and other camelids, and the charred remains of woody shrubs used for fire. Not far from the rock shelter and close to the obsidian, the researchers found an open-air work shop with about 260 tools—including hand axes and spear points.
    Today, the Pucuncho Basin is used primarily as pasture for llama, with Cuncaicha sitting along a ridge overlooking the lowlands of the basin, where the rock shelter was found.
    Also along the coast at Quebrada Jaguay, were found evidence of contact with the interior through small bifacial tool fragments and associated debitage made of obsidian, which indicates that some of South America’s earliest inhabitants were settling the Pacific Coast of southern Peru. These developments showed the early inhabitants were taking advantage of rich fisheries and littoral zones. The presence of obsidian tools and fish hooks also showed they were interacting with the interior zones, such as Cuncaicha, as well as evidence of prickly pear cactus found only at elevations between 7900 and 11,800 feet above sea level (Rademaker, et al., “Cuncaicha Rockshelter, a Key Site for Understanding Colonization of the High Andes,” Quaternary Ecology, Current Anthropology, vol.57, no.1, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, University of Chicago Press, February 2016).
    There is no question that coastal Peru demonstrated that early age people in South America relied on marine resources while resident on the coast, which extends the South American record of maritime exploitation by a millennium. This site supports recent evidence that Paleoindian-age people had diverse subsistence systems. The presence of obsidian showing that the inhabitants had contact with the adjacent Andean highlands during the Terminal Pleistocene (Daniel H. Sandweiss, et al., “Quebrada Jaguay: Early South American Maritime Adaptations,” Science, vol.281, Is.5384, American Association for the Advancement of Science, September 1998, pp1830-1832).
    The point is, the ancients, even at extremely early periods, were involved in matters most people would not consider possible. One of the reasons, especially in the Americas of the New World, is that a people suddenly settled there with an existing history of development and achievement over a long period of time in the Old World. Archaeologists and Anthropologists, and most of he sciences, where conscious or unconscious, tend to judge the past by the standards of the present, and consider what is well documented as the development known in the Europe/Asia Hemisphere as the same development stages for the Western Hemisphere.