Advanced culture in Uruguay challenges current theories

[Dover]

On the horizon

By Peter N. Spotts

Advanced culture in Uruguay
The discovery of a 4,000-year-old farming village in Uruguay is challenging current theories of how complex cultures developed in South America.

The Los Ajos site, located on the Atlantic coast near Uruguay's border with Brazil, includes 15 mound complexes. They contain evidence that residents farmed maize, squash, and beans. In addition, over the years, Los Ajos was altered in ways that suggest that the region was more densely populated at the time than previously believed.

The find is startling because the region traditionally has been written off as archaeologically marginal, say the archaeologists from the United States and Uruguay who uncovered the site. The work, other researchers say, adds to a growing body of evidence that is confounding long-held notions that complex cultures in South America emerged from a central region on the Pacific coast and in nearby Andean highland valleys, then spread to the rest of the continent.

Beyond its assault on conventional wisdom, Los Ajos also suggests that evidence for complex prehistoric cultures also may emerge from other parts of the continent thought "marginal," notes University of Binghamton anthropologist Peter Stahl...cont'd

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1202/p17s02-stgn.html