New type of building built in Peru over 2000 years ago
Written by Xiuhcoatl
Jan 24, 2006 at 03:12 PM
Public release date: 24-Jan-2006
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Contact: Octavi López Coronado
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
A UAB research team discovers a new type of building built in Peru over 2000 years ago
This press release is also available in Spanish.
A research team from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has
discovered a new type of construction, unknown until now, in the
archaeological region of Puntilla, in the province of Nazca, Peru.
These yards, built with stone walls, situated in the centre of the
village, is where people went to work, either in agricultual or in the
crafts. The yards date from the first millenium BC, but their exact
date is yet to have been determined.
These results come from the analysis of archaeological excavations in
the 2005 La Puntilla Project, which ended last December. The project
aims to produce sociological research on the communities living in the
Nazca province – where the archaeological area of La Puntilla is
situated – on the south coast of Peru in the first millenium BC. The
researchers have worked in two sites in the area.
They have found evidence of a new type of unique building that had not
yet been found anywhere. The buildings are yards built with stone
walls, located in the centre of the village. The excavation of part of
one of these buildings, at the peak of the El Trigal site, has shown
that the buildings were for centralised work, and not for cermonies as
was first thought. The researchers have found evidence for a large
number of agricultural processing tasks and craftsmanship.
The work undertaken in these buildings included making andesite and
obsidian tools, manufacturing ornaments on marine shells, weaving and
spinning and food processing. It is particularly remarkable that
Spondylus shells were found, as these must have been brought from
distant lands, probably from the coastline of what is now Ecuador. This
means that the community living in La Puntilla, in the phase known by
historians as Ocucaje 8, had access to goods that had covered large
distances. The team of scientists now hopes to use radiocarbon dating
to gain a more precise idea of the period of the first millenium BC in
which the building excavated in El Trigal began operating.
The excavations have also uncovered domestic units that show the
availability of the products manufactured in the centre of the
settlement. This means it will be possible to analyse distribution and
production and whether there was a dominant class controlling
production.
It is hoped that as excavations continue over the next few years, we
will be able to understand how those living in the Nazca region during
the most primitive periods of the Paracas and Nazca civilisations. This
period came shortly before the Nazca culture became firmly established
at the start of the first century AD, and is therefore of great
historical interest.
###
The excavations were conducted by researchers from the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Almería and directed by
Professor Pedro V Castro Martínez and Juan Carlos de la Torre Zevallos,
of the UAB Department of Prehistory. Archaeologists from the
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and the Pontifícia Universidad
Católica del Perú also took part. Funding came from the Ministry of
Culture as part of the Archaeological Projects Abroad programme.
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