 With Los Morteros and Pampa de Los Salinas, early monumentality, environmental transformations and the creation of a pre-ceramic ceremonial landscape. Good morning. First of all, I'd like to thank the Institute of Hawaiian Studies for this opportunity. I am very glad I can share the current status of my research with all of you. And I'm going to make a very tight summary of my work because there is a lot to say. And I might take more than 20 minutes. I apologize for that in advance. Sorry. Well, let's start. I work in the Chau Valley, which is between the Santa Valley and the Viru Valley. And the Chau Valley is a small valley, a narrow valley that is formed by the Chau La Val and Huamansanya rivers. And it's been historically described as a rather arid valley and with always deficit of water. Most of the reculture in historic times have been done in the lower part of the middle part through bookios and artificial wells. And also this valley, for some reasons, I don't know, I don't understand, didn't get much attention from archaeologists. So there were some projects, but not many yet, still until this year. But in 1977, the project of obtención de una cronología del uso de recursos marinos en el antiguo Perú by the people from the Seminario de Arqueología de la Universidad Católica did an exploration of this valley, mostly in the lower part and in the middle part. And they recorded more than 50 archaeological sites in the Chau Valley, and that was the date for future studies in this area. So excavations and exploration were led by Mercedes Cardenas and her team. Their names are right there. My work so far focuses on this part of the lower Chau Valley, which is called the Pampa de las Salinas. This is a satellite photo of this area, this very particular area. It has a paleoembayment and a Pampa area, a relatively flat area surrounded by some Andean foothills. And you see on yellow is the paleo shoreline. The Chau River is from the Pampa area. It's about eight kilometers. That Pampa area is four kilometers from the ocean. This is how it looks now. This is a view of the dry environment from east to west. Equally it's a very dry environment, very salient. Most of the environment is filled with dune fields. And the Pampa looks like this. No vegetation, no water, no fresh water on the surface. Nothing but chicken farms. And despite this current environment, Mercedes Cardenas and her team recorded more than 20 archaeological sites in this area, most of which were ceramic. The best known site in Andean literature in the Chau Valley is perhaps this site, Salinas de Chau. And this is a photo I took last July. But also there are other sites here like Pescadores with a stone architecture, some open areas, but also small rooms and tents of windbreaks. There are show me dance too, like this one. The recorded also by Mercedes Cardenas, Conchal Viejo. Those are their calibrated dates. In 2012 I started my research in this area as a part of my dissertation project for my doctoral dissertation. And I kept coming back to this area since then. So my research focused in the beginning in this site Los Moroteros. The name of this site is because of some stone mortars that Cardenas and her team found on the surface of this mound. It's a mound-shaped archaeological site. It's about 200 by 200 meters and 1500 meters high. Cardenas excavated some test pits mostly on top of the mound and she found some human burials and some refuses that she described as domestic. And later in 2010 a crew from the University of Maine did some GPR exploration of the mound and they found some evidence of architecture of large dimensions, probably something monumental, underneath six layers of Aeolian sand. So in the beginning the question was to... some of the questions of my project were focused on understanding the formation process of this site. What was Moroteros? If there was a monumental architecture and what was the relation between Moroteros and Salim as a chow? At that moment was the earliest example of monumental architecture in the chow vibe. So until 2013 I got three occupational phases for the mound. We explored different areas of the mound. This is an area full of the mound and I found these phases in different parts. Exploring different areas of the site. So the last phase of occupation, the last phase of construction was recorded originally on top of the mound and is related to stone architecture with brown corners, stone platforms and these stunning stones. But I found also remains of the same kind of architecture in different sectors of the mound and this is a very superficial occupation. You have to dig only a few centimeters from the surface to find these walls and also this architecture has these very thick clay floors. The second phase of occupation is related to monumental Adobe architecture found on the north part of the mound and formed by these walls that are 10 x 7 meters with Adobe walls and thick also thick clay floors. Some of the walls had up to two meters high and this was strategically found at this architecture under the stone architecture and this picture shows that. And in a recent excavation of this architecture, this Adobe architecture, last January we found a very interesting context, an offering related to the closing event of the Adobe architecture and we were excavating the central part of one of these Adobe rooms and we found an offering formed by sea lion bones, some fish bones but the most interesting part was this. We found human bodies like this, children and one very particular finding is that the body of a child was completely burnt and intentionally burnt and there were also many human bones that were found that seemed to be isolated, no articulated bones and we just finished the study of this context and we found at least 10 bodies of children, all of them, all of them so far the analysis said that were between 3 and 5 years old and there are evidence of two adult individuals but some part of adult individuals and there is a very clear intention of selecting the individuals that were buried here in this context and as far as I know this is all the evidence I could find about the burning of a body I know about similar cases later in time but this is very intentional there were some other remains that were part of this offering that were burnt but not all of them, it was very clear, the intention of burning this body was very clear and to see this context in a profile view this is the interior of the Adobe room where we found this offering and in the lower level there are the human remains and some animal bones and then this was part of the closing event because the Adobe walls were dismantled actually destroyed, there were pieces of Adobe's but all these pieces of the Adobe walls were inside the room not outside and it was a very clear intention of dismantling the walls and on top of that there was an audience and a deposit with only Cholomitellus shells so to talk about the whole area, since the beginning I understood that I couldn't study morteros without taking into account the whole context there were more than 20 archaeological sites around morteros and previous research indicated that some of them could be contemporary with morteros so I knew to understand the other sites too so I focused my excavations on morteros but I also do some excavations to build the chronology at the area because Carame Sancturati they obtained some dates but there was some controversy about these dates so I decided to build my own chronology so I started digging other sites along with morteros and so far the ceremonial and monumental architecture is just evident in morteros and also Salinas de Chal but also there are some areas of ceremonial activities like these geoglyphs some of the geoglyph areas were recorded by Carame Sancturati in the late 70s but we found two more areas of these archaeological features these are very particular geoglyphs and this is the one recorded by Cardenas it's close to very close to mortenas it's called the Sara Cross or Clos del Sur and it's formed by these circular marks made with stones but the particular things that are inside very large rooms that are about 50 and 100 meters long so for me that this is very similar to the constellation actually but there are more than 5 similar areas so this is geoglyph 4 you have the same team, walls and marks and if you see these circular marks you see some of them appear to be bigger, more larger than others and this is completely intentional this is not a preservation thing it's completely intentional they decided to be some of these circles bigger than others and this is how they look from the ground so circular accumulation of rocks inside these structures and some of these structures have even entrants preserved other features in this area are preserved trails and this one is laid later I think from the Preserve Museum we even found some colonial loza and some coins and there are walls that seem to have function to close the main area where most of the sites were located in Pampaela Salina this is a wall that is close to the Chau site and it's been eroded by water my run of gear you can see the wall so if you see the whole area you have archaeological sites the geoglyphs and the walls there is another wall this is in the south, the south wall is closing a natural path between these small hills and it's a path that connects this part of the Chau Valley with the Santa Valley that is just north of this and this is the late trail, the late road in the beginning I thought there was some of these sites in this area could be domestic because of the size of the architecture the size of the characteristics and some reports from carbon but I haven't found any evidence of domestic occupation or the evidence of a population even in that area yet this is the site of Piedras Negras and we discovered it because Cardinals reported this site as a domestic site but with architecture that doesn't seem to be very domestic big walls, thick clear floors and I don't think this is a very domestic site and so still there is no, I haven't found yet where the population that occupied Morteros and these other sites were staying probably in other parts of the valley and this is another detail and these are the new dates from this site Cardinals reported this site as being contemporary with Morteros but there is no relationship so far so another component of my research was to understand the environment because as I mentioned before the cool environment doesn't have many relationships with all these archaeological sites it's not a very friendly environment and why people was here so in order to understand that question I did some environmental analysis of the area trying to understand what transformation this area went through so we started analyzing the stratigraphy of the dry environment so we did some exploration of the stratigraphy through test pits and these marks are test pits that we opened in this dry environment so pits like this until reaching the groundwater the groundwater is between it's less than a meter mostly in most of the areas so we analyzed the stratigraphy to understand try to understand what environment formed this deposit so to summarize we found this evidence of the deposit that could be interpreted as wetlands close to the Pena shoreline and followed by to go into the ocean by the deposit Laguna deposits and then Open Beach deposits and then the Morter Beach this could be understood it could be like this this is the area in the north of Chico the Aluferas de Medio Mundo and Morteros, Pata y Las Alinas could be like this or larger with a lagoon and some wetlands around but we were missing something and that's the hardest part of this environmental reconstruction is the chronology because we know that this environment was there but we didn't know when and when this transformation happened so our explorations in 2012 found three new shell middens all of them Mesodiasmas Machas shell middens and these were the Memejo, Donoros and three sorry, on the north part of the dry environment so we decided to excavate them because there were some evidence of that these shell middens were in cultura so this is Memejo too and we excavated this last January, January 2017 and we found this cultural evidence a hard stone heart with charcoal and shells matches inside so we did them and this date helped to have the maximum date for ocean recession and also we used mortals this is another view of mortals amount and if you see part of the mountains inside the dry environment in the beginning we saw that this was like a collapse because of the time and because of that some part of the mountain was inside but we explored that area and we found architecture that is very similar than the surface of occupation and this is a stone architecture and it's dated to 5000 years P.P. so what we have so far is this the ocean wasn't there between, I mean this embayment wasn't active around 5000 years ago because mortals was there the ocean wasn't in the middle part of the embayment that's 2700 B.P. because of the shell mutants and probably this wasn't an active embayment I mean the population that occupied this area didn't see an active embayment when they arrived but it's very likely that the wetlands and the lagoon were there around that time that's what the gearcheology tells us so far the whole occupation of the area with the dates that I have until now indicated occupation of the area from 6000 to 3000 B.P. and these seem to be related to some regional changes in the behavior of El Nino but I can talk about this in another time but there is some relationship with that and Mortelo was the oldest site in the area apparently it has the oldest evidence of monumental architecture and some ceremonial activities so far and we recently found some evidence of cultural deposits and there are pre-architecture pre-monumental phases so probably Mortelo's is going to be very old older than 6000 for sure and this is very interesting because we have a very long occupation of the site and we can understand this construction of monumental architecture there because there was a long history of occupation it didn't happen like from nothing so this is another view of this deposit we haven't dated this deposit yet but that's for future research there is a gap between Mortelo's as I said the oldest site with this ceremonial architecture monumental architecture but the occupation ended around 5000 B.P. and then the oldest date for the older monumental site in the area is 4000 there is a gap of 1000 years and I think the answer is there is here in Salinas de Chao Salinas de Chao is it was excavated or it was little excavated so hopefully this year we are going to start a new excavation at this site and something I forgot to tell sorry is that the characteristic of the architecture here indicates that some monumental architecture in this ceremonial space is that repeated in some part of the mount similar and other rooms in different parts of the mount mostly on the north side and also the stone architecture is very similar it was like the same kind of architecture on the top, on the east side on the west side, on the north side indicating that same kind of activities maybe related with some families or small groups but what you see here is a change it's a very interesting change it's a more centralized the activities ceremonial activities are more centralized you have more also a spaces built for larger audience I don't know if there were larger audience but they built that so that's a very interesting change and also, sorry so far Salinas de Chao belongs to the second phase of occupation of Pampaela Salinas and some other sites that we have dated the site that have this larger architecture belong to this part this second phase from 4,000 to 3,000 BP and that's also very interesting to understand how population how the activities change so around 3,000 BP this site was abandoned the whole area was abandoned again this coincides with some changes with the linear activities and more fine sediment coming to this area so the ocean there wasn't like a real recession of the ocean but more than an infilling of the embainment with fine sediment coming from the air and the ocean and so around 3,000 BP there was no wetlands there was no lagoon and that was the end of the occupation but also this abandonment is changing the occupation of Pampaela Salinas and that could be related to other sites in the Chao Valley maybe sites like this one the Iserro Cabra also reported by Cardenas and her team this is in the Miacholo Valley one of the components of the Chao River and this is an interesting site because it's composed by a series of small mounds with sunken circular plasters that can be another site that's theorized at the end of the around the end of the Pampaela Salinas activity and also this I hope in the future in the near future we are going to come to this site and do some excavation to take some dates so to finish what we see here is a very interesting history of this valley very ancient history of this valley and monumental architecture ceremonial architecture that has a long history in this area although Cardenas the Chao can have some characteristic very similar than the northern Chico the presence of this site is understood because of morteros and because of all these people living in this area for a long time so it wasn't just influence from other areas that got this site to be built well thank you very much I think it's a quick question the rectangular adobes that you show are those molded or they hand-modeled? or they are handmade and some particular things that they are made of clay just clay, nothing else they don't have tempered sand or rolls or any other materials I believe that concludes the morning session thank you