The first South Americans
Subtitle: the peopling of a continent from the earliest evidence to high culture
By: Danièle Lavallée ; translated by Paul G. Bahn
Edition: [English-language ed.]
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Salt Lake City
Language: eng
Number of pages: 260
Subjects: Indians of South America -- Antiquities; Indians of South America -- History; South America -- Antiquities
Work titles: Promesse d'Amérique.
Description: "In The First South Americans, Daniele Lavallee presents all current evidence and claims for the early traces of a human presence on the continent, surveying the territory from Tierra del Fuego to the Caribbean shores of Colombia and from Brazil to Ecuador.

She discusses the continent's earliest occupants, then continues to explore cultural development that include the hunters of the Holocene, the rise of horticulture and animal domestication, maritime adaptations, the Andean development of ceramics and weaving, social stratification, and finally the emergence of the first Andean civilization of Chavin.".

"Lavallee shows how, little by little, people occupied this mosiac of territories over the millennia, sometimes yielding to the constraints of the environment, sometimes controlling and transforming it."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-249) and index
Table of contents: title: The discovery of a world?; title: The first occupants; title: The time of the hunters; title: The Andean boom; title: The other side of the cordillera; title: Peasants, artisans, priests; title: Epilogue : civilization