Early Pottery in the Americas (Figure 8.3)

The oldest claimed pottery in the Americas, sand-tempered and with incised decoration, made its appearance in what appear to have been hunter-gatherer contexts in the lower Amazon by 6000 BC, for instance at Taperinha (Roosevelt et al. 1991). In northern Colombia, a very different kind of pottery with an organic fiber temper occurs in several sites, the earliest apparently being the inland site of San Jacinto I where an ornately decorated grass-tempered ware is dated to as early as 5000 BC, in association with many large stone-filled cooking pits and food grinding implements (manos and metates). San Jacinto is believed by the excavator (Oyuela-Cayceda 1994, 1996) to have had a wild seed-exploiting economy, with no definite evidence for agriculture, although perhaps in some kind of transition toward it. Other sites with fiber-tempered pottery occur as large doughnut-shaped shell middens on the northern Colombian coast (e.g., Puerto Hormiga; Hoopes 1994).

Elsewhere, similar fiber-tempered pottery and shell middens occur in parts of the southeastern USA (South Carolina, Georgia, northern Florida) by about 2500 BC. A different kind of pottery, Monagrillo sand-tempered, appears in shell middens and rockshelters in Panama by soon after 3500 BC. Suggestions that these early pottery occurrences are, or are not, related to each other are legion, but as John Hoopes (1994) points out, these oldest pottery occurrences in the Americas - currently in the lower Amazon, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and the southeastern USA - could well have occurred independently of each other. Being honest, we just do not know.

Were any of these early pottery-using groups associated with any form of agricultural subsistence? The evidence is not clear, although Dolores Piperno and Deborah Pearsall clearly favor an affirmative answer, perhaps for both maize and manioc in the general region of northern South America (Panama, Colombia, Ecuador) by possibly 5000 BC. As discussed above, it is possible that hunter-gatherers were beginning to manipulate these species by this time, particularly if maize was used for its sugary stalk. But if they did, the archaeological sites concerned provide no hard evidence.

Early Farmers in the Americas

Between 2500 and 1000 BC, the archaeological record in the Americas underwent remarkable transformations. Societies capable of constructing sedentary residential complexes with ceremonial monuments, in many cases with positively identified agriculture, appeared across vast regions of the northern Andes, Middle America, the US Southwest and the Eastern Woodlands. In their remarkable sharings, these late Archaic and early Formative cultures testify to the creation of what archaeologists would term a series of "interaction spheres" on a vast scale. It is the explanations for the existences of these interaction spheres, or horizons in archaeological classification, that offer some of the most interesting research questions in Americanist archaeology. What roles were played by population movement and the sharing of fairly proximate cultural and linguistic ancestries?