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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology pp 4407–4419Cite as

Las Vegas: Environmental Archaeology of an Early Site in Coastal Ecuador

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Introduction

At the end of the Pleistocene, the Las Vegas people developed an adaptation focused on a wide variety of marine, estuarine, and terrestrial resources in the Pacific littoral of today’s Ecuador. While they may be classified as broad-spectrum foragers, hunters, and fishermen, they initiated an enduring pattern of plant cultivation, figured among the earliest cultivators in America, and participated in the domestication of useful plant species in the Neotropical region while progressively intensifying both fishing and horticulture. The Las Vegas adaptation has been reconstructed from a wide variety of evidence found in 32 archaeological sites in the western part of the Santa Elena Peninsula (SEP).

The chronological framework for interpreting Las Vegas evidence is based upon 30 radiocarbon dates (Stothert et al. 2003; Table 1). These form a coherent series, and agree well with independent stratigraphic interpretations. Deep preceramic midden in Site 80 permitted the...

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  • Lavallée, D. 2000.The first South Americans. The peopling of a continent from the earliest evidence to high culture. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Karen E. Stothert

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  1. Karen E. Stothert
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Correspondence to Karen E. Stothert .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

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Stothert, K.E. (2014). Las Vegas: Environmental Archaeology of an Early Site in Coastal Ecuador. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_2136

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_2136

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-0426-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-0465-2

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