This volume on early human settlement and agriculture on the lower western Andean slopes of northern Peru synthesizes a veritable mass of data from more than thirty years of fieldwork and research to offer arguably one of the most complete expositions of early and middle Preceramic culture in the Americas. The evidential scope extends to the identification of domestic structures with stone foundations and storage pits, an impressive variety of artifactual remains including well-made stone hoes, landscape features such as garden furrows and irrigation canals, and mound building for public ceremonies. All are well dated through dozens of internally consistent radiocarbon determinations on charcoal, human bone, and plants, revealing a sequence between about 10200 and 5800 bp during which domesticated plants were introduced to the region and food production took hold and intensified (all dates given here are in calibrated radiocarbon years ago). The coverage breadth and data presentation call to mind the classic work The Early Mesoamerican Village (Flannery 1976), this time putting Preceramic South American settlements, economies, social spheres, and technological developments in an empirically rich, synthetic perspective.

With particular regard to the beginnings and development of agriculture in the Zaña Valley, there is a variety of empirical data from cultivated and domesticated plant remains, including AMS-dated macro-botanical specimens and starch grains removed from human teeth of directly dated skeletons and jaws. The micro-fossil and macro-fossil records are often mutually reinforcing and they broaden our understanding of how the plants were prepared as foods and consumed.