Valdivia culture

The Valdivia culture is an archaeological culture of the coastal lowlands of Ecuador, centred on the Santa Elena peninsula and neighbouring provinces. Lasting from roughly 3800–3500 BCE to about 1500 BCE, it is one of the earliest settled, pottery-making farming societies known in the Americas. It is best known for its pottery and for small female figurines often called the "Venus" figures of Valdivia.

Archaeologists define Valdivia by its pottery, which is among the oldest on the continent, together with its villages and farming. Published date ranges differ: some give 3500 to 1500 BCE, others 3800 to about 1450 BCE. Radiocarbon dates published in 2016 place its start at about 3600 BCE, after the much older Las Vegas culture of hunters and gatherers on the same coast. The shift from Las Vegas to Valdivia is usually set at the moment pottery appears. In 1974 the archaeologist Betsy Hill proposed a sequence of eight phases, still used to date Valdivia sites by changing pottery styles.

The Ecuadorian archaeologist Emilio Estrada identified the culture in 1956 and named it after the coastal village of Valdivia, where he soon worked with the American archaeologists Betty Meggers and Clifford Evans. Other sites followed, including San Pablo, Loma Alta and Real Alto, where excavations from the 1970s uncovered house plans and plazas. Around 2500 BCE Real Alto may have held about 1,250 people, with two plazas and two ceremonial mounds. Further sites stretch inland and along the coast from Santa Elena to El Oro.

Valdivia people lived in oval or circular houses arranged around a central open space. Early researchers, working at shoreline sites, assumed they lived mainly from shellfish and fishing. Later finds, including a maize impression in pottery at San Pablo, showed that farming was central. Crops identified at Valdivia sites include maize, beans, squash, cassava, chili peppers and cotton, which was spun and woven into cloth. Fish and occasional deer added to the diet, and grinding stones are common finds. Some scholars see the culture as egalitarian, while others point to special burials in central mounds as signs of rank.

Valdivia pottery, at first plain and functional, grew finer over time, with red slip, polishing and many kinds of incised and stamped decoration. The figurines were first carved in stone; ceramic versions appear from about 3300 BCE. Most show women, made from two rolls of clay joined together, with the lower ends left apart as legs and individual hairstyles. Their purpose is unknown: suggested uses include fertility rites, healing ceremonies and rites of passage, but none has been proved.

Most adults were buried in a flexed position with few or no grave goods, and children were sometimes placed under an inverted pot. At Real Alto, a woman was buried in a tomb lined with grinding stones near the centre of the village, with several men buried around her; some archaeologists interpret them as sacrifices, but this remains uncertain.

In the 1960s Estrada, Meggers and Evans argued that Valdivia pottery was so similar to that of the Jōmon culture of Japan that shipwrecked Japanese fishermen might have introduced it. Critics pointed to the immense distance and to ocean currents, and in the 1970s older, simpler pottery found beneath Valdivia levels, the San Pedro style, supported independent local development. Most archaeologists now reject the transpacific theory. Valdivia was followed on the coast by the Machalilla culture and then the Chorrera culture.

Our maps draw a territory labelled "Valdivia" on the 3000 BCE and 2000 BCE maps, an approximate area for a culture known from scattered archaeological sites in coastal Ecuador.