Prehispanic Settlement Patterns in the Lower Santa Valley, Peru: A Regional Perspective on the Origins and Development of Complex North Coast Society. David J. Wilson. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. 1988. xx + 590 pp., figures, plates, references, appendixes, index. $60.00 (cloth).

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. of the word, this is her first book. It will not be her last, and it will not be her best. Her more recent writings show increasing sophistication, and we can look forward to fascinating explications of Paracas material culture and that of other ancient societies as her career progresses.The north coast of Peru has long been one of the most fertile proving grounds for the development of New World archaeological method and theory. It has provided the context for the development of macrotheories such as Carneiro's circumscription model of state development, middle-range theories such as Moseley's maritime hypothesis and Conrad's split-inheritance model of Inca expansion, and methodological studies such as Willey's pioneering use of settlement patterns to analyze the development of complex society in the Viru Valley.In this monumental volume, David Wilson sets out to test general population-driven models of the emergence of complex society, such as those specifically developed for the north coast of Peru by Cohen and Carneiro with systematic archaeological survey data from the Santa Valley based on fieldwork conducted in 1979-1980. Wilson surveyed some 750 km2 in this project, and located over one thousand archaeological sites in the study area, spanning close to 3,500 years of human occupation. Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Lower Santa Valley, Peru represents the most comprehensive archaeological survey to have been conducted in the area to date, and serves as an excellent example for presentation of survey investigations. Chapters 1 through 3 make up the introductory section of the volume. Chapter 2 describes the "socioenvironmental" context of the research. For the purposes of framing the survey area within the broad contexts of"maritime" vs. agriculturally based subsistence (pp. 6, 353) Wilson divides the Santa Valley into sierra and coastal sectors. He provides complete geomorphological descriptions of each zone, but treatment of biotic resources, except for a brief discussion of mollusks indigenous to the coastal cliffs (p. 23), is somewhat lacking. This omission may well be the result of a combination of the intensity of modern land use in the Santa, and the barrenness of the coastal desert beyond the river valleys, but it would still be in the interest of completeness, especially with respect to the reconstruction of paleoenvironments (pp. 27-31), to have more details on the types of marine and terrestrial fauna and natural vegetation that may have been available to prehistoric inhabitants. The inclusion of a discussion of both the nature and effects of modern population of the Santa is commendable, since modern conditions are often ignored in the reporting of survey...