THE LOWER UCAYALI RIVER IN PREHISTORY: CULTURAL CHRONOLOGY, ARCHEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE AND A RECENTLY DISCOVERED PRE-COLUMBIAN SITE

Abstract

Published evidence of prehistoric settlement from the lowlands of Amazonian Peru is sufficiently scarce to perpetuate debates over the presence and impact of early populations in western Amazonia. In this paper we review the cultural prehistory of the Lower Ucayali River, assess the presence of archeological sites and recovered artifacts, and describe a promising new site (Suni Caño) which may have been the chiefdom seat of the late prehistoric Cocama. We argue for a fuller exploration of the site and nearby terraces along the Lower Ucayali and in doing so, suggest that studies aiming to resolve debates over early environmental influence of humans in the Peruvian Amazon may not be looking in the most propitious places.

Keywords:

• Amazonia
• archaeology
• Cocama
• cultural ecology
• Incas
• Ucayali River

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Ms. Patricia Patton, Collections/NAGPRA Assistant, Anthropology, University of Nebraska State Museum for providing access to the field notes and an unpublished manuscript of Dr. Thomas Myers (retired). We thank to Dr. Izumi Shimada (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) for his opinion regarding the provenance and metal composition of the axe, based on a photograph. We also thank the staff of McGill University’s Interlibrary Loans department and Martti Pärssinen for their assistance in securing bibliographic material. Carlos Rengifo Upiachihua provided vital field assistance. The maps were ably prepared by Ms. Samantha Carr, Nicolas Cadieux and Tristan Grupp. Finally, we thank William M. Denevan and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice and comments on an earlier draft of the paper. This paper is dedicated to the memory of our co-author and friend, Santiago Rivas Panduro.

Notes

1. For example, see Panaifo Teixeira (1994, Lamina 1); Eriksen (2011, Fig 2.2.2); Morales Chocano (2011, Map 1); de Souza et al. (2018, Fig. 1); and McMichael and Bush (2019, Fig. 1).

2. The Peruvian historian, Vargas Ugarte suggests that Gómez Arias Dávila, a wealthy estate owner from Huánuco, arrived in the Ucayali basin via the Aguaytía River in 1557 but the claim has yet to be substantiated (Zevallos Ríos 2018, 32). Alonzo Mercadillo travelled down the Marañón in 1538, passing the mouth of the Ucayali River, however there is no record of him stopping there; instead, he proceeded downriver and made contact with the Tupí Omagua below the mouth of the Napo River (Salinas de Loyola 1965, 202; Stocks 1981, 53).

3. Known also as the Cosiabatay. In the 17^th C the river was referred to as the Manoa, after the Manoitas, the name given to the Shetebos by the missionaries (Marcoy 1875, 58).

4. Cotton was extensively cultivated along the Lower Ucayali in prehistory, as evidenced by the ubiquity of spinning whorls encountered in burial urns and the importance of cotton cloth in regional trade. Cotton was grown along the river as late as the mid-19^th Century (Herndon and Gibbon 1853, 200) but by the early 1920s, the Cocama apparently no longer knew how to spin and weave cotton (Tessmann 1999, 40).

5. For T-axes recorded in Mayer’s (1998) catalogue, we calculate average characteristics as: mean length of 10.3 cm (n=11); mean weight of 400 gms (n=4); and mean tin content of 4.49% (n=5). Most specimens are from the Cuzco region.

6. Incan metal axes have been found at great distances, east from the Andes. Members of the Orellana expedition found a copper hatchet, “like those which the Indians in Peru use” in Loza (Porcelainville), an Amerindian community between the Juruá and Purús rivers (Carvajal 1934, 425, Figure 1a, p. 48). Uhle (1969, 161) reports an Inca style axe found in the late 19^th C along the Ribeira River near Xiririca, in São Paulo.

7. The westward slope orientation would also be appreciated by the Tupian Cocama who buried their dead in secondary burial urns with the skull facing to the west (Girard 1958, 194).

8. The subsequent demographic collapse and evacuation of the Cocama from the Lower Ucayali meant that trade across these varaderos essentially ceased for over a century and vegetation had overgrown them before they were rediscovered by Franciscan missionaries in the late 18^th C (Myers 1990, 40).

9. Canchahuaya is one of two sacred sites of the Panoan Shipibo-Conibo whose ancestors preceded the Tupian Cocama – the other site being Cumancaya – which according to their origin myth are the ancestral communities of their people. Heath (2002, 26) recounts the fantastical myth in which the entire community of Cumancaya rises up skyward and flies away, then crashes back to Earth, giving form to the Canchahuaya hills with such force that all the pottery scattered. The shattering of pottery is associated with Panoan burials (see Raymond et al. 1975, 12). In their linguistic analysis of the myth, Loriot and Hollenbach (1970, 44-47) draw on an account related to staff of Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1954. Unlike Heath’s version, the people of Cumancaya came to reside on the top of the big hill (Canchahuaya). Their text also offers a graphic account of what must have been a major earthquake that may have triggered migration.

10. Water at the tested site – OR-5 (Manantial Canchahuaya) – had arsenic levels 100 times greater than Peruvian permissible levels and manganese concentrations were 50 times above the limit (INGEMMET 1997, 92, Table 5). de Meyer et al. (2017) found high concentrations of both in wells at many sites near Iquitos and Pucallpa, but their values were much lower than at the Canchahuaya site. Although arsenic bioaccumulates in tissue, the metal does not biomagnify up the food chain as does mercury.

11. Arroyo-Kalin and Rivas Panduro (2019) document a large number of new archeological sites along the Napo River in Peru and Ecuador. In an earlier review of published and unpublished reports, Rivas Panduro and Hidalgo Panaifo (2014) identified 301 archaeological sites in the broader region of Loreto.