"In The First South Americans, Daniele Lavallee presents all current evidence and claims for the early traces of a human presence on the continent, surveying the territory from Tierra del Fuego to the Caribbean shores of Colombia and from Brazil to Ecuador. She discusses the continent's earliest occupants, then continues to explore cultural development that include the hunters of the Holocene, the rise of horticulture and animal domestication, maritime adaptations, the Andean development of ceramics and weaving, social stratification, and finally the emergence of the first Andean civilization of Chavin.". "Lavallee shows how, little by little, people occupied this mosiac of territories over the millennia, sometimes yielding to the constraints of the environment, sometimes controlling and transforming it."--BOOK JACKET.