Late Pre-Hispanic Stone-tool Workshops at Cayash Ragaj, Central Andes, Peru

ill. ; 29 cm

il. ; 29 cm

This study presents the preliminary results of fieldwork conducted in 1987 at the site of Cayash Ragaj, Oyón province, as part of the third phase of the ‘Huaura Checras’ research project. The investigated area covered the river basin of the Río Checras, the left-bank tributary of the upper Río Huaura, in the mountainous region of the Central Andes of Peru. At Cayash Ragaj, the remnants of a fortified settlement with stone architecture were found. The site occupies an elevated position at the confluence of the Río Checras and its right-bank tributary the Río Cayash, at an altitude of 2600–2650 m a.s.l. To the west of the settlement, three stone-tool workshops were discovered. This find has, to a large extent, expanded our understending of the characteristics of the tool industry of the Cayash culture, which occupied the upper Río Huaura basin in the 10th-16th century AD. This society produced stone tools using locally available quartzite sandstone as a source of raw material. To obtain semi-finished product for tool making, the flaking technique was used on a large scale. Specimens in form of sidescrapers, notched tools, scrapers and perforators – predominate in tool assemblages. A large part of the inventory also consists of amorphous, retouched flakes. The discovery in Cayash Ragaj of workshops where bifacially retouched leaf points were produced in relatively large amounts, leads to the conclusion that people of the Cayash culture were capable of making leaf shaped points, a diagnostically important artefact of the Andean societies, in addition to the aforementioned flake-tools