92 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 146 
strongly suggest felines in full face, although the teeth so characteris- 
tic of later depictions of cats are lacking. 
Villages, as far as they are known, were small, closely knit settle- 
ments at or near river mouths. These cultures seem to have been 
oriented to the beach for fishing and beach gathering, and to the la- 
goons for wild-plant gathering. There is no evidence whatever in the 
long history of Huaca Prieta from about 2500 B.C. to about 1200 B.C. 
for inland hunting, and very little of such evidence elsewhere. Domes- 
ticated plants include one type of squash, lima beans, perhaps the 
kidney bean, bottle gourds, cotton, and a number of species that may 
or may not have been cultivated. 
Very recently Engel (1960 and n.d.) has announced the discovery 
of an even earlier aspect of the culture of the Horticultural Villagers. 
At Chilca, Paracas, and Nazca, in sites dating between 3800 and 3000 
B.C., he has found small semisubterranean houses and burials of 
people who lived very much as did those of the following millennium, 
but who lacked cotton. They grew the lima bean and bottle gourd, and 
collected the roots of wild plants and shellfish. They also fished, as 
attested by fish bones and a bone fishhook, and hunted birds. Crude 
lanceolate projectile points and the use of vicuna pelts for burial wrap- 
pings indicate that they were also land hunters. For matting and net- 
tifig, they used wild vegetable fibers. Simple bone tools, and grinding 
stones are also present. 
These finds seem to point to the possibility that linted cotton was 
introduced at about 3000 b.c. from an Asiatic source to hybridize 
with the wild, unlinted native cotton, producing the distinctive Peru- 
vian cotton that is still being cultivated. They also bring incipient 
agriculture in South America closer in time to the same level of de- 
velopment in Mexico. 
The main archeological problem posed by these simple, culturally 
relatively static villages is the origin of this way of life, which ap- 
pears on the coast of Peru at about 4000 B.C. Having achieved a neat 
economic balance between sea and land, they show no internal change 
until very late in their history and apparently were isolated from con- 
tacts with other regions, at least from contacts that led to significant 
changes. They have no known antecedents ; it is pure speculation as to 
whether they came from the interior, down the coast, or are local de- 
velopments. From the highlands at this time there is nothing to throw 
any light on this problem, nor on the early development of highland 
crops. 
At about 1400 B.C. maize appears in the rubbish (Collier, 1962). 
It is now quite certain that this is of Mesoamerican origin. As Col- 
