The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

Earliest South American Lifeways 225
and high savannah-like formations. Writing of northern Venezuela, Colinvaux
portrays a vivid entrada: "We are, therefore, given a tantalizing
glimpse of a late glacial landscape, principally savanna land but with
patches of woodland or even forest within a day or two's march. It
might have been an easy land for people to penetrate if their culture was
one already adapted to more open regions in the northern continent." 35
Unfortunately, typical Paleoindian chipped-stone projectile points are
exceedingly rare in northern South America. To my knowledge, none of
the fishtail types has been found in central or eastern Venezuela, Guyana,
Surinam, French Guiana, or northern Brazil. Across that vast area, there
are no signs of Paleoindian dispersal past the Paraguana Peninsula, 100
kilometers across the Gulf of Venezuela from Colombia's Guajira Peninsula.
At El Cayude, fluted points made of chert resemble the Madden
lake specimens from Panama, as well as the stemmed fishtail points from
Chile, and they are not associated with any quartzite artifacts of the El
Jobo series. The El Jobo lanceolate points may yet prove to have been
functionally equivalent, but they have yet to be found in a subsurface
living site with a complete stone tool industry. The El Jobo "points"
themselves may not be finished tools, but they resemble Mexican Lerma
points and, as already discussed, may be associated with extinct animals
at Taima-Taima and like sites. That is, the El Jobo complex may be
Paleoindian in terms of adaptation and date. In the Guiana highlands,
there are large stemmed points, not at all like the fishtail type, which are
undated, not associated with extinct animals, and more likely to belong
to the Archaic stage.
Two possible fishtail points are known in Colombia - one from the
Manizales site and the other from Bahia Gloria, on the Gulf of Darien,
which is fluted and said to resemble those from Alejuela Lake in Panama.
A handful of additional stone points from surface finds, sometimes with
basally thinned and indented tangs, cannot be dated directly. Some have
triangular blades or roughly pentagonal outlines, reminiscent of early
Archaic types in the Central and South Andes, and they generally are
assumed to be fairly early. These come especially from La Tebaida on the
eastern flank of the Cauca Valley, La Elvira near Popayan in the Upper
Cauca, Restrepo in the Western Cordillera, El Espinal in the Tolima
district, and a few other sites that Warwick Bray dates to the much later
35 Paul A. Colinvaux, "Pollen from the Late Glacial of tropical South America: Vegetation and
climate at first settlement," Quarterly Review of Archaeology (1981), 2.
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