Lomas

Patches of vegetation outside of valleys that were watered at that season by fogs. The Peruvian coast was covered with areas of this type of vegetation which could live off the moisture from the fog in the air. Lomas were created as a result of climatic shift at end of Pleistocene. Lomas culture was developed in these areas by hunters who turned to exploitation of this vegetation as their economic basis. They set up seasonally occupied camps during the winter months. The lomas provided wild seeds, tubers, and large snails; deer, camelids (probably guanaco), owls, and foxes were hunted. Milling stones, manos, mortars, pestles, and projectile points frequently occur in the assemblages. Around 2500 BC, a further climatic change made much of the lomas dry up, and the area became a desert. Lomas sites were abandoned in favor of permanent settlement at the littoral zone along the coast, where maritime resources were exploited. The deposits are not thick enough to show stratification, but they have been arranged in chronological order by comparing the implement types and noting their distribution within the shrinking patches of vegetation.

In the period <6500-2500 be seasonally occupied camps were set up several kilometres from the sea in the coastal plain of central Peru. In the winter months, precipitation in the form of fog changed this virtual desert into a fertile area of seed-producing grasses. Highland hunters (see Lauricocha Caves) descended into these lomas lowlands to exploit this resource as part of an Archaic lifestyle. Milling stones, manos, mortars and pestles occur frequently in the assemblages of the later period, which may also have seen some cultivation. By 2500 be shifts in ocean currents and other environmental factors caused the disappearance of fog precipitation and the lomas was abandoned in favour of permanent settlement at the littoral zone.