Excavations at Quebrada Jaguay 280 (QJ-280) (16°30′S) in south coastal Peru demonstrated that Paleoindian-age people of the Terminal Pleistocene (about 11,100 to 10,000 carbon-14 years before the present or about 13,000 to 11,000 calibrated years before the present) in South America relied on marine resources while resident on the coast, which extends the South American record of maritime exploitation by a millennium. This site supports recent evidence that Paleoindian-age people had diverse subsistence systems. The presence of obsidian at QJ-280 shows that the inhabitants had contact with the adjacent Andean highlands during the Terminal Pleistocene.

The first Mesoamerican civilization, the Gulf Coast Olmec, is associated with hierarchical society, monumental art, and an internally consistent ideology, expressed in a distinct style and salient iconography. Whether the Olmec style arose in just one area or emerged from interactions among scattered contemporaneous societies remains controversial. Using elemental analysis, we determined the regional clay sources of 725 archaeological ceramic samples from across Mesoamerica. Exported Olmec-style ceramics originated from the San Lorenzo region of the Gulf Coast, supporting Olmec priority in the creation and spread of the first unified style and iconographic system in Mesoamerica.