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southern California are known to have developed watercraft for exploiting marine resources to any substantial degree. Nonetheless, by thirteen thousand years ago, people had settled in the Channel Islands, an archipelago of eight islands extending 140 miles between the Santa Barbara Channel and Gulf of Santa Catalina off southern California. Similar dates are ascribed to the settlement of coastalPeru and Chile and the center of South America, where a dense network of eastward-flowing rivers rising in the Andes would have fostered very fast migrations; when the Amazon is in flood, it takes little effort to cover120 kilometers a day going downstream.
    The exact sequence and dating of these events is still a matter of vigorous, sometimes rancorous debate, but the earliest widely accepted archaeological evidence for human settlement throughout the Americas dates from about fifteen thousand years ago. Regardless of how and when people reached the Americas, it was not until about five thousand years ago, roughly contemporary with the rise of literacy in Mesopotamia and Egypt, that the first states emerged there. The climax cultures ofpre-Columbian America are those of the Andes and ofMesoamerica, but there were independent flowerings in North America, among theMoundbuilders of the Eastern Woodlands, many of whose sites were located on rivers, and in the desert southwest. Some of these developed autonomously, while others show the imprint of neighboring or ancestral civilizations.
    A theory of particular interest to maritime historians is the possibility thatAndean civilization emerged from maritime-oriented communities on the coast of Peru and that later Andean culture was carried north by sea toMesoamerica. This hypothesis maintains that the first people in Peru to coalesce into societies larger than a handful of families were predominantly fishermen living at the mouths of rivers. The arid coast of Peru is home to one of the planet’s driest deserts; there is scant rainfall on the coastal plain and 80 percent of runoff from the Andean highlands flows east toward theAtlantic Ocean—yet one of the world’s most productive fisheries lies just offshore. The west coast of South America is washed by the cold-water Humboldt current, which sweeps north fromAntarctica. As warm air from thePacific passes over the cold coastal waters, it loses its ability to retain water and generate rain, which accounts for Chile’s and Peru’s coastal deserts. At the same time, cold water tends to be richer in nutrients than warm water, and the upwelling of the Humboldt current accounts for the bounty of the adjacent fisheries. A similar climatological process occurs in the Atlantic, where the fish-rich, cold-water Benguela current washes the desert coasts ofAngola,Namibia, andSouth Africa.
    The first builders of South American monumental architecture lived along the more than fifty parallel river valleys that inscribe the coast of Peru. Excavations at Aspero, on the Supe River north of Lima, show that people derived most of their sustenance from the sea in the form of seabirds, shellfish, pelagic fish, and sea mammals. To the extent that they relied on the land, it was for freshwater and the cultivation ofreeds, cotton, and gourds, which could be used for fishing line, nets and floats, and food crops. In the third millennium BCE , the people of Aspero began to erectpyramids—eighteen have been identified—the largest of which covered 1,500 square meters. Farther up the Supe valley, and farther removed from the marine resources that sustained Aspero, is the later site ofCaral, with an area more than three times that of Aspero and pyramids as tall as twenty-five meters. A third site known as El Paraíso and begun about 2000 BCE lies to the south, about two kilometers from the sea. Andean sites contemporary with these and of comparable sophistication in terms of architecture were clearly linked to the coast and all have yielded seashells and fish