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In 2007, while searching for signs of ancient human inhabitants of the Andes mountain range, more than 4,300 meters above sea level, Kurt Rademaker came across a field littered with chunks of obsidian—some of them fashioned into tools. “There were hundreds and hundreds of them,” recalls Rademaker, then a graduate student at the University of Maine. “Adjacent to this open-air workshop, just up above it on the hillside, was a beautiful rock shelter. . . . I just had a gut feeling that it was the kind [of site] I had been looking for.”
A decade earlier, Rademaker’s advisor, archaeologist Daniel Sandweiss, had made the unexpected discovery of flakes and tools made of obsidian, a volcanic rock, in excavations at one of the oldest archaeological sites in South America. Quebrada Jaguay, which dates to 13,000–11,000 years ago, sits along the Peruvian coast, where there are no ...
