DATING THE DEAD: NEW RADIOCARBON DATES FROM THE LOWER ICA VALLEY, SOUTH COAST PERU Lauren Cadwallader 1,2 • Susana Arce Torres 3 • Tamsin C O’Connell 4 • Alexander G Pullen 1 • David G Beresford-Jones 1 ABSTRACT. This article presents radiocarbon dates from human bone samples (n = 13) from seven pre-Columbian cem- eteries in the Samaca and Ullujaya Basins of the lower Ica Valley, south coast of Peru, spanning from the end of the Early Horizon to the Inca Late Horizon. These contexts have been severely looted. Yet, in all cases, their putative dating by material culture remains is confrmed by these 14 C dates. This shows that such disturbed contexts, sadly typical of the Peruvian coast, can nonetheless still yield valuable bioarchaeological and burial practice data. These dates elaborate upon an emerging pic- ture of the absolute dating of the cultural phases of the wider south coast region, in particular casting new light on the poorly understood Middle Horizon to Late Intermediate period transition. A paucity of archaeological data for this 3-century period has been taken as evidence of some sort of environmentally or socially induced lacuna. Instead, the 14 C dates presented here suggest that the basins of the lower Ica Valley were continuously occupied over this period. INTRODUCTION The riverine oases that cross the arid desert of the south coast of Peru were host to a rich histo- ry of cultural change. Over more than 2 millennia before the Spanish conquest (about 750 BC to AD 1536), at least six major cultural changes occurred here. The Paracas (or Ocucaje) culture emerged in the Early Horizon, duly to evolve into Nasca. Nasca’s fragmentation and collapse was followed by domination of the region by the highland Wari Empire during the Middle Horizon be- fore, in turn it waned and the more regionally focused Ica–Chincha society fourished before being incorporated into the Inca Empire. Much of the archaeological work has focused on the valleys of the Río Grande de Nazca. Yet, the Ica Valley, just to the north, also had a signifcant, and sometimes dominant, role to play in the cultural trajectories of the south coast. Moreover, ceramic sequences from Ica (Menzel 1964, 1976; Menzel et al. 1964) underlie Rowe’s (1967) widely used chronology for all Andean prehistory. Parts of those sequences are only now being tied to absolute radiocarbon dates on the south coast based on work in Nazca and Palpa (Unkel and Kromer 2009; Unkel et al. 2012), while others still remain to be clarifed or refned (and see Vaughn et al. 2014). This study is the frst to assess the ceramic chronology using 14 C-dated material from the Ica Valley itself. Our study area is the Samaca and Ullujaya Basins of lower Ica Valley (see Figure 1). Along the western margins of these basins lie the cemeteries of the various cultural groups who inhabited them over some 2000 yr. We report dates from a selected subset of seven cemeteries—four in the Samaca Basin and three in Ullujaya—out of a total of 34 such funerary contexts recorded here (Beresford-Jones 2011). All have been subjected to severe looting throughout the 20th century by huaqueros to supply pre-Columbian “art” markets (see Pollard Rowe 1979, 1992; Burger 1992; Metropolitan Museum of Art 2013), and their surfaces are littered with fragments of material cul- ture and human remains and other looting debris. Investigations of human remains from those loot- ed contexts have yielded valuable information on changes in ancient diet from the Early Horizon through to the end of the Late Intermediate Period (see Cadwallader 2013). Without secure dating, however, the inferences that can be drawn about these individuals and the communities to which they belonged will inevitably be subject to the caveats entailed by their looted contexts. Thus, the 1. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER, UK. 2. Corresponding author. Email: lc340@cam.ac.uk. 3. Museo Regional de Ica (INC-Ica), Avda. Ayabaca s/n Cuadra 8, Urbanización San Isidro, Ica, Perú. 4. Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3DZ; and McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER, UK. Radiocarbon, Vol 57, Nr 5, 2015, p 765–773 DOI: 10.2458/azu_rc.57.18343 © 2015 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona