PARACAS CAVERNAS, TOPARÁ Y OCUCAJE, EN EL ORIGEN DE LOS CONCEPTOS: MATERIALES CERÁMICOS DE CERRO COLORADO (EXCAVACIONES DE JULIO C. TELLO).

The story of the terms «Paracas», «Ocucaje» and «Topará», as well as the relative chronologies that served as conceptual basis for these terms, demonstrate that their definitions emerge from the state of knowledge and methodologies that were in use at the time of its formulation. By an accident of history, the first interpretations of the «origin» of social complexity on the south coast by Julio C. Tello were based on his excavations in the Paracas Bay (Cerro Colorado-Wari Kayan and Arena Blanca-Cabezas Largas), a site located on the border between two different cultural areas: Topará to the north and Ocucaje-Nasca, to the south of the Pisco valley. The differences relate to technological pottery traditions and monumental architecture, among others. These areas are formed as such after the dusk of Chavin, right at the transition between two periods that would be defined years later as the Early Horizon and Early Intermediate Period by John H. Rowe. Since the discovery of Tello, most Peruvian and European archaeologists chose to call «Paracas» all material expressions of the Formative (pre-Nasca) Period on the southern coast at the first millennium BC, and likewise to consider them a priori as components of a single culture, created by a particular group. The results of recent research, including the analysis of ceramics of the «Paracas Cavernas» phase made by the authors of this article, invite to a critical review of such interpretations. Specimens preserved today in the Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Peru (MNAAHP) belonging to different technological and stylistic traditions were recorded by Tello in the same funerary context. Topara is a dominant style (Jahuay and Chongos phases), but there are also Ocucaje style ceramics from the upper and middle valley of Ica, as well as a piece imported from the Mantaro Valley. The presence of Topará style in the Cavernas phase provides strong arguments to consider the Paracas Peninsula as a border, and a place of interaction between «Topará» and «Ocucaje-Nasca» areas. Also, this fact among others suggests full continuity between the phases that Tello considered expressions of two different cultures, the Paracas-Cavernas and Paracas-Necropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]