Early human settlement in the inter-Andean Magdalena valley, Colombia: New technological and chronological insights from the Nare site
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Magdalena valley, Colombia's principal fluvial corridor, has long been recognized as a key route for early human dispersal in northern South America. This inter-Andean region served as a strategic passage between the Andean highlands and the tropical lowlands, offering a resource-rich environment that supported human mobility and settlement since the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. In the Middle Magdalena valley, some of Colombia's oldest preceramic open-air sites have been identified. However, despite their importance, the technological characteristics of their lithic assemblages—the only direct evidence of early human activity—remain poorly understood. This study presents the first systematic techno-economic analysis of the preceramic stratigraphic unit at the Nare site, integrating use-wear and residue analyses. Moreover, new radiocarbon dates refine the site's chronological framework, placing its main occupation in the Early Holocene. The lithic assemblage shows a strong reliance on local raw materials (primarily quartz and chert), a predominance of unretouched flakes, some retouch flakes, and a single unifacial tool. A bladelet core suggests an interest in producing elongated, relatively standardized flakes, though the absence of bladelets raises questions about off-site transport or differential site use. These results refine our understanding of lithic technology in the region and offer a new perspective on the Middle Magdalena's early industries, highlighting a more diverse and flexible technological repertoire. The Nare assemblage demonstrates a wide range of knapping methods, percussion techniques, and raw material management strategies. This study enhances our understanding of early human adaptation in the region and contributes to broader discussions on lithic technologies and settlement dynamics in northern South America.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".