By about 2500 BC, agricultural communities were widespread in the north-west, from Ecuador to Venezuela. As on the Amazon, settlements consisted of large dwellings housing extended families of ten or more people. They were often semi-subterranean, their walls built up of logs plastered with mud.
The settlement of Real Alto gives us an insight into the public life of such a village. Here two large mounds faced each other across a central plaza, each surmounted by a building. Inside one were pits containing the remains of ceremonial feasts: lobster, scallop and turtle shells, deer bones and broken pots.
On the other mound bundles of bones from several bodies were buried inside a charnel house (funerary chamber). Across its threshold lay the body of a woman in a grave lined with saddle querns (grindstones) and rollers, widely used in the preparation of maize flour but later also regarded as prestige objects.
Eight associated dismembered male bodies, possibly sacrifices to accompany her to the other world, suggest that this woman enjoyed high status within her community.
