Of all human histories of the Andes, the initial peopling of the continent and the beginnings of indigenous civilization and food production have proven to be some of the more difficult to master. For most Andean scholars, pre-Hispanic civilization is seen to begin with monumental architecture, public works of art – among other spectacular achievements–at large, permanent settlements such as Chavin de Huantar in the highlands and Caral on the coast of Peru before 3,000 years ago. (All dates in this volume refer to calibrated dates. BP refers to Before Present. Yet, several major social and economic foundations of civilization had already been in existence for several millennia. Archaeologists have always considered the earlier period from ~13,000 to 6,000 years ago to be important in terms of the appearance of domesticated plants and animals, social differentiation, and a sedentary lifeway, but there is more to this period than just these developments. The spread of crop production and other technologies, kinship-based labor projects, and population aggregation, for instance, formed a palimpsest of ever-changing conditions across many different environments of the Andes that created a patchwork of new transformations through time. This book examines these formations and transformations from the late Pleistocene to the middle Holocene in two valleys in northern Peru – Zana and Jequetepeque (Figs. 1.1, 1.2) – through a large body of archaeological evidence, and places them in the context of recent scholarship studying similar processes in other parts of the world.