La Galgada (archaeological site)

The archaeological site of La Galgada in Peru is an example of a ceremonial monument built within the Kotosh Religious Tradition during the preceramic, or Late Archaic period of Andean history. The site itself is located on the eastern bank of the Tablachaca River, the principal tributary of the Santa River. The site is located in the Tauca District of what is now the Pallasca Province of the Republic of Peru.

Situated in the mountainous Andean region, it is at a relatively low altitude of 1,100 metres above sea level. The archaeologists who excavated at the site in the late 1970s and early 1980s decided to call the monument "La Galgada" after the nearest town, a coal-mining settlement about 2 kilometres to the north, although local people instead referred to it as "San Pedro".

The Pre-Ceramic period was a time of change in the Andean region, with communities becoming more sedentary and beginning to construct monumental architecture both in lowland and highland regions.

The Lithic Period was followed by what archaeologists have called the Pre-Ceramic Period, or alternatively the Late Archaic Period, and is characterised by increasing societal complexity, rising population levels and the construction of monumental ceremonial centres across the Andean region. It is the latter of these features that remains the most visually obvious characteristic of the Pre-Ceramic amongst archaeologists, and indicates that by this time, Andean society was sufficiently developed that it could organise large building projects involving the management of labor. The Pre-Ceramic Period also saw a rise in the population of the Andean region, with the possibility that many people were partially migratory, spending much of their year in rural areas but moving to the monumental ceremonial centers for certain times which were seen as having special significance. The Pre-Ceramic also saw climate change occurring in the Andean region, for the culmination of the Ice Age had led to an end of the glacial meltback which had been occurring throughout the Lithic Period, and as a result the sea levels on the west coast of South America stabilized.

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