The Santa Elena Peninsula marks the northern end of a coastal desert that runs three thousand kilometers down South America's Pacific coast. The cold Humboldt Current keeps the air mild, averaging 23 degrees Celsius year-round, but it also strips moisture from the atmosphere before it can reach land. Santa Elena receives only 250 millimeters of rain a year, almost all of it falling between January and March. The natural vegetation is xeric, dominated by cacti and drought-adapted shrubs. Inland, as rainfall increases, the landscape shifts into seasonally dry forest. This was not an easy place to settle. Yet archaeologists have identified thirty-two Las Vegas sites across the peninsula, concentrated along the Rio Grande and its tributaries, including the Las Vegas River itself, inside an area roughly 25 kilometers east-west by 12 north-south.

Human presence on the peninsula goes back to 8800 BCE, but the Las Vegas period runs from 8000 to 4600 BCE. Archaeologists divide the culture into two phases, Early Las Vegas (8000-6000 BCE) and Late Las Vegas (6000-4600 BCE). In the early phase, small family groups lived in flimsy temporary structures and moved between sites to exploit seasonal food sources. They hunted deer, peccary, rabbit, fox, rodents, opossum, and various reptiles and birds. They gathered intertidal crabs and shellfish. The diet was split roughly evenly between land and sea. Then the sea began to rise, and everything shifted. Mangroves declined. Clams disappeared from the diet after 6000 BCE. As the ocean pushed inland, marine resources became more accessible from established base camps, and Las Vegas people began to stay put. Sedentism changed the culture in deep ways.

The Las Vegas people were among the earliest cultivators anywhere in South America. Bottle gourds, useful as water containers and fishing floats, were domesticated by roughly 7000 BCE. Leren, a tropical root crop known as Calathea allouia, appears at the same time. Squash may have been cultivated even earlier. Phytolith evidence, microscopic silica remains preserved in the soil, pushes domesticated squash back to 8000 BCE. Most surprisingly, maize arrived here from Mexico remarkably early. Piperno has reported dates for Las Vegas maize at approximately 6100 to 5870 BCE, making this one of the first places in South America where corn was grown. The Las Vegas people did not abandon fishing, hunting, or foraging. They added farming alongside them, building a diet robust enough that human remains from the sites show no signs of anemia or malnutrition.

In the Late Las Vegas period, burial practices became elaborate. Interments concentrated at two major sites, 80 and 66/67, with bodies sometimes transported from smaller seasonal camps for formal burial or reburial. At Site 80 alone, archaeologists have recovered the remains of at least 192 individuals, making it one of the largest preceramic burial grounds in South America. Most burials show evidence of complex ritual. A typical primary burial placed the body in a flexed position, knees drawn up. Later, the bones were often exhumed and reinterred elsewhere as a secondary burial. This pattern suggests the two major sites had grown into ceremonial centers and base camps, places where the community gathered to honor its dead and reinforce the bonds between the living. Food sharing within the settlements was another sign of increasingly formal community life. This reciprocity would become a hallmark of later Andean cultures.

Around 4600 BCE, the Las Vegas culture simply stops appearing in the archaeological record. For roughly a thousand years, the Santa Elena Peninsula shows no evidence of human presence. Then, around 3500 BCE, the Valdivia culture appears in the same region, remembered today for some of the oldest ceramics in the Americas. Whether the Valdivians descended from Las Vegas survivors, migrated in from elsewhere, or represent something entirely new, no one yet knows. The fate of the Las Vegas people is one of archaeology's open questions. What is certain is what they left behind: evidence that the domestication of plants in the Americas was not a single event, not a single place, not even a single continent's achievement. A coastal desert people, living in small groups on a rainless peninsula, were already tending gardens eight thousand years ago.