A brief synopsis of post-Spanish activities in the Galapagos will here be included since the prehistory of the islands may be better appreciated against the background of known historic events.

The group was visited for the first time by Europeans in 1535, when a ship carrying the Bishop of Panama, Tomás de Berlanga, was helplessly caught by the offshore current while sailing southwards along the mainland coast bound for Peru. In the area where El Niño and the Humboldt Current join forces Berlanga's sailing vessel was caught in a 6-day lull and immediately started a rapid drift away from the coast. After drifting helplessly in the doldrums for 10 days the vessel came in sight of an island on the 10th day of March. In a subsequent report from Tomás de Berlanga to the Emperor of Spain, dated the 26th of April, 1535, the Bishop speaks of the futile search for water on this newly discovered island where the ship's crew encountered strange iguanas resembling serpents and tortoises so large that each one could carry a man on its back.

The first scientific expedition to the Galápagos took place, as stated, when Malaspina made his brief call in 1790. In the 19th century a series of other and more important scientific expeditions followed, among them notably H.M.S. Beagle which arrived in 1835 with Charles Darwin as naturalist on board. Right up to the present time naturalists have been drawn to the Galápagos due to its unique fauna and flora, and biologically and geologically the group has been carefully surveyed. The many visiting expeditions have, however, never assumed the special task of searching for archaeological remains, and no signs of early occupation have been reported, other than man-made caves in the local tuff and broken Spanish jars and porcelain, all properly ascribed to the late 17th century buccaneers and the 18th century whalers.

The principal site discovered by the expedition is on the northwest coast of James Bay, Santiago Island. The local conditions for primitive settlement are conspiciously better in this bay than in any other coastal area visited by the expedition in the Galápagos. To a passing craft James Bay opens up wide and impressive, well sheltered by forest-clad mountains sufficiently withdrawn from the coast to leave space for a large and level plateau lifted up like a terrace above the fine sand beaches of the bay (Fig. 3). In the rainy season glittering streams of water appear on the sides of a cone-shaped volcano (Sugar Loaf) and reveal from far out at sea the likely location of waterholes. Even in the dry season there are one or 2 dependable waterholes a couple of miles inland at the foot of this hill.

The identification of the archaeological material from the Galápagos islands is naturally dependent on the state of knowledge of the mainland archaeology. It should therefore be remembered that the archaeology of certain areas on the coast of Ecuador and Peru is still very little known. Thus, for instance, the far north of Peru, with such principal aboriginal ports as Piura and Tumbez, is virtually unknown, and the situation is not very much better with regard to the main Ecuadorian navigation center of the Guayaquil Bay area. Archaeologically, the best known section of the mainland immediately east of the Galápagos is the central part of the North Peruvian coast with such valleys as Moche, Chicama, and Virú. Organized archaeology in this area, with a chronological approach, first began with Uhle in the early part of this century, and continued with the work of Kroeber, Bennett, Larco Hoyle, and others, all of whom confined their chronological research almost entirely to burials, and especially to the classical types of funeral ceramics. Before Uhle, a number of publications on prehistoric art of the North Peruvian coast had appeared, but nearly all of them were based on the rich museum collections of funeral goods that had accumulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1954, 2 years after our expedition to the Galápagos, the group was visited by J. C. Courier and C. Hall of the Walt Disney Galápagos Expedition, which made use of some of the local guides that had served in our expedition and were thus trained in the general search for surface archaeology. In a letter from Mr. Couffer (dated Dec. 18, 1954), he states that their expedition visited a tiny bight behind Cabo Colorado on the coast of Santa Cruz Island. In this bight (which was not visited by our expedition) they found a cleared landing place for small boats, with the lava rocks stacked to form a small sea wall. Ashore, at the bottom of a shallow valley, they found quantities of European artifacts, such as “broken heavy demijohn material, broken glassware, fragments of clay pipes, iron artifacts, European chinaware, and other recent material.”