Chan-Chan is an archaeological site

Archaeological site

An archaeological site is a place in which evidence of past activity is preserved , and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology and represents a part of the archaeological record.Beyond this, the definition and geographical extent of a 'site' can vary widely,...

 and beach

Beach

A beach is a geological landform along the shoreline of an ocean, sea, lake or river. It usually consists of loose particles which are often composed of rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles or cobblestones...

 on the coast of the commune of Mehuín

Mehuín

Mehuín is a Chilean town and harbour, located on the shores of the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of Lingue River. Administratively it belongs to the San José de la Mariquina commune in Valdivia Province of Los Ríos Region....

 in southern Chile

Zona Sur

The Zona Sur is one of the five natural regions on which CORFO divided continental Chile in 1950. Its northern border is formed by the Bío-Bío River, the limit with the Central Chile Zone. By west with the Pacific Ocean, by the east with the Andean mountains and Argentina. Its southern border is...

. Chan-Chan is known to have been inhabited by hunter-gatherer

Hunter-gatherer

A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...

s during two periods of the Middle Archaic, separated by a hiatus. One period spans from 6420 to 6250 BP

Before Present

Before Present years is a time scale used in archaeology, geology, and other scientific disciplines to specify when events in the past occurred. Because the "present" time changes, standard practice is to use AD 1950 as the origin of the age scale, reflecting the fact that radiocarbon...

 and the other from 6130 to 5730 BP. The beach of Chan-Chan extends on the north to Huezhui tombolo

Tombolo

A tombolo, from the Italian tombolo, derived from the Latin tumulus, meaning 'mound,' and sometimes translated as ayre , is a deposition landform in which an island is attached to the mainland by a narrow piece of land such as a spit or bar. Once attached, the island is then known as a tied island...

 and on the south to a peninsula

Peninsula

A peninsula is a piece of land that is bordered by water on three sides but connected to mainland. In many Germanic and Celtic languages and also in Baltic, Slavic and Hungarian, peninsulas are called "half-islands"....

. The archaeological site itself is located above the beach, on a coastal terrace

Marine terrace

A marine terrace, coastal terrace, raised beach or perched coastline is a relatively flat, horizontal or gently inclined surface of marine origin, mostly an old abrasion platform which has been lifted out of the sphere of wave activity . Thus it lies above or under the current sea level, depending...

, that was formed by sediment

Sediment

Sediment is naturally occurring material that is broken down by processes of weathering and erosion, and is subsequently transported by the action of fluids such as wind, water, or ice, and/or by the force of gravity acting on the particle itself....

s of allochthonous (exotic) and autochthonous (local) origin. The allochthonous material consist of volcanic rock

Volcanic rock

Volcanic rock is a rock formed from magma erupted from a volcano. In other words, it is an igneous rock of volcanic origin...

s as well as retransportated mollusc shell

Mollusc shell

The mollusc shell is typically a calcareous exoskeleton which encloses, supports and protects the soft parts of an animal in the phylum Mollusca, which includes snails, clams, tusk shells, and several other classes...

s. The autochthonous material is chiefly made of sand

Sand

Sand is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles.The composition of sand is highly variable, depending on the local rock sources and conditions, but the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal...

s, gravel

Gravel

Gravel is composed of unconsolidated rock fragments that have a general particle size range and include size classes from granule- to boulder-sized fragments. Gravel can be sub-categorized into granule and cobble...

 and peat

Peat

Peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation matter or histosol. Peat forms in wetland bogs, moors, muskegs, pocosins, mires, and peat swamp forests. Peat is harvested as an important source of fuel in certain parts of the world...

.

After examining several artifacts found on the coast of the Valdivia

Los Ríos Region

The XIV Los Ríos Region is one of Chile's 15 first order administrative divisions. Its capital is Valdivia. Pop. 356,396 . It began to operate as region on October 2, 2007. It was created by subdividing the Los Lagos Region in southern Chile...

 and Concepción area

Concepción, Chile

Concepción is a city in Chile, capital of Concepción Province and of the Biobío Region or Region VIII. Greater Concepción is the second-largest conurbation in the country, with 889,725 inhabitants...

s, archaeologist Menghin claimed the findings belong to a "Chanchaense Complex" or culture

Archaeological culture

An archaeological culture is a recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place, which are thought to constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society. The connection between the artifacts is based on archaeologists' understanding and interpretation and...

 extending from Quiriquina Island

Quiriquina Island

Quiriquina Island, Chile is located at the entrance to the Bay of Concepción, 11 km north of Talcahuano.In April, 1557, Don Garcia de Mendoza, Spanish viceroy of the Kingdom of Chile, arrived at the harbor of Concepción, with a large force of infantry and established himself upon the island of...

 (37° S) in the north to Tierra del Fuego

Tierra del Fuego

Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan. The archipelago consists of a main island Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego divided between Chile and Argentina with an area of , and a group of smaller islands including Cape...

 (55° S) in the south. The inhabitants of Chan-Chan had access to a substantial diversity of rocks, with schist

Schist

The schists constitute a group of medium-grade metamorphic rocks, chiefly notable for the preponderance of lamellar minerals such as micas, chlorite, talc, hornblende, graphite, and others. Quartz often occurs in drawn-out grains to such an extent that a particular form called quartz schist is...

s, basalt

Basalt

Basalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet. It may be porphyritic containing larger crystals in a fine matrix, or vesicular, or frothy scoria. Unweathered basalt is black or grey...

, quartz

Quartz

Quartz is the second-most-abundant mineral in the Earth's continental crust, after feldspar. It is made up of a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall formula SiO2. There are many different varieties of quartz,...

 and chert

Chert

Chert is a fine-grained silica-rich microcrystalline, cryptocrystalline or microfibrous sedimentary rock that may contain small fossils. It varies greatly in color , but most often manifests as gray, brown, grayish brown and light green to rusty red; its color is an expression of trace elements...

 being found close to or at the archaeological site. The inhabitants of Chan-Chan had even grey obsidian

Obsidian

Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock.It is produced when felsic lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimum crystal growth...

 from Chaitén Volcano, located 400 km south of Chan-Chan. As of 2005, 3484 stone handcrafts

Stone tool

A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric, particularly Stone Age cultures that have become extinct...

 and 12,050 carve outs have been found in Chan-Chan as well as bones from mammals, birds and fishes apart from conchal

Conchal

Conchal is a municipality in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. The population in 2004 is 24,422 and the area is 184.36 km². The elevation is 591 m....

es of marine invertebrate

Invertebrate

An invertebrate is an animal without a backbone. The group includes 97% of all animal species – all animals except those in the chordate subphylum Vertebrata .Invertebrates form a paraphyletic group...

 shells.

The superficial layers of the Chan-Chan site were washed by the tsunami

Tsunami

A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...

 that followed the 1960 Valdivia earthquake, which produced waves of 12 to 15 meters. These waves possibly emplaced some disc-shaped cobbles

Cobble (geology)

A cobble is a clast of rock with a particle size of to based on the Krumbein phi scale of sedimentology. Cobbles are generally considered to be larger than pebbles and smaller than boulders . A rock made predominantly of cobbles is termed a conglomerate....

 in the terrace of Chan-Chan. The same kind of disc-shaped cobbles are found in the lower layers of human occupation in Chan-Chan, as well, leaving open the possibility that they were deposited by an ancient tsunami, according to Pino and Navarro.