The Las Vegas culture represents "an early, sedentary adjustment to an ecologically complex coastal environment.

[2] The Santa Elena peninsula is the northernmost extension of the coastal desert that stretches for some 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) along the Pacific coast of South America.

Under the influence of the cool waters of the Humboldt Current, temperatures are mild, averaging 23 °C (73 °F) with only a few degrees in seasonal variation.

Inland, precipitation generally increases and the vegetation becomes more varied and lush, changing from desert to seasonally dry forest..[3] Ten thousand years ago sea level on the Santa Elena peninsula was 30 metres (98 ft) lower than at present.

[4] The sea levels began rising around 7000 years ago, shrinking the area of land the settlement was found on.

[7] A rise in sea levels along with an annual dry season could have motivated the Las Vegas people to pursue plant domestication and gathering of marine resources for food.

[10] The sites discovered by archaeologists suggest they were originally established on low hills and in areas where marine life and terrestrial resources were equally accessible.

The human remains found at these sites also seem to indicate that the residents of the Santa Elena Peninsula were healthy and free of anemia.

[12] During Early Las Vegas the "basic unit of social production, distribution, and consumption was the small, relatively self-sufficient family, flexibly organized for carrying out a wide variety of subsistence tasks using a few generalized tools and facilities."

The people gathered wild foods and hunted and fished in the variety of habitats in the region: the desert, dry tropical forest, and the Pacific coast.

Deer, fox, rabbit, small rodents, weasel, anteater, squirrel, peccary, opossum, frog, boa constrictor, indigo snake, parrot and lizard were exploited for food.

This loss of big game may have motivated the Las Vegas people to become more sedentary in order to collect more predictable resources.

The lack of big game meant more time needed to be spent hunting and gathering, as well as tending to crops.

Food sharing in this community creates an early form of the reciprocity that shows up throughout the Andean region in various cultures.

Later Las Vegas continued to rely on hunting and gathering, but with a greater dependence on fish and shellfish from the ocean.

Recent data has suggested that humans dispersed maize into the upper lowland of northwest Colombia at some time within a date range of 8997-8277 cal.

[25] Recent microbotanical studies from Cubilan recovered maize starches from milling and scrapping lithic tools associated with contexts dated to 8078-7959 cal.

[25] Archaeologists have found no evidence of the presence of humans on the Santa Elena peninsula for one thousand years after 4600 BCE.