1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
“Nobody can find one,” Creamer said. She left to supervise the second part of the dig, two hundred yards away, on the other side of the highway.
Haas sighed, pushed back his wide-brimmed straw hat, and leaned into the dirt with jackknife and paintbrush. Despite the low clouds—an almost featureless carpet a thousand feet above our heads—perspiration stippled his temples. With Ruiz documenting the work with a digital camera, Haas silently plucked out dead insects, bits of leaf, and lengths of shicra, a kind of thick twine made from reeds. When he had cleared enough, he sat back and stared at the now-exposed object. “I have no idea what this is,” he announced. “Got any tweezers?” Ruiz produced a caliper-sized pair from his backpack.
“Bravo,” Haas said. “We have tweezers.”
Although the Huaricanga mound resembled an ancient sandhill, the soft, shifting, slightly gritty surface was not sand but the fine, windblown soil geologists call “loess.” Fertile stuff, if it can somehow be irrigated, the loess blanketed the underlying structure like a heavy tarpaulin tossed over a piece of machinery. Here and there the archaeologists had scooped it away to reveal granite walls that had once been smoothly plastered. Over time, weather and earthquakes and perhaps human malice had buckled most of the walls, but their overall layout had been preserved. Behind them the team had removed some of the fill: bags of stones, created by knotting shicra into mesh sacks, filling the sacks with chunks of granite, and laying the results like fifty-pound bricks in the foundation.
Moving slowly, Haas tweezered out the pieces—they looked like the remnants of a serving platter—and passed them to Ruiz, who dropped them into a resealable plastic bag.
“Are all of those from a single object?” I asked.
“I’d guess so, but your guess is good as mine,” Haas said. With his wide face, gray goatee, and merry smile, he resembled, for the moment, an aging folk singer. “All I can say is, this is really strange.”
Almost twenty people were working on the Huaricanga mound, shoveling away the obscuring loess. Half of them were local workers; Peru has so many ruins from so many cultures that in many small towns archaeological labor is a flourishing blue-collar trade. The others were graduate students from Peru and the United States. After two days of labor, workers and students were halfway through clearing off the top platform and the staircases leading to it; the layout of the structure was visible enough to map. The temple, for the mound was surely built for religious reasons, was laid out in a wide, shallow U about 150 feet long and 60 feet high, with a sunken plaza between the arms. In its day its grandeur would have overwhelmed the visitor. Little wonder: at the time of its construction, the Huaricanga temple was among the world’s biggest buildings.
In college I read a one-volume history of the world by the distinguished historian William H. McNeill. Called, simply enough, A World History, and published in 1967, it began with what McNeill and most other historians then considered the four wellsprings of human civilization: the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, in modern Iraq, home of Sumer, oldest of all complex polities; the Nile Delta, in Egypt; the Indus Valley, in Pakistan; and, in east central China, the valley of the Huang He, more familiar to Westerners as the Yellow River. If McNeill were writing A World History today, discoveries like those at Huaricanga would force him to add two more areas to the book. The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.*
Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.
A few decades ago, many researchers would have included jump-starting Andean civilization on the honor roll of Mesoamerican accomplishments. The Olmec, it was proposed, visited Peru, and the locals, dutiful students, copied their example. Today we know that technologically sophisticated societies arose in Peru first—the starting date, to archaeologists’ surprise, keeps getting pushed back. Between 3200 and 2500 B.C., large-scale public buildings, the temple at Huaricanga among them, rose up in at least seven settlements on the Peruvian coast—an extraordinary efflorescence for that time and place. When the people of the Norte Chico were building these cities, there was only one other urban complex on earth: Sumer.
In the last chapter, I described how archaeologists have spent the last century pushing back their estimates of when Indians were first present in the Americas. Now I turn to a parallel intellectual journey: the growth in understanding of the antiquity, diversity, complexity, and technological sophistication of Indian societies. Much as historians of early Eurasia focus on the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He Valleys, historians of the Americas focus on Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Like the Eurasian centers of civilization, Mesoamerica and the Andes were places where complex, long-lasting cultural traditions began. But there was a striking difference between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres: the degree of interaction between their great cultural centers. A constant traffic in goods and ideas among Eurasian societies allowed them to borrow or steal each other’s most interesting innovations: algebra from Islam, paper from China, the spinning wheel (probably) from India, the telescope from Europe. “In my lectures, I put this very baldly,” Alfred Crosby told me. “I say that nobody in Europe or Asia ever invented anything—they got it from somebody else.” He added, “When you think of the dozen most important things ever invented—the wheel, the alphabet, the stirrup, metallurgy—none of them were invented in Europe. But they all got used there.”
By contrast, there was very little exchange of people, goods, or ideas between Mesoamerica and the Andes. Travelers on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean had to cross desert and the Hindu Kush, both formidable obstacles. But there was no road whatsoever across the two thousand miles of jagged mountains and thick rainforest between Mesoamerica and the Andes. In fact, there still isn’t any road. The section of the Pan-American Highway that runs between them remains unfinished, partly because Panama has feared that the motorway would channel Colombia’s long-standing cocaine traffic and guerrilla strife into its territory—and partly because the costs of bulldozing and tunneling through the wet mountains would be enormous, even with modern equipment. Almost entirely by themselves for thousands of years, these two centers of civilization were so different that researchers today have difficulty finding a conceptual vocabulary that applies to both. Nonetheless, the tale of their mostly separate progress through time deserves prominent placement in any history of the world.
THE COTTON AGE
Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift. Leading South America’s slow, grinding march toward Australia, its coastline hits the ocean floor and crumples up like a carpet shoved into a chair-leg. Just offshore the impact pushes the plate on the bottom of the Pacific down and under the advancing coast, creating a trench almost five miles deep. Inland the impact thrusts up the two parallel mountain ranges that make up the Peruvian Andes: the high Cordillera Negra, the Black Range, to the west, and the still higher Cordillera Blanca, the White Range, to the east. (The White Range has snow; the Black rarely does. Hence the names.) In northern Peru a third range rises between them; the altiplano, a scoop of high plains some five hundred miles long, fills the gap in the south. Taken together,
the cordilleras and the altiplano make up the Andes, the second-biggest chain of mountains in the world.
Sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific, Peru’s coastland is a skinny gray-brown ribbon. From a geographer’s point of view, it is a splendid anomaly, commencing with its extreme aridity. Over most of the South American landmass, the prevailing winds come from the east, across Brazil. As the warm, wet Amazonian air hits the towering Andes, it cools and sheds its moisture in the form of snow. Almost nothing is left for the Peruvian coast, which sits in the mountains’ rain shadow. Surprisingly, the coast is also walled off from moisture on the Pacific side, where the trade winds create a second rain shadow. Blowing from the southwest, the trades push the warm surface waters northeast, pulling frigid water from the deep offshore trench to the surface. The upwelling, known as the Humboldt Current, chills the air above it. Coming from the west, the Pacific trade winds hit the cold air from the Humboldt Current and are forced upward in a classic temperature inversion of the sort common in southern California. In temperature inversions, air movement is inhibited—the cold air can’t rise and the warm air doesn’t fall—which in turn inhibits rainfall. Walled off from wet air by both the Andes and the Humboldt Current, the Peruvian littoral is astonishingly dry: the average annual precipitation is about two inches. The Atacama Desert, just south of Peru on the Chilean shore, is the driest place on earth—in some places rain has literally never been recorded. Space researchers use the Atacama as a model for the sands of Mars.
Pizarro’s pilot once explained how to navigate from Mexico’s Pacific shore to Peru: Sail south along the coast until you no longer see trees. Then you are in Peru. Yet the coast is not a classic, Sahara-style desert of sand dunes and scorching sun. It is punctuated by more than fifty rivers, which channel Andes snowmelt to the sea. The lines of vegetation along their banks are like oases, fertile places where people can farm in an otherwise almost lifeless land. For much of the year the ocean air is cold enough on winter mornings to make fog roll into the valleys a hundred feet deep. People wear sweatshirts and futilely wipe at the mist on their windshields. By noon the fog lifts, having deposited a few hundredths of an inch of moisture (summed over the year, the fog gives the desert most of its annual two inches of precipitation).
If the anti-Clovis arguments are correct, paleo-Indians walked or paddled to Peru fifteen thousand years ago or more. But Peru’s first known inhabitants appear in the archaeological record sometime before 10,000 B.C. According to two studies in Science in 1998, these people apparently lived part of the year in the foothills, gathering and hunting (for the latter, no traces of Clovis points have been found). When winter came, they hiked to the warmer coast. At Quebrada Jaguay, a dry streambed on the nation’s southern coast that was one of the two sites described in Science, they dug up wedge clams and chased schools of six-inch drumfish with nets. They carried their catch to their base, which was about five miles from the shore. (Quebrada means “ravine” and often refers to the gullies caused by flash floods.) Quebrada Tacahuay, the other Science site, was closer to the shore but even drier: its average annual rainfall is less than a quarter inch. The site, exposed by the construction of a road, is an avian graveyard. On their annual travels between the foothills and the shore, paleo-Indians seem to have visited the area periodically to feast on the cormorants and boobies that nested on the rocks by the beach.
By 8000 B.C., paleo-Indians had radiated throughout western South America. Their lives were similar enough to contemporary hunter-gatherers that perhaps they should now be simply called Indians. Whatever the name, they were varied enough to have pleased Walt Whitman. Some groups had settled into mountain caves, skewering deer-size vicuña on spears; others plucked fish from mangrove swamps; still others stayed on the beach as their forebears had, weaving nets and setting them into the water. In the parched Atacama Desert, the Chinchorro created history’s first mummies.
Mummies were first discovered in the Atacama at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the Chinchorro attracted sustained attention only in 1983, when ninety-six superbly preserved cadavers were discovered beneath a massif that rises above downtown Arica, Chile. About 90 percent of their diet was seafood—fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and seaweed—the Chinchorro ate almost no fruit, vegetables, or land animals. Sometime before 5000 B.C. they began mummifying bodies—children at first, adults later on. Nobody knows why. They peeled off the skin from the limbs like so many socks, covered the result with white clay, painted it to resemble the deceased, and fitted the head with a wig made from its own hair. Such was the skill of the Chinchorro at preserving human flesh that scientists have been able to extract intact DNA from cadavers thousands of years older than the Egyptian pyramids.
Many of the child mummies exhibit signs of severe anemia, surprising in people who lived on seafood. In the preserved cadavers paleoparasitologists (scientists who study ancient parasites) have discovered eggs from Diphyllobothrium pacificum, a marine tapeworm that usually afflicts fish and sea lions but can slip into human beings who eat raw seafood. The parasite clamps onto the intestines and siphons nutrients from the body. Some grow to lengths of sixteen feet. If the tapeworm attaches to the right place in the gut, it can leech vitamin B12 from the victim, instigating a lethal form of anemia. The Chinchorro, it seems, were beset by parasites.
The Chinchorro mummies were often repainted, indicating that they were not quickly interred but kept on display, perhaps for years. One can speculate that grieving parents were unable to let go of their children’s bodies in a society that viewed the spirit as adhering to the flesh. What is certain is that the Chinchorro mummies are the first known manifestation of a phenomenon that marked Andean society all the way up to the Inka: the belief that the venerated, preserved dead could exert a powerful impact on the living.
Sometime before 3200 B.C., and possibly before 3500 B.C., something happened in the Norte Chico. On a world level, the eruption at the Norte Chico was improbable, even aberrant. The Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He Valleys were fertile, sunny, well-watered breadbaskets with long stretches of bottomland that practically invited farmers to stick seeds in the soil. Because intensive agriculture has been regarded a prerequisite for complex societies, it has long been claimed that civilizations can arise only in such farm-friendly places. The Peruvian littoral is an agronomical no-go zone: barren, cloudy, almost devoid of rain, seismically and climatically unstable. Except along the rivers, nothing grows but lichen and epiphytes (rootless plants that draw moisture from the fog). “It looks like the last place you’d want to start up something major,” Creamer said to me. “There doesn’t seem to be anything there to build it on.”
Nonetheless, they built it. “The complex of sites in the Norte Chico region is nothing short of extraordinary,” Haas and Creamer wrote in 2005.
While a very small number of moderate sites with communal architecture … are found in other parts of the Andes, the concentration of at least 25 large ceremonial/residential sites in the valleys of the Norte Chico is unique. Metaphorically, most of the Andes is covered with granules of sand [between 3000 B.C. and 1800 B.C.]. In a few spots, there are anthills that clearly stand out from the loose granules. Then in the Norte Chico, there is a volcano.
The Norte Chico consists of four narrow river valleys: from south to north, the Huaura, Supe, Pativilca, and Fortaleza. They converge on a slice of coastline less than thirty miles long. The first full-scale archaeological investigation of the area took place in 1941, when Gordon R. Willey and John M. Corbett of Harvard worked at Aspero, a salt marsh at the mouth of the Supe. They found a big trash heap and a multiroomed building with no pottery and a few maize cobs under the pounded clay floor. They didn’t know what to make of it. Why was there no pottery, when all previously examined large settlements in Peru had pottery? Why only a handful of maize cobs in the whole site, when maize, at least for the elite, was a staple food? How did they grow maize in a salt marsh, anyway? How could they have agr
iculture but no pottery? Working before the invention of carbon dating, they had no way to determine Aspero’s age. The puzzled archaeologists took thirteen years to publish their data.
Indian cities in Peru are some of the most heavily looted archaeological sites in the world. The looting dates back millennia, with the Inka having ravaged the centers of their predecessors, sometimes reusing art and stonework. The Spanish sack of Tawantinsuyu calamitously expanded on this tradition of plunder, which has greatly accelerated in modern times, fueled by the desperate poverty of Peru’s Indian population. Here in the Fortaleza Valley, graverobbers—almost certainly local farmers—have ripped apart thousand-year-old tombs in a futile search for golden artifacts. Others gathered the remains into shrines for secretive, candlelit prayers to the dead, whose powers are recognized by alcohol and cigarettes.
(Illustration Credit 6.2)
Among Aspero’s many curiosities, Willey and Corbett noted, were a half-dozen mounds, some of them nearly fifteen feet tall. These “knolls, or hillocks,” the two men wrote, were “natural eminences of sand.” Thirty years after his initial excavation, Willey revisited Aspero with Michael E. Moseley, an archaeologist now at the University of Florida. To his chagrin, Willey quickly recognized that the natural “knolls” were, in truth, human-made “temple-type platform mounds,” evidence of a more materially advanced culture than he had imagined possible for the era. Indeed, Aspero may have had as many as seventeen artificial mounds, all of which Willey missed the first time round. “It is an excellent, if embarrassing, example,” he remarked, “of not being able to find what you are not looking for.”
At about the same time, one of Moseley’s graduate students wrote his doctoral dissertation about Aspero. He had enough grant money to pay for seven radiocarbon dates. According to one of them, Aspero went back to 3000 B.C. The student also had a smaller, nearby site called As8 tested and got a date of 4900 B.C. Ridiculous, he in effect thought. These dates are too old—obviously something went wrong. Maybe the samples were contaminated. And he tossed the dates out.