1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

  That may have been a mistake. In 1994 Ruth Shady Solis, of the National University of San Marcos in Lima, began working fourteen miles inland from Aspero, at a site known as Caral. The work was enormously difficult. Peru had little money to spend on archaeology, and almost all of it was earmarked for the magnificent stone ruins in the mountains. Shady could get almost nothing to exhume an almost-unknown pile of rocks on the coast. Often she had no money to pay assistants and worked alone in the nearly empty valley. Sometimes she had to sleep in her car. Once someone tried to steal the car while she was in it. In the resultant struggle she was shot in the knee. The work went faster when she was able to persuade twenty-five Peruvian soldiers to help dig. Year after year, she slowly pared away the sand and dust over Caral. From the sandy soil she revealed an imposing, 150-acre array of monumental architecture: six large platform mounds, one sixty feet tall and five hundred feet on a side; two round, sunken ceremonial plazas; half a dozen complexes of mounds and platforms; big stone buildings with residential apartments. Haas and Creamer visited the site in 2000. Amazed by what Shady had found, they proposed using their funds to conduct some radiocarbon tests on samples from Caral. The tests amply confirmed the city’s antiquity: it was founded before 2600 B.C.

  (Map credit 6.1)

  The discovery—an unknown city in Peru that was as old as the Egyptian Pyramids—set off headlines around the world. It also led to a falling-out. Shady’s National University of San Marcos, Haas’s Field Museum, and Creamer’s Northern Illinois University all shouted to the heavens about their researchers’ accomplishment. But the U.S. institutions had bigger megaphones. Most of the stories under those headlines paid scant heed to Shady’s years of grueling labor. In many parts of Latin America there is a resentment, abundantly justified, of U.S. workers with big budgets swooping in to profit from the work of poor local scholars. The collaboration did not survive. Shady continued work at Caral, while Haas and Creamer, joined by Ruiz, split off to investigate the Pativilca, the next river to the north, and the Fortaleza, just north of the Pativilca. They found, Haas told me, “major urban centers on a par with Caral in terms of monumental architecture, ceremonial structures, and residential architecture. And some of them were older.”

  Examination of Huaricanga and the surrounding communities is far from complete—Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz published their first findings in December 2004. They found evidence of people living inland from the coast as early as 9210 B.C. But the oldest date securely associated with a city is about 3500 B.C., at Huaricanga. (There are hints of earlier dates.) Other urban sites followed apace: Caballete in 3100 B.C., Porvenir and Upaca in 2700 B.C. Taken individually, none of the twenty-five Norte Chico cities rivaled Sumer’s cities in size, but the totality was bigger than Sumer. Egypt’s pyramids were larger, but they were built centuries later. I asked Haas and Creamer where a race of alien visitors in, say, 3000 B.C. would have landed if they were searching for earth’s most sophisticated society. “I hate questions like that,” Haas said, because they ask scientists to engage in the dubious enterprise of ranking cultures against each other on a scale.

  “Wouldn’t it depend on what the aliens thought was sophisticated?” Creamer asked. “I mean, who knows what they would think.”

  I asked them to indulge me.

  “I know what you’re getting at,” Haas said, reluctantly. “In 3000 B.C. your aliens would have had a very limited number of options on the menu. And one of those options would have been the Norte Chico.”

  Because human beings rarely volunteer to spend their days loading baskets with heavy rocks to build public monuments, Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz argued that these cities must have had a centralized government that instigated and directed the work. In the Norte Chico, in other words, Homo sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time had occurred only once before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of leaders with enough prestige, influence, and hierarchical position to induce their subjects to perform heavy labor. It was humankind’s second experiment with government.

  “Where does government come from?” Haas asked. “What makes people decide to surrender some of their personal liberty to it? What did they gain from it? Philosophers have been asking this question for centuries. But archaeology should have something to contribute. In the Norte Chico, we may be able to provide some answers. It’s one of only two places on earth—three, if you count Mesoamerica—where government was an invention. Everywhere else it was inherited or borrowed. People were born into societies with governments or saw their neighbors’ governments and copied the idea. Here, people came up with it themselves.”

  Haas’s enthusiasm seems hyperbolic to some of his colleagues. “What about Amazonian chiefdoms, North American Mississippian societies, and so on?” James Petersen, an archaeologist at the University of Vermont, asked me. “Plus Africa. ‘Government’ was independently invented there, too.” But Haas argues that these peoples knew of the existence of hierarchical, structured societies with strong central leaders, and could pattern their societies after them. Only in a very few places, he says, Norte Chico among them, were cultures proceeding without a map.

  In the Norte Chico, Haas told me, government seems not to have arisen from the need for mutual defense, as philosophers have often speculated. The twenty-five cities were not sited strategically and did not have defensive walls; no evidence of warfare, such as burned buildings or mutilated corpses, has been found. Instead, he said, the basis of the rulers’ power was the collective economic and spiritual good. Norte Chico was the realm of King Cotton.

  To feed Norte Chico’s burgeoning population, Shady discovered, the valley folk learned how to irrigate the soil. Not given an environment that favored the development of intensive agriculture, that is, they shaped the landscape into something more suitable to their purposes. Luckily for their purposes, the area is geographically suited for irrigation. The peril of irrigation for farmers is evaporation. Just as water evaporating in a glass leaves behind a film of salts and minerals, water evaporating from irrigation channels leaves deposits in the soil. In a surprisingly short time, the salty deposits can build up to toxic levels, making the land unusable. Because the Cordillera Negra bulges especially close to the coast in the Norte Chico, the valleys are short and steeply walled; almost hurled from the heights, the rivers shoot toward the sea at high velocity. Even after diversion, the water gushes through irrigation channels so quickly that it can’t evaporate and build up salts in the soil. To this day, one can only reach many archaeological sites in the Norte Chico by navigating around surging, brimfull irrigation ditches, some of them probably laid out originally by the same farmers who built the mounds.

  The most important product of irrigation was cotton. Almost forty species of cotton exist worldwide, of which four have been domesticated, two in the Americas, two in the Middle East and South Asia. Cotton was known in Europe by the thirteenth century but not common until the eighteenth; Columbus and his men wore sturdy flax and coarse wool.* South American cotton (Gossypium barbadense) once grew wild along the continent’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts. It may first have been domesticated in Amazonia, presumably near the river’s mouth. Today it has been supplanted by Mexican cotton (another species, Gossypium hirsutum), which provides most of the world’s harvest. But in the Andean past, the long, puffy bolls of South American cotton, some varieties naturally tinted pink, blue, or yellow, were the soft underpinning of Andean culture. “In the Norte Chico we see almost no visual arts,” Ruiz told me after I gave him the scrap of cloth. “No sculpture, no carving or bas-relief, almost no painting or drawing—the interiors are completely bare. What we do see are these huge mounds—and textiles.”

  Cotton was a key element in regional trade. People in shoreline settlements like Aspero could catch vast quantities of anchovies and sardines; Caral, Huaricanga, and the other inland towns had irrigation-produced cotton, fruit, and vegetables. The countless fish bones in inland Caral and Huaricanga and the fruit
seeds and cotton nets in shoreline Aspero are evidence that they swapped one for the other. According to Haas, the inland centers must have controlled the exchange, because the fishers needed their cotton for nets. Cotton was both needed and easily stored, which made it useful as a medium of exchange or status. At Upaca, on the Pativilca, Haas’s team discovered the ruins of stone warehouses. If they were for storing cotton, as Haas surmises, they would have been, in this textile-mad society, an emblem of state power and wealth, the ancient equivalent of Fort Knox.

  By making these claims, Haas and Creamer were staking out a position in a long-running theoretical dispute. In 1975 Michael Moseley, the Florida archaeologist, drew together his own work in Aspero and earlier research by Peruvian and other researchers into what has been called the MFAC hypothesis: the maritime foundations of Andean civilization. He proposed that there was little subsistence agriculture around Aspero because it was a center of fishing, and that the later, highland Peruvian cultures, including the mighty Inka, all had their origins not in the mountains but in the great fishery of the Humboldt Current. Rather than being founded on agriculture, the ancient cities of coastal Peru drew their sustenance from the sea.

  The MFAC hypothesis—that societies fed by fishing could have founded a civilization—was “radical, unwelcome, and critiqued as an economic impossibility,” Moseley later recalled. Little wonder! The MFAC was like a brick through the window of archaeological theory. Archaeologists had always believed that in fundamental respects all human societies everywhere were alike, no matter how different they might appear on the surface. If one runs the tape backwards to the beginning, so to speak, the stories are all the same: foraging societies develop agriculture; the increased food supply leads to a population boom; the society grows and stratifies, with powerful clerics at the top and peasant cultivators at the bottom; massive public works ensue, along with intermittent social strife and war. If the MFAC hypothesis was true, early civilization in Peru was in one major respect strikingly unlike early civilization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. Farming, the cornerstone of the complex societies in the rest of the world, was in Peru an afterthought. (In Chapter 1, I called Peru the site of an independent Neolithic Revolution, which I defined, following archaeological practice, as beginning with the invention of agriculture. If the MFAC is correct, the definition will have to be changed.)

  The MFAC hypothesis was radical, its supporters conceded, but the supporting evidence could not be dismissed. Bone analyses show that late-Pleistocene coastal foragers “got 90 percent of their protein from the sea—anchovies, sardines, shellfish, and so on,” said Susan deFrance, an archaeologist at the University of Florida. And the pattern continued for thousands of years and archaeological dig after archaeological dig. “Later sites like Aspero are just full of fish bones and show almost no evidence of food crops.” The MFAC hypothesis, she told me, can be summarized as the belief “that these huge numbers of anchovy bones are telling you something.” That “something” is that, according to Daniel H. Sandweiss of the University of Maine, “the incredibly rich ocean off this incredibly impoverished coast was the critical factor.”

  Further evidence both for and against the MFAC hypothesis emerged in the mid-1990s, with Shady’s pathbreaking work on the Supe River. (Aspero, one recalls, sat at the river’s mouth.) Shady’s team uncovered seventeen riverside settlements, the second-biggest of which was Caral. In her view, monumental buildings implied a large resident population, but again there were plenty of anchovy bones and little evidence that locals farmed anything but cotton. To Moseley, the fish bones suggested that the ample protein on the coast allowed people to go inland and build irrigation networks to produce the cotton needed to expand fishing production. The need for nets, in Haas’s view, gave the inland cities the whip hand—Norte Chico was based on farming, like all other complex societies, although not on farming for food. Besides, he says, so many more people lived along the four rivers than on the shore that they had to have been dominant. Moseley believes that Aspero, which has never been fully excavated, is older than the other cities, and set the template for them. “For archaeology,” deFrance said, “what may be important” in the end is not the scope of the society “but where it emerged from and the food supply. You can’t eat cotton.” Evidence one way or the other may emerge if Moseley and Shady, as planned, return to Aspero. If they are correct, and Aspero turns out to be substantially older than now thought, it might win the title of the world’s oldest city—the place where human civilization began. “Maybe we might actually stop people calling it the ‘New World,’ ” Moseley joked.

  Norte Chico chiefdoms were almost certainly theocratic, though not brutally so; leaders induced followers to obey by a combination of ideology, charisma, and skillfully timed positive reinforcement. Scattered almost randomly around the top of the mounds are burned, oxidized chunks of rock—hearth stones—in drifts of fish bones and ash. To Haas and Creamer, these look like the remains of feasts. The city rulers encouraged and rewarded the workforce during construction and maintenance of the mound by staging celebratory roasts of fish and achira root right on the worksite. Afterward they mixed the garbage into the mound, incorporating the celebration into the construction. At these feasts, alcohol in some form was almost certainly featured. So, perhaps, was music, both vocal and instrumental; excavating Caral, Shady discovered thirty-two flutes made of pelican wingbones tucked into a recess in the main temple.

  What was it like building these first great structures? In June 1790, a year after the French Revolution swept away a corrupt and ineffectual monarchy, thousands of Parisians from every social class united to create the enormous Champ de Mars as a monument to the new society. Working in heavy rainfall without coercion or pay, they dug out the entire enormous space to a depth of four feet and then filled it up with enough sand and gravel to make an outdoor amphitheater suitable for half a million people. The whole huge effort took only three weeks. Something analogous—an awed, wondering celebration of a new mode of existence—may have occurred at the Norte Chico.

  Even today, the contrast is startling between the desert and the irrigated land, with its lush patchwork of maize, sugar, and fruit trees. Beyond the reach of the water the barrens instantly commence; the line of demarcation is sharp enough to cross with a step. To people born into a landscape of rock and fog, the conflagration of green must have been a dazzlement. Of course they would exalt the priests and rulers who promised to maintain this miracle. The prospect of a drunken feast afterward would be a bonus.

  A recently discovered drawing etched onto a gourd (left) has led some researchers to posit that the fanged Staff God was a central figure in an Andean religious tradition that lasted almost four thousand years. (Right, a Staff God from the first millennium A.D.)

  (Illustration Credit 6.3)

  The only known trace of the Norte Chico deities may be a drawing etched into the face of a gourd. It depicts a sharp-toothed, hat-wearing figure who faces the viewer frontally and holds a long stick or rod vertically in each hand. When Creamer found the gourd in 2002, the image shocked Andeanists. It looked like an early version of the Staff God, a fanged, staff-wielding deity who is one of the main characters in the Andean pantheon. Previously the earliest manifestation of the Staff God had been thought to be around 500 B.C. According to radiocarbon tests, the Norte Chico gourd was harvested between 2280 and 2180 B.C. The early date implies, Haas and Creamer argued, that the principal Andean spiritual tradition originated in the Norte Chico, and that this tradition endured for at least four thousand years, millennia longer than had been previously suspected.

  Many researchers reacted skeptically to the finding. According to Krzysztof Makowski, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, the image is so anomalous—Creamer found it in a strata dating between 900 and 1300 A.D.—that a more likely explanation is that the figure was carved onto an ancient gourd that had been preserved by the extremely arid climate. Such reuse o
f old materials is not unknown, though nobody has ever seen it with a gourd three thousand years old. More important, Makowski says, researchers have little evidence that ancient Peruvians actually believed in a single overarching deity called the Staff God. “What we describe as the ‘Staff God’ is a convention,” he explained to me, a standardized pose reminiscent in its way of the standardized poses in Byzantine art. The religious tradition of Peru, in his view, was an overlapping sequence of related faiths that has barely begun to be unraveled; it is as if archaeologists from the far future were excavating in Europe, and mulling over the ubiquitous image of the man on the cross. Was this one man? Many men depicted in a similar fashion? One man whose meaning changed over time?

  Much more remains to be found. On the coast south of Caral, one of Shady’s San Marcos colleagues is excavating a site that may be nearly as large and somewhat older; north of the Norte Chico, a research team led by Daniel H. Sandweiss of the University of Maine tentatively concluded in 2010 that an early monument may be older than Huaricanga. All of these efforts in the Norte Chico came to an end, as all human endeavors must. Shady, Sandweiss, Moseley, and two other U.S. researchers have established that a sudden bout of earthquakes and El Niño flooding in about 1800 B.C. led to devastating landslides in Caral; meanwhile, Aspero, at the mouth of the river, was choked in sand. If these climatic and geological disasters occurred throughout the Norte Chico, they could have brought to an end the civilization that began in the area two millennia before.

  The fall did not halt the human story in western South America. New cultures and societies built on the remains of the old. As Andean societies developed and grew richer, their temples and the images in them grew grander and more refined, though the former stayed true to the U-shape-and-sunken-plaza pattern I saw in the Norte Chico and the latter, depicted often in the “Staff God” pose, never lost their erect postures, gnashing fangs, and brandished staffs. Over the millennia, this god or gods transmuted into Wiraqocha, the Inka creator deity, whose worship was brutally suppressed by Spain.