by David Keys
But archaeological and ice-core evidence also suggests that the Nascan efforts to secure rain utterly failed, as the drought continued for some thirty years.
Dating in Nasca archaeology is far from being an exact science, but the available evidence suggests that Cahuachi was abandoned as a great ritual center around the very time that the drought started. Certainly, even after just a few years of crop failure and famine, it is likely that the abject failure of established religious practice would have begun to provoke religious and political tensions and change. And according to the archaeological record, that is precisely what seems to have occurred.
The first act in the drama appears to have been the abandonment of Cahuachi and a switch of ritual and religious emphasis away from the city to the open wilderness and its sprawling proxy cosmos—the vast desert drawings.
There seems to have been a decentralization of religious practice, probably with different Nascan clans or tribal subgroups etching very large numbers of new line systems on the desert floor. Dozens of new ray complexes were created, and virtually every hillock worthy of the name was turned into a proxy mountain on which rituals were then carried out in an increasingly desperate bid for water. On their summits, archaeologists have found the still perfectly preserved offerings made almost fifteen hundred years ago to the gods or to the ancestors to coax water from the skies. Maize cobs, the remains of sacrificed llamas and guinea pigs, and quantities of smashed pottery have been discovered lying exactly where they were left back in the sixth century.
Along with the sudden proliferation of ray systems came an intensification of other forms of desert mega-drawing. Giant trapezoids were introduced, and increased numbers of zigzag patterns, some over three hundred feet long, may at this stage have been meticulously etched onto the scorched surface of the Nasca desert.
But it wasn’t just the desert drawings that changed and proliferated. The iconography on the Nasca pottery—among the finest in the world—also began to change. The images on the pots became more violent, more jarring. Increasingly they featured spikes, jagged staffs (probably spears), warriors, severed heads, and even killer whales replete with fanged mouths dripping with blood. A key religious icon—a probable deity—evolved from being fairly human into a far more demonic and aggressive monster.
The abandonment of Cahuachi and the orgy of line drawing were followed not only by more aggressive iconography but also by more real conflict. As the long drought continued, not only religious but also political stability seems to have broken down. Competition and raiding for food became the order of the day, and archaeologists have succeeded in uncovering compelling evidence to illustrate the full horror of this increase in warfare.
In 1989, on a hillside overlooking a valley near the modern town of Palpa, archaeologists excavated a cache of forty-eight sixth-century severed heads.6 Detailed forensic examination of the skulls and associated material revealed that the victims had first had their throats slit.7 Once dead, their brains, tongues, facial muscles, and skin were removed. Then the skin was refitted and the cheeks and eyeballs were stuffed with cloth. Finally, a hole was punched in each forehead so that the severed head could be suspended from a cord of cotton or human hair. It’s likely that the heads originally belonged to warriors killed or captured in battle and were displayed as trophies on some sort of timber scaffold erected by the victors above the very valley in which the victims had been slaughtered.
Increased conflict was an almost inevitable consequence of the growing competition and political chaos that flowed from prolonged drought. The drought-period Nasca fought with weapons that were crude but nonetheless cruelly effective. The pottery and textile iconography and other evidence show that they included five-foot-long spears (for lunging with), wooden clubs, stone axes, slings, and eighteen-inch-long throwing spears launched by wooden spear throwers with whale-ivory handles.
Warriors would have fought wearing short, often sleeveless tunics, probably sometimes reinforced with padded cotton armor. To protect their heads, they would often have sported conical padded cotton helmets, each topped with a fan-shaped crest of brown feathers.
But politico-religious change and warfare were not the only Nascan responses to the great drought. In a few areas the Nasca fought back against natural catastrophe with their own version of high technology—and it must almost have worked, at least until other factors overwhelmed them. The “high-tech” solution was to dig for water deep underground, capture it, and channel it to where it was needed.
Almost certainly while the drought was raging, the Nasca invented and then engineered around fifty such water-extraction systems, with a total length of some thirty miles. Thirty-six systems survive, and some are still in use to this day. They vary from narrow, three-foot-wide tunnels deep underground to large, V-shaped, cobble-faced canals three feet wide at the bottom but ten times that width at the top.
Each system, known as a puquio, was a purely local solution and was usually between 1,300 feet and 1.5 miles in length. Their age was for a long time a mystery, but now three types of evidence have combined to tie them to the sixth century. First of all, careful water-level analysis of the puquios has revealed that they were built in conditions of extreme drought, much more extreme than even the ultradry conditions that exist in the Nasca desert today. Second, to dig thirty miles of puquios requires more than just a few years. Third, radiocarbon and associated pottery dates all point to the sixth century.
But there is one last piece of fascinating and poignant evidence that also links it to the great drought, namely, an extraordinary piece of local folk memory. Local legend has it that the puquios were built at a time of great drought to collect the tears wept by the local Indian god as he beheld the suffering of his people. Some linguistic authorities have even suggested that the history of the great drought is preserved, in a sense, in the very name of Nasca itself, for in the local Quechua language the word for pain, nanay, is said to have evolved into the name nanascca, which has come down to our own times simply as Nasca.
And so it was that the creators of the largest artworks on earth became victims of the mid-sixth-century climatic catastrophe. But they were certainly not the only Peruvian victims of the great drought.
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T H E M U D
O F H A D ES
Naked, terrified, staggering from blows delivered with wooden mace heads, and prodded with copper-tipped lances, the half-dead gifts to the storm god entered at last the place of their deliverance.
Their suffering at the heart of one of South America’s most sacred ancient sites—the now long-deserted city of Moche in northern Peru—formed part of what probably qualifies as the world’s most bizarre mass human sacrifice. Many of the victims had their fingers and toes sliced off and inserted into the dead bodies of their colleagues. Other individuals had their fingers crushed with rocks. Still others had their feet pierced by copper lance heads. Most were probably finally dispatched by decapitation or with a blow to the head administered with a heavy wooden mace. Others, however, were almost certainly bled to death.
For their tortured corpses, however, the ordeal was far from over. Some of the bodies were systematically chopped up and ritually rearranged. In certain cases heads were placed between legs—and bodies were deliberately positioned on top of each other.
But in terms of probable meaning, the most telling aspect of this ghastly ritual deposition was its precise location—buried within a matrix of sacred mud. For the torrents of clinging mud in which the butchered bodies were finally laid to rest were nothing less than the “melted” outer surfaces of a giant adobe temple.
The sacrificial victims’ rendezvous with the mud of their mass grave was no coincidence. The utilization of the sacred mud from the elaborately decorated outer surfaces of the temple was a deliberate act that by its very nature had to coincide with an extremely heavy rainstorm. And in and around the north coast of Peru, where the sacrificial site is located, the only occasions on which su
ch intense downpours occur are during the very worst occurrences of the intermittent climatic phenomenon known to the world today as El Niño.
Recent archaeological excavations show that these mass sacrifices took place in association with at least two El Niño events, and that each ritual slaughter involved up to forty victims.¹ The excavations have even revealed the tombs of the executioners—almost certainly warrior-priests of some sort. In one such tomb was found the skeleton of a sixty-year-old man who had been buried together with the macabre tool of his trade—a three-foot-long mace still encrusted with the blood of his victims. Medical analysis of his bones suggest that, even at sixty, he had massive muscles and must have been physically very strong. With him was buried a child—a sixteen-year-old boy, perhaps his personal servant, who was probably put to death in order to accompany him to the next world. A nearby double tomb also housed an adult male, also around sixty, and another young boy, this time just thirteen years old.
The mass sacrifices—and there are probably many more groups that have not yet been discovered—took place at some point between the years A.D. 500 and 700. They illustrate the sort of extreme ritual religious reaction that occurred when Moche society came under climatic threat. In the examples excavated so far, these associated threats were the massive El Niño rainstorms, cataclysmic events that were capable of washing away whole towns, destroying entire irrigation systems, and plunging societies into chaos.
During the mid-sixth-century climatic problems, the Moche civilization was hammered mercilessly by a combination of intense drought and intermittent devastating floods. The evidence for a great drought in the Americas has already been outlined in Chapter 23, but one of the sources for that evidence, the Quelccaya glacier ice core, also revealed the increasing frequency of major El Niño events: in c. 490, c. 526, c. 556, c. 580, c. 590, c. 592, and c. 630. Notice that between 490 and 592, the gaps between really major El Niños decreased from thirty-six years, to thirty, to twenty-four, to ten, and finally to two years (see Chapter 23).
It is almost certain that the great Andean drought (c. 540–570) was part of the mid-sixth-century climatic crisis, but whether that crisis played any part in accelerating the frequency of sixth-century El Niños is less certain. However, the worldwide problems almost certainly made the El Niños substantially more severe than they would otherwise have been.
The Moche reaction to intense drought, just as much as intense flood, would have included attempts to placate their gods with human sacrifice. Like Nasca religion, Moche religion is likely to have been largely shamanic in nature. Contact with ancestors, especially in times of climatic crisis, would have been a vital ingredient—ancestors could intervene with the gods or with the powers of nature to prevent disaster, terminate adversity, or bring prosperity.
Contact with the dead was of real economic and political impact, and a recent archaeological discovery may well be illustrative of just how important it was. Buried within the floor of one of a Moche temple’s many rooms were found what appear to have been a set of life-size dancing skeleton puppets—made out of real bones. Detailed examination of the bones revealed that they were deliberately defleshed using butchering instruments and that all the bones were kept in an articulated state.
In Europe, such a concept would be straight out of Dante’s Inferno, but in a mid-first-millennium Peruvian context, the skeletons need to be seen as elements of rituals designed to breach the barriers between this world and the next. They may even have symbolized the ancestors whose intercession would so desperately have been required in times of climatic crisis.
At the height of its power, probably in the early sixth century A.D., the Moche state controlled up to fifteen thousand square miles of territory between the Piura River in the far north of Peru and the Huarmey, three hundred miles to the south.
The capital covered at least three-quarters of a square mile, had an estimated population of up to ten thousand, and was dominated by two huge buildings, the largest of which was a massive cross-shaped structure with a 160-foot-high pyramid at its southern end. This vast cruciform edifice covered 14 acres and consisted of 2 million cubic yards of mud bricks and other building material—three-quarters of the volume of the Great Pyramid in Egypt! Most of the complex was ultimately destroyed by Spanish treasure hunters, who diverted an entire river in their desperation to wash away the mud bricks in their search for hidden gold.
But it was the second great structure in the city center, a slightly smaller temple, that has revealed most about Moche religion and ritual. It was here that archaeologists found the human mass sacrifices, the tombs of the executioner priests, the skeleton marionettes, and a series of spectacular wall paintings depicting frightening large-fanged anthropomorphic and zoomorphic beings, probably deities.
The climatic events of the mid–sixth century—the drought and the El Niños—had the effect of destabilizing the Moche empire. The thirty-year drought must have led to severe famines, and the c. 556 El Niño flood would have destroyed irrigation systems, thus making the food supply situation even more precarious. The population, weakened by starvation, would then have fallen prey to a range of contagious diseases, much as the Teotihuacanos of Mexico were succumbing to famine and disease at exactly the same time.
Although the entire Andean region was hit by the climatic problems, the already arid coastal plain was almost certainly affected more disastrously than the highland areas to the east. In times of drought, lowlands normally suffer worse than highland areas. Those few rain clouds that are around will tend to shed their load when they encounter mountain terrain. What is more, the reduced rainfall in the mountains is not sufficient to sustain the river volumes required to water coastal plains. The water-starved lowlands would have lost much of their vegetation cover, and the loss in turn would have reduced water retention, accelerated soil erosion, and encouraged the encroachment of desert terrain.
Additionally, the large coastal plain populations had only two ecological niches to exploit for food—the flatlands and the sea. By contrast, highland peoples, with a variety of altitudinal zones at their disposal, had more options. They could exploit valley bottoms, mountain slopes, high mountain pastures, and even lakes. Even when the lakes shrank, they often actually assisted agriculture by revealing new, ultrafertile land. And of course all mountain peoples were, by definition, closer to key water sources.
At first the change in geopolitical balance would probably have allowed foothill areas between the coastal plain and the highlands to break loose from Moche control. This would have made access to their food, copper, gold, and silver resources, as well as the ritually important drug crop coca, much more difficult for the Moche and much easier for the highland peoples, especially the most powerful highland group, the Huari.
As the economic as well as geopolitical situation increasingly favored the mountain areas, the north-south highland trading trail would have become the key commercial highway in Peru—very much at the expense of the only other major north-south trail, the one that ran along the coast.
Moreover, the coast soon began to suffer the bizarre secondary effects of drought and severe El Niño flooding. During the brief yet severe episodes of such flooding, millions of tons of sand were scoured out of the parched landscape, swept coastward by the El Niño torrents, and dumped immediately offshore. Long-shore drift then spread them out along the coast, while the tides swept them onto the beaches and strong coastal winds formed them into dunes and drove them inland. In classic dsert fashion, the dunes marched inland—well after the drought had ended—and destroyed agricultural land and even towns. Indeed, part of the Moche city around the Huaca del Sol was inundated by this tide of sand.²
Thus it was that this lethal cocktail of disasters affected the highland and coastal areas to quite different degrees, and the people of the relatively poor mountainous interior almost certainly suffered less than their ostentatiously rich, coastal-plain opposite numbers.³ Demographically and in terms of social or
ganization and control, the coast no longer had an advantage. The Moche civilization appears to have fragmented politically, probably under pressure from highland peoples, especially the Huari.4 Moche itself, the pyramid city, survived relatively unscathed, but it lost much of the territory it controlled. In one area eighty-five miles to the north, a new city, Pampa Grande, grew up and eventually adopted a strongly Huari-influenced culture, which probably reflected increasing Huari geopolitical power.5
In fact, within a few generations, highland-influenced populations were living in a new town—now a group of ruins known to archaeologists as Galindo, just twenty-three miles northeast of Moche.6 The ancient city became more and more isolated; Moche survived at least another century, but its glory days were over.
Along with this decline in Moche’s power came a marked increase in warfare. A series of massive defensive walls were built by various northern Peruvian coastal cultures, including the Moche. The most spectacularly located was built on the rugged mountain summit near modern Chepen, a hundred miles north of Moche, by the same highland-influenced culture that created Galindo. This now-deserted mountaintop city is surrounded by massive, twelve-foot-wide stone ramparts that even today stand in places to a height of twenty-seven feet. With an estimated population of around five thousand, it boasted large apartment complexes and a probable palace—but, extraordinarily, it appears to have had no water supply! Water probably had to be carried by porters from the valley below and somehow stored. And south of Moche are the ruins of further massive defenses, in the Santa Valley and at Cerro de La Cruz in the Chao Valley, where piles of stones meant to be slung at enemies still lie as mute testimony to the deterioration of security conditions following the climatic problems of the mid–sixth century.