by Jim Goodman
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| terraced pyramid at Caral, oldest city in the Americas |
The Andes Mountains that run
the length of Peru make a clear geographical division of the country between
Peru’s portion of the Amazon basin and the arid western coastal strip, containing
the biggest cities and most of the population. About forty rivers tumble down from the mountains to reach
the coast, creating green valleys that can support human habitation. In between these valleys scarcely a
plant can grow. It’s all dry desert—sand
dunes and smooth brown hills. It
reminds you of the Sahara or the middle of Saudi Arabia. You half expect to spot a camel caravan
along the way.
These rivers provide almost
all the water that ever gets to this arid part of the country. A little rain may fall in the far north, but not much
elsewhere. The southern coast gets
the least, 4 mm per year around Nazca, for example, because of the effects of
the Humboldt Current. This
brings cold water from the Antarctic up the coast this far, cooling the surface
and limiting the amount of moisture reaching the clouds.
The earliest settlements in
Peru were around these river valleys, preferably close to the sea, which was
also a major food source. Agriculture was possible wherever they could divert water to
their farms. The community’s
growth required organizing the creation of irrigation systems, which could
create surpluses, enabling the development of a society and culture.
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| 'eyes' of a puquio near Nazca |
As these societies grew they
opened up and irrigated new lands with canals and ditches in the north and
center of the coast and in the south by underground aqueducts. Called puquios, these conducted water from the hills to the dry plains,
with periodic placement of openings (‘eyes’) for farmers to check the flow and
remove debris and obstacles.
Around Nazca, ancient puquios
are still in use.
Societies also established
states with non-farmer classes that lived off the surplus of the
farmers—rulers, priests, soldiers and artisans. States grew more sophisticated, expanded their territory and
everything seemed to be going fine forever when suddenly the peculiar weather
phenomenon known as El Niño came
along and destroyed it all.
El Niño is a periodic temperature alteration in the movement of Pacific
Ocean waters that causes warm air to rise off the coast of Peru, triggering heavy rains in the deserts, and inhibits the upwelling of cold waters in the
sea. These are the waters with the
nutrients that feed the fish population, which then declines considerably. With fewer fish the seabird population
also goes down, as does their production of guano, the droppings left on
offshore islands that has long been coastal farmers’ favorite fertilizer. It is rich in nitrogen, phosphate and
potassium, all good for plant growth.
El Niño can be relatively mild and short-lived. But it can also be occasionally very
disturbing, with years of heavy rain, which demolishes the irrigation system,
followed by years of severe drought, which stifles any chance of recovery. El
Niño-related weather disruptions struck Moche society in the 6th
century at its peak of development.
It recovered, but in a much attenuated form. Decades of drought in the early 11th century
forced the Sicán society to abandon its homeland and relocate to Túcume. Moreover, the coast lies on a major
seismic fault line. Earthquakes,
which can destroy irrigation works and alter the courses of rivers, can be as
devastating as weird weather.
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| sunken circular courtyard at Caral |
Fortunately, earthquakes and
spells of violent weather have never been so frequent as to prevent the
establishment and growth of ancient Peruvian states and their cultures. Many of these societies lasted several
centuries. Moreover, the first one
sophisticated enough to have a city began around 3500 BCE, contemporaneous with
pyramid-building Egypt. Known as
the Norte-Chico Culture, it is the oldest in the Americas and one of the six
places in the world where civilization originated independently.
When a people abandon their
homeland and leave their buildings behind, eventually fierce winds blow desert
soil all over them, turning then into what looks like
ordinary hills and mounds. Many
centuries may pass before anyone discovers that a certain barren hill actually
contains the remains of ancient buildings under its surface. This is what happened to the
Norte-Chico culture when the people disappeared from their Supe Valley habitat
around 1800 BCE. Sandstorms
covered up all vestiges of their civilization and concealed their past
existence until excited Peruvian archaeologists began excavating the sites in
the late 1990s.
The Supe Valley is about 175
km north of Lima and 15 km inland.
The 19 settlements found there are estimated to have had altogether
20,000 inhabitants. The largest
was Serro Caral, the first city in the hemisphere, where 3000 lived. Some of the features of Caral—tiered
pyramids, regular staircases, placement of buildings, sunken
circular courtyards and broad streets—turned out to be prototypes for the
cities built by the desert kingdoms of later centuries.
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| warrior with severed heads, Sechín |
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| Moche warrior |
Caral’s heyday was still the
pre-ceramic age, but archaeologists did find flutes and other instruments made
from deer and pelican bones. They
also found an early type of quipu, the
knotted cords used, in the absence of a writing system, to record accounts all
the way down to Inca times.
Besides food crops the Norte-Chico people grew cotton, using it for
textiles and making fishnets.
What the excavators did not
find was anything resembling a weapon, any fortifications or any sign of
war. This particular
cultural characteristic, however, was not one maintained by the states that
rose after Caral’s demise. The
next oldest archaeological site of significance, dating 1000-1600 BCE, is
Sechín, another 200 k, or so north, near Casma. Lying beside a broad valley, the main feature of this
culture’s legacy is the violent scenes of war etched into the remains of its
city walls. Sculptures of fierce,
club-wielding warriors, severed heads and limbs fill the facades, to the
exclusion, save for a rare snake or feline, of every other type of imagery.
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| detail of a Paracas textile |
Whom these warriors
fought and what caused the Sechín state to vanish remain unsolved mysteries in
the gaps that punctuate the history of the coast. Perhaps another wind-swept, barren desert hill somewhere
hides the remains of another undiscovered ancient culture. The next significant cultural
development was the rise of the Chavín people around 900 BCE. But their capital was west of Casma in
the highlands and though their culture survived until 200 CE, their control and
influence over the coastal areas was minimal.
In the south near Ica, a
century later marks the beginning of the Paracas culture. Their main legacy is
the textiles used to wrap mummies in their necropolis. Using simple looms and cotton or alpaca
wool thread, Paracas weavers created extraordinary pieces of intricate patterns
and fanciful, very pictorial designs, unmatched by successive cultures, with a
broad range of still vibrant colors.
Paracas culture also produced fine ceramic bowls and pitchers and lasted
until around 100 CE, when it became absorbed by the emerging Nazca culture a
little further south.
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| temple foundations at Pachacámac |
Ceramic and textile production
were now an embedded part of cultures on the Peruvian coast. Except for Paracas, where the burial
shrouds had been preserved by their internment and the arid climate, only
scattered examples of the ancient weaving tradition have survived. The record is much richer for ceramics,
from pieces excavators found in burial sites in the original condition, intact,
no cracks and unbroken. In
contrast, ancient Chinese vases, Greek pots and Roman bowls were discovered as
piles of shards that had to be reassembled like jigsaw puzzles before display.
Each culture used its own kind
of materials, molding techniques (no one used a potter’s wheel) and drying or
baking methods, plus particular shapes, colors and motifs. Whether for ceremonial or everyday
domestic use, the themes ranged incredibly—natural subjects like plants, fish
and animals, both real and mythical, warriors, peasants and vignettes of daily
life like farming, weaving, playing music, boating, pounding grain and sexual
intercourse. Sometimes they
painted these themes on the surfaces.
Other tines they molded the pieces to depict the subject.
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| spouts of a Huari water pitcher |
The final result could
be a cup, bowl, vase, pitcher with one or more spouts, or a piece without any
function other than as a decorative work of art. They could appear rather crude, even if imaginative,
or could reach an amazing level of verisimilitude, as in the Moche portrait
ceramics, that look like so exact a depiction of a real person you can imagine
the subject striking a pose in the courtyard of the artisan until the work was
completed.
The Moche were also skilled
goldsmiths. They produced
ornaments for the aristocracy and the golden masks, ritual paraphernalia,
ceremonial weapons and so forth brandished by the Lord in his public
appearances. In 1987, in
another of those fortunate cultural discoveries, archaeologists unearthed a
huge trove of gold artifacts and royal paraphernalia in a scarcely disturbed
burial pit at Sipán, just east of Chiclayo. The find, dated around 300 CE, is comparable to that of the
tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt. The
treasure was removed, replaced by replicas visible today, and installed in a
special museum in Lamabayeque, near Chiclayo, opened in 2002 and now the most
heavily visited museum in the whole country.
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| relics of the Sicán capital at Túcume |
Moche culture collapsed by 800
and in the Lambayeque region Sicán culture replaced it, for a long time
centered at Túcume The Huari
culture took over other parts of Moche territory, extended their sway into the
highlands just south of Cusco and around 600 established a city 40 km south of
Lima called Pachacámac. Two
centuries later the Huari people abandoned the site, which afterwards became
the ceremonial center of yet another desert culture, the Ichma society, an
Aymari-speaking people who added sixteen pyramid temples to the city and
maintained independence until the Incas conquered them in the mid-15th
century.
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| Chancay ceramics |
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| Sicán ceramics |
What remained of Huari culture
in the north became subsumed in the Chimú takeover of the area from 900. From its large, walled capital at
Chan Chan, near Trujillo, the Chimú ruled over the northern coast of Peru as
far down as Chancay, 80 km north of Lima, where yet another post-Huari culture
established itself. Chancay
artisans achieved fame for their mass production of quality ceramics, textiles,
metal ware and wooden carvings.
Like the Chimú, their state became part of the expanding Inca Empire in
the 1420s.
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| Nazca Lines--the dog |
All of these cultures
established cities with similar terraced pyramid temples, palaces with ramped
walkways and broad streets in rectilinear grids. They used similar techniques for farming, fishing and waging
war and similar methods of venerating their gods and their kings. But in works of art, in the jewelry,
ceramics, weavings and ritual paraphernalia they were distinctly
different. Each culture had its
own creative style and execution that distinguished it from all others. Many examples of their artistic
achievements are now housed in the country’s museums, displaying the enormous
variety and ingenuity of different ancient peoples. An afternoon browsing the artifacts collected in a
well-stocked museum (and there are several) is one of the great aesthetic
adventures of a trip to Peru.
One artistic achievement,
though, cannot be lodged in a museum—the Nazca Lines. Consisting of enormous pictures of various animals and
ritual pathways etched into the ground, they can only be viewed in their
entirety by taking an airplane flight north of Nazca over the plains where they
lie. Actually, they lay
undiscovered for over a thousand years until the pilots spotted them on the
first-ever airplane flight out of Nazca in the 1920s.
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| Nazca Lines--the hummingbird |
To make the lines for both the
figures and the pathways people extended a rope between two posts and removed the
top layer of red-brown soil along the line to expose the lighter, almost white
soil underneath. Then they moved
the posts to the next section, curving where necessary, until eventually the
picture was completed. The
figures, many meters long and wide, sometimes depict familiar animals—dog,
snake, parrot, monkey, spider, condor, hummingbird—and sometimes more enigmatic
images, like a face with a pair of hands or the one that resembles a human
waving to the sky.
Apparently this kind of art,
only visible from high above, was meant to please the gods, perhaps to
encourage them to deliver rain.
But the precise intention of the works, the significance or symbolism of
the selected animals and other figures, remain matters for speculation. Nazca culture collapsed around 900 and
the area was all but abandoned. Since
Nazca culture had no writing system we have no records concerning this unique
phenomenon. Like the centuries of
gaps in the archaeological record of the coastal kingdoms and the precise
reasons for the birth and disappearance of some of the ancient societies, the
Nazca Lines, the most unusual form of artistic expression in the hemisphere,
will remain mysterious until some future accidental archaeological discovery, a
la Sipán or Caral, spills the secrets.
Until then we simply marvel at what only gods were supposed to see.
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| sunset over the desert near Nazca |
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