Could the ancient city of Caral in Peru be the oldest city in the Western Hemisphere?
Four Thousand Years Ago in Coastal Peru: America's First Civilization?
Gordon R. Willey Lecture by Dr. Michael E. Moseley
Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida, Gainesville
In 1943 and again in 1971, Harvard archaeologist Gordon Willey investigated the monumental site Aspero in Peru’s Supe desert valley. Later, Peruvian scholars identified sixteen more early monumental centers, including Caral, in the Supe desert valley. Covering more than 130 acres, Caral was an urban center with large temple mounds that predate Giza’s famed pyramids. In this talk, archaeologist Michael Moseley discussed the four-thousand year-old architectural monuments in the Supe desert valley that are the focus of claims for the earliest civilization in the Americas.
Recorded April 8, 2010
About Michael Moseley
Dr. Michael Moseley earned his doctorate from Harvard University studying coastal Peru, and went on to become a curator at the Peabody Museum and the Field Museum before joining the University of Florida. He writes, “I am privileged to have conducted field studies with students and colleagues on the full temporal spectrum of indigenous evolution in the Americas and the Andes… my research interests are trans-disciplinary, embracing ideologies of corporate art and monumental architecture, political economies of subsistence and settlement systems, and adaptive responses to dynamic stress of social and environmental origin. My investigative methodologies are eclectic, ranging from traditional to art history through new technologies of regional landscape analysis. I invite exceptionally inquisitive minds with superior credentials to enjoy a mutual thirst for evolutionary understanding of the Native American achievement.”
Transcript
0:00
Good evening and welcome. Thanks for joining us on this beautiful day. We have an amazing individual as our Gordon Willey lecture this evening and an equally amazing topic that he will cover for us. It's especially nice for me to welcome back are speaker to his old stomping grounds that Peabody Museum where Mike mostly spent a number of years doing important curatorial work and establishing sort of the gold standard of Andean archaeology, while he was here, published his results in a major monograph and came up with some really amazing theoretical contributions during his work in the Department of Anthropology. Before I get started, I should introduce not only our host, Dr. Richard Leventhal, but say that, I'm William Fash, I have the privilege of being the director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology, where one of our most distinguished visiting lecturerships is the Gordon R. Willey Visiting Lecturer. This was due to the generosity of one of our alums Richard M. Leventhal got his PhD here in 1981. And his bachelor's degree, just a few short years before that. The idea of the lecture is to bring scholars of great distinction and new world archaeology to the Peabody, as was Richards and my mentor, Gordon Willey, also Mike's mentor to the Peabody to share their work and their ideas. Past Gordon R. Willey lecturers include William Sanders, Robert Cher, Jerry Sabloff, Norman Hammond, and Wendy Ashmore, Richard had to send his regrets this time, saying that he's in Yucatan, attending to matters related to his own archaeological project on the archaeology of the Maya Caste War. Fascinating topic. So I happily confess that I've been a great admirer of Mike Moseley for decades. Sadly enough, the year I arrived to grad school here was the very year that Mike had departed for the Field Museum, so I never had a chance to study under him. But I've always admired his work and have to say that that very first semester of mine here, we were all actively engaged in appreciation and also debate about his revolutionary ideas, particularly in his succinct, but salient little book, the Maritime Foundations of Indian Civilization. But all that my friend and colleague Jeffrey Quilter, our deputy director of curatorial affairs and curator of American archaeology do the honors, since he can give you a much better appreciation of the depth and breadth of Mike's contributions. I'll close by inviting you to the reception on the third floor of the Peabody after Mike entertains a few questions from you. Then we'll move up the stairs around the corner here to the third floor, to the new world galleries where you can have fun with yet other questions. So, Jeffrey...
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Thank you very much, Bill. And welcome all of you to tonight's event. It gives me great pleasure to welcome and introduce this evening's speaker, a pleasure and honor derived not only from the fact that he is one of the great new world archaeologists of his generation, but also because we're welcoming back when of Harvard's own as Bill said. Michael Edward Mosely received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MA and PhD in anthropology from Harvard University, where he studied under Gordon Willey as Bill mentioned. Upon receiving his doctorate, he served as an instructor and lecturer here from 1968 to 1970 and then as assistant and associate professor from 1970 to 1976. He also held an appointment as an assistant, and then associate curator at Harvard's Peabody Museum between 1969 and 1975. After this time at Harvard, he was an associate and then a full curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago between 1976 and 1984. And then since 1984, to the present, he's been in the Department of Anthropology, University of California Gainesville, where he now holds the rank of distinguished professor. Professor Moseley's long career has been noteworthy in his continued engagement, with big questions in archaeology, and a strong commitment and mastery of a scientific approach to them, both theoretically and methodologically. The quantity and quality of his research and publications have thus led to many honors including election as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So too, he has served on the editorial boards of Geoarchaeology and Latin American Antiquity. And since 1987, to the present, he has been a contributing editor editor to the Review of Archaeology. I subscribe to the Review of Archaeology simply to read Mike's occasional pieces, which are often delivered both to the point on target in a highly engaging and often wryly humorous style. Some of your titles are just gems, have to read them for yourselves to find out what they are. Michael Moseley made his mark in archaeology early in his career, on the subject of his doctoral dissertation, as Bill mentioned, the subsistence economies of the late pre ceramic period large ceremonial complexes on the central coast of Peru. In one fell swoop, he drew attention to the importance of these sites, and laid out an alternative model for their rise, noting the importance of maritime resources as reliable resources rather than terrestrial and especially agricultural resources, as was the prevailing model. Moseley's work was not only a contribution to Andean archaeology, but raised questions directly tied to larger issues concerning the Neolithic and urban revolutions in on a worldwide scale. The ideas he proposed and the issues he raised are still with us today. The longevity of his early scholarship alone for decades, is a testament to the originality of his thinking, the thoroughness of his research and the quantity and quality of his publications. Subsequent to his maritime hypothesis work, Moseley developed one of the largest research projects ever carried out in Peru, the Chan Chan Moche Valley archaeological project that was carried out between the late 1960s into the mid 1970s. Again, the work done under Mike's direction established benchmark understandings of the vast urban center of Chimu. The great rivals of the Incas, Chan Chan, their capital city, and the earlier, might as well throw them in, Moche culture of the same region. Mike has worked on the Central Coast. Many of the substantive discoveries and theoretical issues of that project continue to be of current scholarly relevance today. In addition, during this work, Mike trained or worked closely with a large cadre of Harvard and other graduate students and young archaeologists who went on in their own important careers. And if I started to list them all and tell you what they've done, we wouldn't have time for Mike's talk.
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Indeed, if you name almost any prominent U.S. Peruvianist archaeologist over the age of about 45, today, nine times out of ten, he or she worked directly under the tutelage or with Michael Moseley. The North Coast research entered a second phase in the late 1970s, with a focus on the ancient irrigation systems of the region. In this work, Mike moved deeper into research interests with which he had always had an interest: quaternary geomorphology, climatology, tectonics, prehistoric irrigation and water management and remote sensing. Mike's fieldwork experiences also took him into the Bolivian altiplano with [inaudible] historic sites and Tobog--Tobago, but his main research area from 1980 to the present has been the far south coast of Peru in the Moquegua Valley, and area almost unknown when he began and now one of the best known and most important research regions for a number of reasons thanks to his research and that of his colleagues. As I said, if I continue to detail all the contributions and accomplishments of Mike's career, we wouldn't have time to hear him speak. So only note a few more things before closing. First, he consistently has published articles and books, ranging from highly specialized and scientific to more generalized works. His "The Inca and Their Ancestors," first published in 1992, continues to be the book for an introduction to Andean archaeology, while articles in Science, Latin American Antiquity, and other scholarly journals continue appear with frequency. In addition to all of these accomplishments, Mike is well known as an easygoing, big-hearted friend and colleague, who has helped legions of students and colleagues throughout the years. Two notable examples of this generosity must be noted before I close. First, last January, Mike worked closely with Peabody Museum staff to transfer his large collections of maps, aerial photographs, and other documents from the Chan Chan Moche Valley Project, from his personal files to the archives department of the Peabody Museum for which we heartily thank him. And for those of you interested, we're already putting them to good use, because on April 29, we'll have an opening in our photo gallery, Gallery 12, called Spying on the Past: Declassified Satellite Images and Archaeology. I invite you all to come to the opening. Mike's photos are just part of that show, but an important part. Second, Mike has worked closely with Professor Ruth Shady of Peru San Marcos University in her research in the late pre ceramic sites of the Supe Valley where Mike and his Harvard graduate student Robert Feldman many years ago worked. And it's on that research on Peru's earliest monumental architecture, that Professor Moseley will speak to us tonight. So won't you please welcome him with me for this lecture.
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A real pleasure to come back to my old stomping grounds. Let's see if we can get our graphics up and running. Here we can, I want to address some very large monuments that date before the introduction of pottery on the coast of Peru. If you don't know who I am now, I'm Michael Moseley. And what I'm going to show you and weave into this story, this being the Gordon Willey Lecture, is the exploration by this young guy, Gordon Willey in 1941. And it's a marvelous story to tell because Gordon proved very supportive of my work in the preceramic. We went back to the site that he had worked on, published on that jointly, Robert Feldman, who was mentioned, did his doctoral dissertation on that. And it now turns out that that site called Aspero, down the coast is just one of 17, very, very large sites. I won't try and define civilization, but I'll show you what anchors it. The claims there, too, is a big site called Caral. It shows up very nicely in Google Photos, it covers approximately 66 hectares, more than 100 acres, it has six major temple mounds, if you want very large structures, and an estimated populationof about 2000. One of the problems we have is that we've got 16-17 other very big sites a little less than this. And we haven't got a lot of people, it's a small valley. So it's very likely that these sites were occupied by the majority of people briefly. And I would suppose at the beginning of the planting season at the end of harvesting. Radiocarbon dates range from 28-2900, to about 2000 BC, actually, we're pushing more about 1800 BC. The bigger sites seem to be up and running by about 2500 BC. So there's a fair amount of complexity. These are big structures. And the what we're looking at here is their exposure by Dr. Ruth Shady, Peruvian archaeologist. This, and she has worked diligently to get Caral proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage monument, also diligently to get the road paved in there used to take an hour and a half to go 20 kilometers. Now, you can do it in half an hour, makes research much more civilized. Here is one of her graphics and many of the reconstructions and whatnot that I'll use tonight are drawn from her publication that shows the relative age so to speak of where Andean civilization is relative to other more noted civilizations. And what this does is push the rise of complex societies in the Americas back further than had been noted before. Although it's preceramic, these people did a lot with baked clay. And there are a fair number of figurines that come out. And that's been known for a number of years also. So they were also in contact with ceramic-using people to the north of them and weren't interested. Thank you. And that's probably due to this real funny economy, which I'll talk about a little bit later. The crux of this
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material that is coming to light inland somewhat is right up here on the north coast. Now Jeffrey Quilter excavated a very big, very large preceramic site down near Lima some years ago. And so what's new I would think, is really that stuff is being strung out inland further than we supposed and that is because farming is important, and I'll talk to you, but not farming as we generally think of it. I need to talk a little bit about geographic conditions and their influence on economic conditions. We're in what becomes the world's driest desert. It's dry, up around the northern border of Peru, and then gets progressively drier into north central Chile. And that is due to the mountain range, world's longest mountain range, second and height only to the Himalayas, it splits the continental climate. And we get a very moist climate on the Atlantic side, where most of all the rainfall comes from the Atlantic, ultimately, and an extremely dry rain shadow along the Pacific side. The Pacific side is governed by very strong upwelling currents coming out of the tectonic trench that is building the mountain range, very cold waters coming up. Within about 30 meters of sea surface, there is sufficient penetration of sunlight to drive photosynthesis. and that in turn, supports an enormous population of very small single celled plants and zooplankton that feeds upon them and then there's a huge marine food chain on top of that. The top predators are sea lions and humans. Humans have been plugged in to marine resources. Since about 12,500 years ago, this is down in the far south of Moquegua, where we're working now. Well dated site sealed by El Nino debris flows that turned cement-like, and so it has not been disturbed. And these at this site, they're mainly going after marine birds, although small fish, and molluscs also appear. The other aspect of life on the desert is agriculture, and that is due to runoff from the high mountains above 12,000 feet. And there's not much water that comes down the the short steep [inaudible] edges, but where it does, you have year round growing conditions if you have water. Water is the limiting factor in where people are distributed. And farming and fishing tend to be separate professions. Distribution, one is inland whoops, sorry. And the other is coastal, you have separate calendars one is solar, the other is lunar. And you have very different risks. If you're a farmer, a shark is not going to chew off your leg. On the other hand, famine is pretty frequent. So what we have today and in the past are separate professions, that very different ways of making a living. And the reason they are still separate is you can do better if you focus on one rather than trying to do two. Your harvests are better, your fishing returns are better. And what unites this is economic exchange. These there is a complex symbiosis here in which you're trading protein for carbohydrates. And it's been going on for a very long period of time.
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Now I want to turn to the Supe Valley up here in the north. Caral is inland. These red dots are sites that Ruth Shady has confirmed are preceramic. Many of them are so large, that they have been known since the turn of the century. They are, you know stick out like sore thumbs in air photos. And in satellite photos. The problem has been dating them because we're before pottery, and there's not a lot of elaboration of artifacts that are dateable. Some cotton textiles. Beyond that, it's pretty pretty slim in terms of culture, people are not decked out as they will later be in Moche with fancy feathers and gold and rich tombs and stuff like that, very sort of simple and straightforward society. This is Aspero, coastal site is up here. This is the small Supe Valley. The blue lines over here represent the Mid-Holocene Highstand of the ocean, which means that Aspero was originally on a peninsula stuck way out. And you'd have a huge protected bay, which is great for fishing on small reed boats. The further out you go into open water, more chances for trouble that you'd get into. Aspero is noteworthy because it has very, very dark midden. And it was visited by Max Uhle, the so-called founder of Andean archaeology in shortly after the turn of the century, and Uhle said and quite justly, it looks like an old foundry there's so much dark earth there, he didn't excavate at it. But this is what attracted Gordon Willey, to come and work at the site. The photo of Gordon here and his mentor William Duncan Strong at Columbia University. Strong received, the institution you belong to received some government support to carry out archaeology. At that day to get your PhD at Columbia, you had to publish or had to deliver to publish copies of your dissertation to the library. So the financial burden was extreme. And Strong offered Willey the chance to go to Peru to conduct excavations, and then to write up and publish his dissertation work, which he did. And he worked at Aspero. And this is the map that was made of it, they put in about four pits, five pits, were really frustrated because there wasn't any pottery in there, a lot of garbage, but simply no artifacts to speak it. In one of them, they found a cache of maize cobs. So they presumed what it was was some sort of anomalous agricultural site without pottery, but there were burials up here that we now know are later, and they had ceramics in them. And then there's another little site off on the side that also had ceramics in them. They mapped a number of hillocks there, and at this time, 1941, there was no concept that you could have sedentary societies based on anything other than farming. So how else were you going to interpret all this midden and garbage, it had to be something in that order. And nor was there any concept that you could have mounds and earthworks being built by other people. What is interesting is that one of the mounds had a huge looters' hole in it.
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And it didn't register that this was not a hillock. It was an artificial platform mound. So we're very much captivated by our own preconceptions, and what we see is what we get. But what we expect really determines what we see. If you don't expect there to be big platform mounds, you're not going to see them even if it's pretty obvious. Fortunately, things changed in preceramic studies beginning in 1946. During Willey's second trip to the Andes with the Virú Valley project, a fellow by the name of Junius Bird excavated what is now the type site of the preceramic, Huaca Prieta, in an area where Dr. Quilter is working. Also, survey was able to pick them up in the Virú Valley. Subsequently, a number of scholars argued that there was complex architecture at many of these including the great big site next to Lima. Thus when Gordon revisited Aspero in 1971, he recognized it for what it was, and we went back and re mapped it. You can see the dark midden up here? This is trash, modern trash. The port of Supe had turned this thing into a landfill. And one of the great accomplishments recently of Ruth Shady is to get them to haul all the garbage out. So this is now on a touristic circuit. And a great deal of restoration has been done. Very, very impressive, much more than either, any of us did before. And again, it's just one of 17 sites, that's about mid range in size. By '71, there was a general consensus among some archaeologists working in Peru, a minority point of view, that all this stuff was based not on agriculture, but on marine resources. And that includes building these things that were originally called hillocks, but they stand out. People don't build temple mounds out of garbage, real simple. And so you can see these things stick out pretty well, by '71 general consensus that come that among some scientists, French, Russian, some North Americans that all this was basically marine derived, and the arguments were that you have exceptionally bountiful fishing along the coast of Peru. This is the new world's richest fishery coming down through here is the primary feeders are anchovies and sardines. And you get those by mass harvesting them with nets. Now, fishermen, we'd like to talk about the big one that got away. If you're going to feed people, it's going to be the little things that you can get in great abundance. And both anchovies and sardines are there on a year round basis. And traditionally, up until the government stepped in to regulate, you could fish 360 days out of the year, only rough seas about four or five days. So that readily available, we've got this extraordinary preservation, very good botanical preservation, and it is just chock full of marine organisms, fish, seabirds, shellfish and whatnot. Thus, by about '75, there, it was possible to hypothesize that the preceramic had a maritime component. This was my original doctorate back in '68. Got a little skinny little book out that upset a lot of people in 1975, and argued that marine resources sustained first of all sedentary life, and that there's no question about that now goes all the way into Chile, there's a Chilean version of this floating around. There is also when people settle down, population sizes increase. So we get growth in numbers of people. And the construction of large monuments comes into this context in here. And again, complex organization, whether you want to call it civilization or chieftainships, that's up to you. I won't debate that. But Dr. Shady, does argue for civilization. And I'll go with her
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arguments here. By '75, it was also evident that these people had to cultivate industrial cultigens in order to sustain fishing. The sea can feed you, but it doesn't give you fishing tackle. It doesn't give you boats. It doesn't give you fuel, maybe some driftwood and stuff. But it's long been evident that there was an agricultural component. It just doesn't behave the way we'd like to think it should. It's not a Near Eastern model. The big thing for if you're going to harvest those marine resources that are close to the shore, you don't have to go out real far, is cotton. Now because we're in the world's driest desert, there's very little natural vegetation that can give you long fibers suitable for making nets and fishing lines. Thus, cotton is the second most common cultigen that is coming to light these days. And I think the same was at El Paraíso where Quilter excavated. The other really common thing that's coming up is wood and its fruit trees. And I think what we're doing here is double dipping. The fruit wood tends to be pretty pithy. And it's great for making float rafts, which you need to get your big fishing nets out into the water. Other important cultigens: reeds for watercraft, these little watercraft are great, but they're you're not going to be able to carry a really big 100 meter long net on one of these, they can spread the net for you, help you bring it in. And then gourds: very important in preceramic, do not have pots. But you've got gourds, and they can be used to carry water, other tasks and more importantly, they are floats for nets that help you suspend these curtain nets. So that that was where we were in 1975. And it hasn't changed significantly. There's a dearth and there still is a dearth of staples. By staple, I mean a cultivated crop that you can harvest in sufficient quantities that will tide people over for the rest of the year. And that's probably why many of these sites don't seem to be inhabited on a year round basis. They're not emphasizing that. Anyway, thanks to Dr. Shady's work, we have the trash thrown off Aspero. Now I'm sure Gordon would be very pleased about that. And people are beginning to visit it. She has a book out called Caral, the Sacred City or the City of the Sacred Fire, there has been an advertisement for another English language volume fairly recently. I don't own it. What Shady's work suggests, and I subscribe to, is that plant tending began along the coast in the valley mouth sediments. And this is where you could grow fruit trees, cotton and stuff like that, as well as harvest reeds, other materials, and then it migrated upstream inland into the desert. So if we looked at whoops, looked at the Supe Valley, we think, and this is yet to be demonstrated, archaeologically with dates, that the earlier stuff is going to be around Aspero. And then these things are gonna move upland, perhaps relatively fast.
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There's not a lot of farmland in Supe. And again, if you're going to fish, you're going to need hook and line and nets and whatnot. And the cottons that are grown there, are perennials. And we still have wildlands down in the far south and Moquegua. They're good little shrubs about this high, and they just grow, you don't have to do a lot of work to get them going. And the same thing with fruit trees. Once you get those things up and going, you're not going to have to spend a lot of time doing that. So what we would have then, is in the Late Archaic, the rise of separate professions, fishermen and farmers on the coast in these coastal valleys, and the hypothesis here is that they are interdependent. Once you get about five kilometers inland, it's going to be real hard to commute. If you're going to try and do a fishing thing and once you get 20 kilometers inland, forget it. So Shady's hypothesis is that civilization arose when fishing and farming became economically interdependent. The old maritime hypothesis we can push back further in time that seemed to still "hold water." What we're now trying to factor in is this new, more complex economy. With the rise of specialized fishing and farming, the argument is we have the rise of a managerial elite to coordinate exchange, and to keep the economy rolling, this elite rules in the name of the gods. We don't have particularly graphic evidence of warfare going on back in Pre-Pottery times. And what these characters control is access to the most important scarcest resource, easiest one to control, is arable farmland. Again, small valley. And each big patch of land in there seems to have a big site right on it sitting on it. Shady's work was pretty well articulated in Peru by 19-, the early 1990s. But controversy arose basically, it was negative and distracting, went on for seven years and resulted in this little thing. You know, showdown at the okay corral. Jonathan Haas and his wife, Winifred Creamer, Jonathan's at the Field Museum. And she is at Northern Illinois University, jumped claim, quite literally, and began working in the valleys, both north and south of Supe, and began publishing a lot of Shady's data and interpretations as their own, with no reference to her. And that was unfortunate. This began really in 2001. And in Science Magazine, other high profile journals, they argue that the origins of complex societies in the Andes now appears to be economically quite similar to other old world areas, with agricultural foundations. This isn't what Shady is saying by any means. But this is a testable hypothesis. Give me a break. We can go in and compare what's coming out of coastal Peru with other areas of the world, very easy. Other areas of the world, what do they depend upon? Domesticated animals for protein. Not so in Peru. This stuff is basically coming out of the sea in tremendous abundance. We have again, if we want to look for plants and look at those, we have exceptional preservation. These are some sort of little bitty marsh tubers, these are [inaudible], you can there's a thing like cat tail, great big reed down there. You can eat and chew up the base of that thing. And then you get a lot of fiber and you spit that out. These are milkweed-like plants that have long fibers. And there's a big cotton textile. And this is the best open air archaeological preservation,
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surpasses Egypt. And so what you find is really quite important. It tells you that we're not fulfilling expectations. Fruits, as these are, and chili pepper comes in real early. And that's probably because you get tired of eating all these fish. Again, dinner nuts, try and spice this up, honey. The thing that is close to, if we want to talk about, and these things cotton and the fruits are represented by thousands of specimens [inaudible]. One thing that does appear later, sweet potato. But there are less than six examples of that. There is no maize. And we're not seeing anything else, maize doesn't become common until later. Maize has been found at preceramic sites over the years. But there is no maize that has been directly C14-dated as preceramic. All maize that "was preceramic" that has been dated is [inaudible]. And that's not surprising there's very limited distribution where this stuff was cropping up, seems like these people had a little cult of growing and bearing maize and [inaudible] site, something like that. The other way to get at this is not simply by the remains themselves. There's a dearth of staples, same thing we've seen 25 years ago, is [inaudible] to stable isotopes and see what they were eating and there are no surprises. We're getting very, very high marine signatures. There was some work done. This has been done by us at Florida at the moment. And it looks very, very good. There were some Chilean fisherfolks called Chinchorro culture, very intensively studied and about 30 of them, dietary remains, stable isotopes suggests 96% of their calories are coming from the sea. And that would fit in general here. So stay with me. And we'll now turn to the good stuff. Look at Caral-Supe, it's really a marvelous site. And again, this is all Shady's doing. What we've been working on with her the last few years are a series of natural disasters very late in the preceramic that looked like they are contributors to the collapse of this adaptation, got to figure what they had going for them lasted for over 1000 years. They were carrying on happy as clams, and then the bottom sort of falls out. So America's earliest city, the valley is really narrow. There's not a lot of arable land, but it's very well watered, it has a very high water table. So you can farm year round here, it's probably a major consideration going on. We talked about the mounds at Caral, there are at least six big ones. And they are no doubt orient orienting to cosmological or astronomical features. There is this great big, if you want to call it a stele, it's not carved, it's got niches around it. It sits right out here between these three big pyramids. And presumably they are tracking stuff that's going on. And so, Andean cosmology is really quite rich. We've got somewhere between four and six million native speakers of Quechua and Aymara. And this is the largest surviving population of Native Americans anywhere in the continent. And I wouldn't argue that they are ancient savages frozen in time. But over broad areas, these folks share a number of really fundamental concepts on how the cosmos is organized, how humans should be organized. And we can draw on some of that, to try and understand what may be going on here. But let me caution you that when some guy puts a poncho on a gringo and then starts talking about cosmology 5000 years ago, you need to take that with a grain of salt. So keep that in mind.
42:39
In Andean cosmology, mountains are very, very important. There's probably no place in the Andes that you can live without seeing a mountain. They're all over the place. The mountains are where gods reside. They are very important to tracking celestial phenomena for calendars. And not only that, but in the broader cosmology, the Milky Way is a river that picks up water out of the cosmic ocean, and then carries it up and drops it on the mountains' tops. These are Apu, sacred places, gods live there. And then from the father mountain, they're generally male, the water descends to fertilize Pachamama Mother Earth. And I'll come back to this analogy, again, very widespread, and certainly Pachamama, reverence for her all over the place, and mountains too. But if that's the case, then you could argue that Caral is a six-mountain city, that you've got six major deities, at least, represented there. But you got to watch out for that guy. One of the core values here in Andean cosmology is you use miniatures to try and manipulate the macro cosmos. So little bitty mountains, well, hopefully, God will come and reside there, at least on a part time basis, [inaudible], we're doing the same thing. There are a lot of little figurines that show up, a clay things, probably sacrifices of some kind, you don't have to kill a kid or something like that. So when we look at the buildings, per se, we'll start off with the largest one called the major temple. And it is about twice the size of a football field. Stone faced, again, very heavy emphasis on restoring these things, or at least stabilizing, because tourism is going to pay the bill, is ultimately what's going on here. And when you look at this here, the main entryways are up here and took a lot of people to build this, but you couldn't get them all on top of it. So we've got a great segregation of space. Worker ants out here, get to help carry stones, do this, that and the other. And then the elites are carrying on up here. And on the tops of these big platforms, you can't see what's going on, if you're sitting down here in front. So there's an emphasis on the stairways, as sort of stages of ritual display. This is where the elite construct their stuff for the masses to see, because when they get up here on the top, you can't tell what's going on very much. And quite often very wide stairways leading up to a terrace, and people may go both ways, and then narrow ones going up to the top. So public access, basically, what you're going to see is activity on the sides, stairways to the mound. There is an addition to the mound architecture at Caral, a lot of lower or, not lower class, but less monumental stuff. And much of this is, cases here and here, these are residential complexes that are actually tacked on to the sides of the major pyramid. So without dressing up as an Andean Indian, I say that this is very likely where the priests live, or the people in charge of these temples. And it's really very impressive residential architecture for any time scale in Peru. High walls may be built out of stone posts. Here are a series of reconstructions. So we've got these people as full time residents. We don't have a lot of the commoners there. They tend to be out on the edge of the ocean or the edge of the valley. Elite costuming: very, very simple. Here is a guy who's got a either a large diaper on or a breechcloth of some kind, and then a doughnut-shaped headdress, which is this. Again, Moche comes on, all this stuff isn't gold and feathers and stuff like that. This is very, very simple. material culture. There is some ornamentation coming in. And
47:32
it's pretty simple. And but here's spondylus shell from Ecuador. Again, these people are in contact over broad areas, the elites and this stuff is appearing and these in areas where pottery is in use. So there's plenty of contact going on. Biggest or most common artifacts are twine textiles. This is called finger weaving. You may do it on a frame loom, but it lacks the heddle that really industrializes the weaving to go on. It is probably outside of fishnet, and there's no, there's no fishing gear at Caral outside of fishing gear, at places like Aspero, these things are the most common artifact. And it's very likely that we're seeing what's called textile taxation here, this is the the [inaudible], we're great at that. The men get to go off and build monuments and this, that and the other, and we're Equal Opportunity employers, honey, and here's a pile of cotton, weave it or spin it, leave it and I'll come collect the cloth. And as I say, I think this is very likely. The best iconography we have comes out of twine textiles, such as this [inaudible]. This is from the type site of the preceramic up in the Chicama Valley. Unfortunately, the textiles have faded. And to reconstruct the design, you have to plot the movement of the threads and you do that lose your eyesight, but you get somebody to do that and after a year or two, these things begin to emerge on some textiles. So textile probably much more important than we can see, or get a feel for, and again, I think beginning of textile taxation going on here. So if we look at textile taxation, then argument is males are rendering [inaudible] labor, same as they did in the Inca. When we look at the mounds, they're certainly very big. But they're not built all at once. Very typical of new world mound building in general, and certainly of Peru. These things are built, and then used for a while, then built again, renewed, built again, used for awhile, built again. And this is an interesting phenomenon. Because if they're able to command resources to reconstruct the entire thing, then it's still very important to that society. We did a similar thing some years ago, with the Statue of Liberty. Recall that it was closed down, the president of Chrysler Corporation became the fundraising giant that went out and got all this money, and they cleaned up Miss Liberty, stabilized her. And then we had a grand reopening of her. And this is an event of national solidarity, potentially the same thing going on here. What sets Caral apart from other sites is that in a late stage of reorganization, they got them all to get aligned around a central plaza. Elsewhere, these other big sites, they're all over the place. There's no orientation, per se. Looks like each one has its own little cult of devotees. This reorganization is what Shady sees as the stamp of the state coming in here. That Caral is the capital, they are able to pull off this reorganization by drawing labor from populations elsewhere. Again, we haven't got the artifacts that really allow us to see state organization at this point. And the architecture, we may be able to pull it out of that. But as a sample is getting bigger. Certainly cosmological significance, we've talked about that, there's stuff going on up in the sky. This is the big huaca out there. That's Bob Feldman again, back in '71. He visited these sites, you can't hide them. We couldn't date them. That was the main thing. We thought, Oh, my God, fishermen are not going to be all the way up here and build these things. It must be early ceramic state. Not so.
52:12
Building these sites requires a great deal of stone. And there are quarries. I'll show you a slide of that. But what's interesting is that quarried stone is placed in a great big bag. And then that bag is brought to the construction site, and then bag and all is deposited in construction. So here is a quarry, very angular signs all over. They were really quarrying, the only big hill in in the site. And then all of a sudden, they decided, hey, this is too important. And they turned it into a temple, built over the top of it. So we've got it pretty well preserved. This is a bag of stones. They're called shicra, and they are made out of sturdy reeds. Here's an empty bag. Here's one filled with stone. And here's how they appear in archaeological excavations. I think these bags are male labor tax accounting devices. They're generally filled like this. But here's one with just one big whopping great stone. And I think the significant is you're counting numbers of bags, not how many stones are in each one. Construction is certainly an activity that was fair amount of votive offerings associated with it. Little cache of crystals. These things, [inaudible] deals are very common in construction fill and clay figurines. Also, in some major construction episodes, you get human sacrifice, mainly children, young people. The city is called the city of the sacred fire because all of the big platforms have what are called fire altars in them. These are small buildings, either circular or square right here, and they're not something you can see out from the front out here. But they were very important. One of the distinguishing features is that they have sub floor flues or vents to bring fresh air in to the heart. And then from there, you get a high combustion going on. And I think they're really after high combustion, either because they're going to throw on stuff that smokes, goes up into the sky and all the plebes outside in the plaza go ooh, or they're going to use it another way. These things have been called the use of smoke, ropes of smoke and again, you use them to tug upon the macrocosm and cause them to get done what you want. It's still an aspect of indigenous ceremonial activity. These are shaman carrying on, and no doubt, very important back here in the preceramic. But given the vents under here, I suspect that if you really want to impress the plebes, do it at night and throw on stuff that'll spark, go up in the sky. Why not? Makes a good story. Other thing that is common in Andean organizations is what's called dual organization settlements divided between left and right, upper and lower, male/female, very, very pervasive. This is Shady's view of what the dividing lines, if I'm reading her correctly, are all about. On each side, there is a building a big building that has a circular sunken plaza on it. The circular sunken plazas are cult-type activities. They come in in the preceramic time, they last in northern Peru, up to Moche times in the far south in the Altiplano. They last up to about 1000 AD. They've got two stairways, one going in and one going out. They look like they were designed to be paraded through. You can't hold many people in this area. The ones at Caral have huge columns around them. So you may have some precessional, not just going in and out but around here. So you go up, then you go down in, and then you come back up again.
56:47
In the Andes, it is like in the pueblos, that humans origins are in the inner Earth. There's a great void down there. And people arise out of that and come up to the surface through the sipapu, in the pueblos. What you might have is something similar going on here with this cult perhaps in Pachamama, you go down into Pachamama, you rise out of Pachamama. But, you know, 5000 years ago, you got to watch out for that god that may or may not be true. Anyway, let's look at these things. Look at the biggest one, well, depends on how you define big. The one with the biggest mound is over here, the male side of the site, according to Shady, here's a reconstruction of that. And that's, it's a really big mound. Here's the court, great big thing. And again, it's wide enough, if you wanted to have a procession going around it as well as up and down into it, you could. So if we're going to put this together in a cosmic tail, as it were, you may have a procession, you begin out here at ground level, you go into this thing, you go up here, which would be a procession into Pachamama and up through Father Apu, Father Mountain. But, you know, that's taken with a grain of salt. The other side, and this moiety organization, dual organization, is asymmetrical, they call it in the Andes. One side can draw resources from the other, but not vice versa. So here we have a circular sunken court, that is the main feature, and the mound is really sort of tacked on much, much lower here. And this is a great shot of it. Front parts been eroded away, but it came out here and then the mound is back here. These circular sunken courts have acoustical phenomena associated with them. Those of you who are familiar with old world archaeology, you probably have heard of whispering walls, where you can stand on one side of the wall and whisper something here and somebody on the opposite side can hear you real well. So it's a well known phenomenon. Certainly still, this one, a lot of labor went into it. But what is amazing is all the musical instruments that have come out of that particular structure. These things are called clarinets, Dr. Shady, you've got some marvelous flutes. And again, given the acoustical properties of the circular sunken court probably has some pretty rich ceremonies going on here to impress the plebes. If they can't see the ceremony, at least they will hear the music, so to speak. Here is another way of reconstructing this. Again, I should dress up in my poncho. But this is Shady's. True. So with that, let me just say Caral is a marvelous place, how you want to rank it: chieftainship, civilization, state–that may be worthy of debate. But the main proponent and certainly strongest argument for preceramic civilization, are really due to this one very charismatic individual. And she is the one that has brought us that, and with that, let me close. But say, if you want to take something away here, we look at the coast as still being unique, and different course of evolution. It's nothing that the Field Museum has introduced here that would change any of that. It's economically very divergent from what we see elsewhere in the world, but socially, very convergent, in terms of temples and priests, and lots of activity of that nature. So let me conclude with that. I'll field a couple of questions. And then we must all go to the reception.
1:01:36
Yes, ma'am. No, we're arguing that agriculture moves from the coast, preceramic agriculture, the funny stuff, emphasising cottons to fish which begins near the coast, where it's easier for people to, for fishermen to grow cotton. And then as land gets scarce, they shift further inland. Now, this is not to argue if we wanted to go all the way back into the mountains, we could say that, yeah, there are people farming up in the mountains, too, behind us, at high elevation. But the really rough thing is the mountain sites are producing botanical assemblages that really fulfill our expectations about staples. It's weird. It's been that way since 1975, and haven't gotten any clearer. Yes, ma'am. It seems to be pretty much a monochrome cotton, sort of a dirty brown. And that's why, the problem is with reconstructing the iconography in these textiles, if they had cottons of different color and wove that into it that would still be with us, probably. But now, it looks like these things are dyed or painted or something like that.
1:03:07
Yes, sir. You mentioned some natural disasters, can you elaborate on why these cultures died out?
1:03:19
The final phase of, we've got about half a dozen big sites now. Next, the final phase is demarcated by what is probably the best archaeological evidence in the Americas for a large, large scale tectonic event, potentially a magnitude eight or larger. And that makes you wonder if I got the right gods. Some of these temples, many of them are sort of repaired, but the level of labor investment thrown at the repairs is pretty skinny. There's one at Aspero where they didn't even get into that. The commoners just moved in on the top and started dumping garbage all over it. After that, big earthquakes. It's not just the destruction of the buildings that's important. It's in mountains. You're going to release eight zillion landslides on a rainless watershed. That stuff is just loose debris waiting for El Nino to come and dump a lot of rain on the lower watershed and drain all this material and dump it out to sea. The sea, when non El Nino normal conditions return, picks up this stuff, grinds it up, carries it up the shore and deposited as sand beaches. The daily winds are regimented. They come up at nine o'clock and they go right inland off the ocean. You get a lot of sand out there, you have a huge supply of sand dunes begin to move in. So that's a complex three-four-fold disaster that we're looking at. And it doesn't do these people much good. The amount of debris that's shoved out, probably by a number of El Ninos following a big disturbance, builds what's called a beach ridge out of [inaudible], it's 100 kilometers long. This thing just straightens out the coast. Whereas Aspero originally was on a peninsula [inaudible], the whole valley is closed off. So fishing is impacted negatively, you get pushed out to have to fish in more open waters which are riskier, and to a degree less productive. That's that's the big stones. Death by stoning also entails a little bit of sand and that blows inland and buries Supe Valley. So yeah, that's that's the story. And here I will dress up with my geological hat and put that on and you can take that with a grain of salt but I think we know what we're doing here. Yes. Yes, it does. In some areas. You get a kelp-like seaweed. There was a site that I excavated back from my doctoral degree, it's no longer there, tiny little place. And it was just full of kelp [inaudible] roots and all the big leaves were gone. Air bladders were left behind. It is still important today. For traditional people. They will come down to the coast to gather kelp and other iodine-rich seafood and take that back to the sierra, where otherwise people would be suffering goiter. Yes, sir.
1:07:02
What is the evidence of the watercraft I've seen along the coastexisted 2000 years ago.
1:07:15
We're talking 4000-5000. The reeds preserve at sites--that, I lived in a fishing village for a number of years and where they use these little boats, they don't bring them home at night. You pull those reed boats out because they get waterlogged real fast. And you stand them up at night on a rack or something like that. Let them drain. And then you can go back and use them again. The shelf life of a reed boat, maybe about three months, something like that. Thor Heyerdahl, when he did the Ra Expedition found that out. They get waterlogged real fast. That's what happened in Ra One. Okay, thank you folks, very much. Let's go.