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By 8000
B.C.,
paleo-Indians had radiated throughout western South America. Their lives were similar enough to contemporary hunter-gatherers that perhaps they should now be simply called Indians. Whatever the name, they were varied enough to have pleased Walt Whitman. Some groups had settled into mountain caves, skewering deer-size vicuña on spears; others plucked fish from mangrove swamps; still others stayed on the beach as their forebears had, weaving nets and setting them into the water. In the parched Atacama Desert, the Chinchorro created history’s first mummies.

Mummies were first discovered in the Atacama at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the Chinchorro attracted sustained attention only in 1983, when ninety-six superbly preserved cadavers were discovered beneath a massif that rises above downtown Arica, Chile. About 90 percent of their diet was seafood—fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and seaweed—the Chinchorro ate almost no fruit, vegetables, or land animals. Sometime before 5000
B.C.
they began mummifying bodies—children at first, adults later on. Nobody knows why. They peeled off the skin from the limbs like so many socks, covered the result with white clay, painted it to resemble the deceased, and fitted the head with a wig made from its own hair. Such was the skill of the Chinchorro at preserving human flesh that scientists have been able to extract intact DNA from cadavers thousands of years older than the Egyptian pyramids.

Many of the child mummies exhibit signs of severe anemia, surprising in people who lived on seafood. In the preserved cadavers paleoparasitologists (scientists who study ancient parasites) have discovered eggs from
Diphyllobothrium pacificum,
a marine tapeworm that usually afflicts fish and sea lions but can slip into human beings who eat raw seafood. The parasite clamps onto the intestines and siphons nutrients from the body. Some grow to lengths of sixteen feet. If the tapeworm attaches to the right place in the gut, it can leech vitamin B
₁₂
from the victim, instigating a lethal form of anemia. The Chinchorro, it seems, were beset by parasites.

The Chinchorro mummies were often repainted, indicating that they were not quickly interred but kept on display, perhaps for years. One can speculate that grieving parents were unable to let go of their children’s bodies in a society that viewed the spirit as adhering to the flesh. What is certain is that the Chinchorro mummies are the first known manifestation of a phenomenon that marked Andean society all the way up to the Inka: the belief that the venerated, preserved dead could exert a powerful impact on the living.

Sometime before 3200
B.C.,
and possibly before 3500
B.C.,
something happened in the Norte Chico. On a world level, the eruption at the Norte Chico was improbable, even aberrant. The Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He Valleys were fertile, sunny, well-watered breadbaskets with long stretches of bottomland that practically invited farmers to stick seeds in the soil. Because intensive agriculture has been regarded a prerequisite for complex societies, it has long been claimed that civilizations can arise only in such farm-friendly places. The Peruvian littoral is an agronomical no-go zone: barren, cloudy, almost devoid of rain, seismically and climatically unstable. Except along the rivers, nothing grows but lichen. “It looks like the last place you’d want to start up something major,” Creamer said to me. “There doesn’t seem to be anything there to build it on.”

Nonetheless, they built it. “The complex of sites in the Norte Chico region is nothing short of extraordinary,” Haas and Creamer wrote in 2005.

While a very small number of moderate sites with communal architecture…are found in other parts of the Andes, the concentration of at least 25 large ceremonial/residential sites in the valleys of the Norte Chico is unique. Metaphorically, most of the Andes is covered with granules of sand [between 3000
B.C.
and 1800
B.C.
]. In a few spots, there are anthills that clearly stand out from the loose granules. Then in the Norte Chico, there is a volcano.

The Norte Chico consists of four narrow river valleys: from south to north, the Huaura, Supe, Pativilca, and Fortaleza. They converge on a slice of coastline less than thirty miles long. The first full-scale archaeological investigation of the area took place in 1941, when Gordon R. Willey and John M. Corbett of Harvard worked at Aspero, a salt marsh at the mouth of the Supe. They found a big trash heap and a multiroomed building with no pottery and a few maize cobs under the pounded clay floor. They didn’t know what to make of it. Why was there no pottery, when all previously examined large settlements in Peru had pottery? Why only a handful of maize cobs in the whole site, when maize, at least for the elite, was a staple food? How did they grow maize in a salt marsh, anyway? How could they have agriculture but no pottery? Working before the invention of carbon dating, they had no way to determine Aspero’s age. The puzzled archaeologists took thirteen years to publish their data.

 

Indian cities in Peru are some of the most heavily looted archaeological sites in the world. The looting dates back millennia, with the Inka having ravaged the centers of their predecessors, sometimes reusing art and stonework. The Spanish sack of Tawantinsuyu calamitously expanded on this tradition of plunder, which has greatly accelerated in modern times, fueled by the desperate poverty of Peru’s Indian population. Here in the Fortaleza Valley, graverobbers—almost certainly local farmers—have ripped apart thousand-year-old tombs in a futile search for golden artifacts. Others gathered the remains into shrines for secretive, candlelit prayers to the dead, whose powers are recognized by alcohol and cigarettes.

 

Among Aspero’s many curiosities, Willey and Corbett noted, were a half-dozen mounds, some of them nearly fifteen feet tall. These “knolls, or hillocks,” the two men wrote, were “natural eminences of sand.” Thirty years after his initial excavation, Willey revisited Aspero with Michael E. Moseley, an archaeologist now at the University of Florida. To his chagrin, Willey quickly recognized that the natural “knolls” were, in truth, human-made “temple-type platform mounds,” evidence of a more materially advanced culture than he had imagined possible for the era. Indeed, Aspero may have had as many as
seventeen
artificial mounds, all of which Willey missed the first time round. “It is an excellent, if embarrassing, example,” he remarked, “of not being able to find what you are not looking for.”

At about the same time, one of Moseley’s graduate students wrote his doctoral dissertation about Aspero. He had enough grant money to pay for seven radiocarbon dates. According to one of them, Aspero went back to 3000
B.C.
The student also had a smaller, nearby site called As8 tested and got a date of 4900
B.C.
Ridiculous,
he in effect thought.
These dates are too old—obviously something went wrong. Maybe the samples were contaminated.
And he tossed the dates out.

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. From the sandy soil emerged an imposing, 150-acre array of earthworks: 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 worked with the project in 2000 and helped establish Caral’s antiquity: it was founded before 2600
B.C.
While Shady continued work on Caral, Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz split off to investigate the Pitivilca, the next river to the north, and the Fortaleza, just north of the Pitivilca. 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.”

NORTE CHICO
The Americas’ First Urban Complex, 3000–1800
B.C.

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.