The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (39 page)

The community of Áspero occupied a shallow basin, framed by rocky hills that jut into the sea. Between 15 and 20 artificial mounds still rise above its blackened refuse heaps. Two of the largest mounds were excavated by archaeologist Robert Feldman. Each had an impressive multiroom building on its summit.

One of those buildings, reached by a stairway, had a large entry court with a centrally placed fire pit. Two human sacrifices were associated with this court. One was an adult with a gourd vessel, buried tightly flexed inside a bundle. The other, an infant, had been wrapped in a cotton textile and placed inside a basket. The infant wore a cap covered with 500 beads of seashell, clay, or plant material, and its burial basket had been covered with a four-legged stone basin. Possibly the sacrificed child belonged to a family of some importance.

The second building, reached by a ramp, measured more than 90 by 60 feet and featured a high-walled entry flanked by smaller rooms and courts. Its mud-brick walls were decorated with rectangular niches and brick friezes, and its contents included a cache of 13 unbaked clay figurines. Feldman hesitated to declare this building a temple, in part because the ritual architecture of 4,500 years ago was still relatively nonstandardized. The building’s elevated position, complex mud-brick decoration, and lack of domestic refuse, however, all suggest that it was a temple of some kind.

Our sample of early Peruvian temples is enlarged by the Late Archaic site of Caral, 13 miles inland near the left bank of the Río Supe. The sprawling settlement covers a landscape where rocky hills alternate with sandy plains and depressions. Perhaps a dozen prominent buildings encircle the low central area of the site.

The layout of Caral is unlike that of any village we have looked at so far. Each of its public buildings seems to have been accompanied by a nearby multiroom residential complex. These buildings have different styles and orientations and do not give the impression of components integrated into a master plan. Instead, the impression is one of multiple social units, each of which built its own ritual complex. Some of the major buildings were temples atop pyramidal mounds. Others were linear complexes whose varied elements suggest the stages in a ritual procession.

Some of the most impressive buildings were built around natural rock outcrops. This labor-saving use of bedrock was most evident in the case of the so-called Quarry Pyramid, where the stairs and terraces of the building were clearly quarried from a natural hill that formed the core of the building. Where no such outcrop was available, Caral’s architects relied on a technique that Peruvian archaeologists call
shicra.
Shicra refers to coarse net bags filled with stones. These bags could be stacked one upon another to form a wall or terrace, much the way we use sandbags to build levees along flooding rivers.

FIGURE 30.
   The so-called Amphitheater Building at Caral, Peru, appears to have been designed to direct processions of worshippers along a linear, 500-foot route from one ritual venue to the next, eventually reaching the highest and most restricted inner sanctum.

The so-called Amphitheater Building, built on the south edge of the site, combined rough stone masonry and shicra fill. This building’s layout seems designed to regulate the movement of a procession (
Figure 30
). The linear complex extends more than 500 feet. Worshippers would have entered through a corridor flanked by rows of storage rooms. Then, using a series of narrow stone stairways, they would step down into a sunken circular court more than 90 feet in diameter. Ascending the stairs to the opposite side of this amphitheater-like court, they then would have passed through a narrow doorway into a rectangular entry room. From this point on, the procession would have continued to rise in elevation as it passed through three or four more narrow doorways and stairways. Finally, it would have reached the inner sanctum of the complex, a room elevated by a platform more than 260 feet wide. Every door and stairway in the linear complex seems to have been designed to force ritual participants to move deliberately through six or seven levels before reaching the final, and least accessible, room.

This complex was not the only building at Caral to feature a sunken circular court. A smaller court, 60 feet in diameter, had been built at the base of the stairway to the site’s largest pyramid, which bore on its summit a temple complex. Our suspicion is that such courts were the scene of preliminary rituals that worshippers were required to perform before being allowed to proceed to the inner sanctum. In many parts of the ancient world, the life force housed in a temple was considered so great that one could not leave the secular world and enter the temple without a preliminary ceremony.

Both the pyramidal structures and the linear complexes at Caral seem to have culminated in temples. Caral, however, includes some ritual structures reminiscent of earlier, achievement-based societies. These structures were circular, white-plastered rooms with centrally placed fire pits, to which oxygen was supplied by subfloor ducts; they look, in other words, like circular versions of the ritual houses at La Galgada. Caral thus seems to lie at the transition from (1) a society with small-scale, private rituals to (2) a society with large-scale, public-performance rituals.

One of the most interesting aspects of Caral is the apparent association of multiroom residential complexes with ritual buildings. Many residences had cobblestone foundations, upright posts of acacia or willow wood, and walls of cane daubed with clay. Shady believes that the residential complexes nearest to the temple pyramids were occupied by extended families of somewhat higher rank.

The number of temples, as well as the attention devoted to ritual processions, makes it clear that spiritual authority was a major source of power at Caral. As at Áspero, human sacrifice was practiced. During a period of architectural renovation in Caral’s largest pyramidal mound, the builders incorporated into the fill an adult male victim with his hands tied behind his back.

Music also played a role in the rituals at Caral. Excavations in the Amphitheater Building produced more than 30 flutes made of bone. Each flute was carved in such a way that the sound hole appeared to be the mouth of a spirit or mythical ancestor (
Figure 31
).

The largest of the residential complexes at Caral, called Sector A, lay almost equidistant from the Amphitheater Building and the Quarry Pyramid. Refuse from the cane-and-clay rooms of this residential complex was a major source of information on Caral’s crops. By drawing off water with irrigation canals, the villagers had turned the Río Supe floodplain into gardens of squash, beans, sweet potatoes, and chile peppers. Their orchards featured avocados, guavas, and a series of fruit trees for which we have only indigenous Peruvian names. They grew cotton for textiles and fishing nets, as well as gourds for containers and net floats.

Despite its distance from the ocean, Caral was well supplied with fish and shellfish. Residential Sector A alone produced more than 20,000 specimens of anchovies and another 7,000 of sardines. These small fish were probably dried by communities such as Áspero and transported to Caral in baskets. Occasional larger fish—drums of several species, catfish, bonito, and even the
tollo,
or smoothhound shark—also showed up in Caral’s refuse.

From roughly 4,300 years ago onward, Caral was in contact with regions producing corn. As with so many early Andean villages we have examined, however, corn was too rare at Caral to have been a staple. Our suspicion is that Caral obtained enough from its highland trading partners to make
chicha,
or corn beer, for ceremonial use. There are hints that those same highland partners supplied Caral with
charki,
or dried portions of llama meat. Charki (from which we get the English word “jerky”) frequently included bone segments that made the rehumidified meat juicier, and such segments are recognizable in Caral’s refuse.

FIGURE 31.
   These bone flutes from Caral, roughly six and a half inches in length, were carved in such a way that the sound emerged from the mouth of a spirit or mythical ancestor.

Evaluating Inequality at Caral

Several factors make it difficult to evaluate the degree of inequality at Caral. On the one hand, the scale of its ritual architecture makes it precocious within the New World; Mexico did not produce comparable buildings until more than a millennium later. On the other hand, Caral was not even the largest village in its own valley, and there is no evidence that it stood at the apex of a hierarchy of satellite communities. Caral moved large stones around, but so did egalitarian societies such as the Angami and Lotha Naga. So few burials have been reported from Caral that we are not sure whether elite children received sumptuary goods.

To us, one of the most significant lines of evidence at Caral is the apparent association of each major temple complex with a multifamily residential compound. What this suggests is that Caral society consisted of relatively large descent groups of some kind, each of which designed, built, and maintained its own temple. Social units with access to rocky outcrops turned the latter into pyramids. Those without access to outcrops used shicra to construct processional complexes. Both groups of builders placed sunken courts at the interface between the secular and sacred worlds.

The Rise of Chiefly Warfare on the Peruvian Coast

In his analysis of Polynesian societies, Irving Goldman concluded that the most powerful rank societies arise when military force is combined with religious authority. Such a combination seems to have emerged on the Peruvian coast in the centuries following the occupation of Caral.

Head-hunting already had a long history on the Peruvian coast. Consider the evidence from Asia, a Late Archaic site some 65 miles south of Lima. The villagers of Asia lived in multiroom compounds built of stones and clay, irrigating many of the same crops grown at Caral. While excavating an area of burials at Asia, archaeologists came across something unexpected: four severed human heads, all carefully wrapped in a bundle. One of the skulls had incisions left by the removal of the facial skin.

Even the trophy heads from Asia, however, do not fully prepare us for the escalation of raiding depicted at Cerro Sechín. That ancient chiefly center lay in the Casma Valley, perhaps 180 miles north of Lima.

Some 3,500 years ago, villages in the Casma Valley were irrigating squash, beans, cotton, and root crops and producing simple pottery. Cerro Sechín covered more than 12 acres, not far from the confluence of the Sechín and Moxeke Rivers.

FIGURE 32.
   The temple at Cerro Sechín, Peru, was surrounded by a wall made of carved stones depicting a massacre. In the top row we see a severed torso, loose intestines, and severed limbs. In the lower row we see blood pouring from plucked-out eyes, a collection of eyeballs, and a stack of trophy heads.

The leaders of Cerro Sechín created a multiroom temple with an entry court and an inner sanctum. The temple sat on a three-tiered stone masonry platform more than 170 feet on a side. Access to the temple was controlled by a single doorway in a massive wall, constructed of upright stones quarried from the hill behind it. Because of their irregular shapes the upright stones had gaps between them, and those gaps had been filled with smaller stones stacked one above another. Both the larger and smaller stones were carved with details of a massacre (
Figure 32
).