by Christopher Joyce
Archaeologist Jonathan Haas
Photo Gallery: Explore the Excavation Site
A map showing the location of Norte Chico.
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Alice Kreit, NPR
The mound builders settled in the arid, coastal hills of northwestern
Peru.
Archaeologist Winifred Creamer works at an excavation in Norte Chico,
Peru.
Archaeologist Winifred Creamer works at an excavation in Norte Chico,
Peru. Courtesy Jonathan Haas
All Things Considered, February 11, 2008 · Along the coast of Peru, a
mysterious civilization sprang up about 5,000 years ago. This was many
centuries before the Incan Empire. Yet these people were
sophisticated. They cultivated crops and orchards. And they built huge
monuments of earth and rock.
Archaeologists are trying to prove that an abrupt change of climate
created this new culture.
The culture has no official name yet. It flourished in a series of dry
coastal valleys called Norte Chico. The place is a moonscape --
desolate, misty, a place of rock and dirt, with the occasional cactus
and a few hardy trees along the few streams and rivers.
The Mound Builders
What drove people to settle here is something archaeologist Jonathan
Haas, of the Field Museum in Chicago, has puzzled over for years.
He doesn't know exactly why they built the mounds he has discovered in
Norte Chico. But he has been working on the problem since he first
made some unusual finds eight years ago.
"You get down on your hands and knees," he says, showing exactly how
he did it years ago, "and what you find is little pieces of seashell.
And then you go, 'How do I get little pieces of seashell out here?'
And I thought, 'Well, I don't know, I don't know, and I don't really
care.' "
But of course he did care.
"I puzzled and puzzled and puzzled over it, and I finally realized it
was the people who were building the mounds who were coming out here,
and I bet they were fishermen."
Fishermen who had come up from the coast about 10 miles away, bringing
shellfish. But why?
The story starts thousands of years ago, when people from eastern Asia
flowed into North America and then South America. On a local beach,
Haas tells the story.
"People are going where the good resources are," says Haas, a burly,
bearded man in his 50s with a wheeze from years of inhaling desert
dust. "Right down to this very beach."
This beach is called Barranca. Early Americans -- hunters and gatherers
-- came here to fish and collect mussels and clams. That worked fine
until about 3000 B.C., Haas says. "At around 3000, the environment
begins to change."
A Change in the El Nino Cycle
Haas suspects that what changed was El Nino, the cycle of warm ocean
water and torrential rains that regularly descends on western South
America. Some shift in the coupling of the atmosphere and the Pacific
Ocean made El Ninos more frequent. Haas doesn't know why it happened,
but he believes more frequent El Ninos had a drastic effect on coastal
life.
"They were pushing out the cold-water fish," he says of the new El
Ninos, "bringing in warm-water fish, killing off local clams and
mussels."
The fishing got bad, the weather unpredictable. So people moved
inland, to the desert valleys. It was only 10 miles or so, but it
might as well have been the moon.
One of the places they went is now called Huaricanga. The ancient
people built a mound here about 5,000 years ago. Haas' team is now
excavating it. His wife, a professor of archaeology at Northern
Illinois Univerisity, is in charge. Winifred Creamer is tall, lanky
and soft-spoken. She has a team of students in tow, ready to trowel
and shovel away the face of a "profile" -- a sheer wall of mound that
was created when local farmers dug an irrigation ditch through it.
What they are looking for in this layer-cake of dirt and rock are the
remains of floors and walls. There were hearths or fires, too, that
show up as dark, burned areas inside the mound. What the team has
discovered is that people actually lived on these structures over
successive generations.
Working conditions aren't ideal, Creamer says. "We're standing here
working outside somebody's house. We're on the edge of the highway,
and we're standing in a ditch that may or not fill with water, and the
area right behind where we're working is where people throw trash, so
it's not really the romance of archaeology, is it?" She laughingly
notes that it isn't the kind of place Indiana Jones would work.
A Balance Between Cultures, Old and New
Local people stand above and watch. Alvaro Ruiz, the Peruvian co-
director of the project, says these farmers are poor, uneducated but
curious about their ancient relatives. But they're also worried about
what the digging might do to their life-giving irrigation system.
"We don't want to cause any damage to their irrigation, because people
live here, they have many problems, they need to live -- that's the
point," Ruiz says.
Life was even harder 5,000 years ago. The mound-builders who abandoned
coastal hunting-and-gathering and came here had to learn how to grow
crops and irrigate them from the precious few rivers and streams. The
weather controlled life, especially El Nino.
Standing on a hill, Creamer says El Nino storms would have brought
life-giving water, but also destruction.
"You look up this dry wash that we're situated in, and imagine a 40-
foot-high wall of water rolling out of that," she says. "That would
have a pretty life-changing impact on everybody in this valley."
But people learned a new way of life here in the valleys. Culture grew
more complex. Trade flourished. Coastal people brought shellfish -- the
shells Haas found in the desert -- and took back squash and cotton. And
they brought their labor to help build the mounds. It was massive
architecture on a scale never seen before in the New World.
On a rare sunny afternoon in the Peruvian winter, Haas climbs into a
battered SUV and drives out to Porvenir. It's one of dozens of mounds
hidden in the creases of the valleys. It's at least 1,000 years older
than other mounds in the New World.
A Stone Birthday Cake
Past fields of sugar cane and a network of narrow irrigation ditches,
a narrow pass leads to a flat area surrounded by hills. The mound is a
pile of rubble, 30 feet high and maybe 200 feet across. Originally, it
was terraced, with a flat top, and was the product of enormous labor.
"You have to think of a large stone birthday cake," Haas says with an
almost fatherly pride. "And it would have been covered with plaster,
and you can have it pink, you can have it light orange." He says the
builders would have replastered it regularly, to keep it looking
sharp.
Whoever these people were, they built these monuments even before the
Egyptians built the pyramids.
On the mound, there are pits dug by present-day looters. Human bones
and trash litter the ground. Haas has found precious little jewelry,
and this culture made no pottery. Nor has he found weapons.
"This isn't the coolest archaeology in the world in terms of the stuff
you find," he says. "There are no beautiful ceramics, no gold
masks ... our treasure is trash, residential architecture, and all of
a sudden those start bringing together this incredible picture of the
origins of civilization in South America."
Haas believes a change in climate started all of this.
"If you think about going from a hunter-gatherer society to this
highly centralized society with an organized religion, it's a pretty
dramatic change to take place over a very short period of time," Haas
says.
There is still a lot of work to do to prove that. Haas is taking
sediment cores from a nearby lake that should tell him about climate
changes 5,000 years ago. He and colleagues in the United States are
studying the rings in seashells he has found. The shells should
provide evidence of how ocean temperatures changed during that period.
But whatever this society's genesis, Haas believes its way of life --
the mounds, sunken plazas, irrigation agriculture, religion --
eventually spread across South America, like a map unfolding.
"There's a very distinctive Andean pattern that starts here and then
spreads and forms the foundation for Andean civilization for the next
5,000 years. It's pretty cool," he says.
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