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By Root 1815 0

Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the “New World.” Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.

Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize

(Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)

BIG BUILDING

“Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”

Without waiting for my assent, Jonathan Haas slid the fabric into my hand. It was about two inches on a side, little more than a scrap, and aged to the color of last season’s straw. To my eye, it seemed carefully made: a warp of fine cotton threads, ten or fifteen to the inch, crossed at half-inch intervals by paired weft threads in a basket-like pattern known as “weft-twining.” Haas, an archaeologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, had plucked the fabric from the earth minutes before, two graduate students immortalizing the operation with digital cameras. Thousands of years ago it had been handled or worn by other people; bits of their DNA might still adhere to the fibers. (If so, I was contaminating it.) To be the first person in two hundred generations to see or touch an object—to reach across time with eye and hand—is one of the reasons why people like Haas spend their days sifting through ancient soil.

Ordinarily, archaeologists label and store such artifacts immediately. But just as Haas removed the cloth from the ground, he was distracted by the excited shouts of a group of workers a hundred feet away. Haas clambered over the rough ground to take a look. Poking through the earth at the workers’ feet was something that resembled the edge of a dinner plate. Haas kneeled to inspect it. When he came back to his feet, his eyebrows had shot up like a pair of circumflexes. “What’s this doing here?” Haas asked the air. “It looks like unfired ceramics.” The site was supposed to be very old—well before the local invention of pottery. “Better have a look at it.” Reaching for the trowel in his back pocket, he had realized that the textile was still in his hand, and asked if I would mind hanging on to it.

“Would you like to hold a four-thousand-year-old textile?”

Haas was standing midway up a sixty-foot hummock in a valley along the central coast of Peru, about 130 miles north of Lima. The valley was desert, withered and yellow-gray except for the crooked band of green that marked the course of the Fortaleza River. In the late 1990s Haas and Winifred Creamer—his wife and co-teamleader, an archaeologist at Northern Illinois University—assisted a research team led by a Peruvian archaeologist, Ruth Shady Solis, that had spent years investigating an ancient ceremonial center fifteen miles to the south. By carbon-dating some of Shady’s material, they helped establish that the Peruvians had uncovered the oldest known city in the Americas.

Afterward, Haas, Creamer, and a Peruvian archaeologist, Álvaro Ruiz, drove a four-by-four through the back roads of the area between that excavation and the Fortaleza Valley. Called the Norte Chico, the region is studded with isolated knolls, twenty to fifty feet high and as much as two hundred feet long. These mounds had been flagged as possible ruins for nearly a century but never excavated because they seemed to have no valuable gold or ceramic objects. The Pan-American Highway had been laid right through them without causing an outcry. Haas, Creamer, and Ruiz had decided to drive through the area because they suspected that the mounds might be more interesting and numerous than had been realized. Ultimately, the three researchers determined that the Norte Chico held the remains of at least twenty-five cities, all of which they wanted to explore. On the day I