1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [101]
“You mean to tell me there’s no dental picks at all?” Haas was saying. “All these people and not one has a dental pick? I’d really like a pick for this thing.”
“Nobody can find one,” Creamer said. She left to supervise the second part of the dig, two hundred yards away, on the other side of the highway.
Haas sighed, pushed back his wide-brimmed straw hat, and leaned into the dirt with jackknife and paintbrush. Despite the low clouds—an almost featureless carpet a thousand feet above our heads—perspiration stippled his temples. With Ruiz documenting the work with a digital camera, Haas silently plucked out dead insects, bits of leaf, and lengths of shicra, a kind of thick twine made from reeds. When he had cleared enough, he sat back and stared at the now-exposed object. “I have no idea what this is,” he announced. “Got any tweezers?” Ruiz produced a caliper-sized pair from his backpack.
“Bravo,” Haas said. “We have tweezers.”
Although the Huaricanga mound resembled an ancient sandhill, the soft, shifting, slightly gritty surface was not sand but the fine, windblown soil geologists call “loess.” Fertile stuff, if it can somehow be irrigated, the loess blanketed the underlying structure like a heavy tarpaulin tossed over a piece of machinery. Here and there the archaeologists had scooped it away to reveal granite walls that had once been smoothly plastered. Over time, weather and earthquakes and perhaps human malice had buckled most of the walls, but their overall layout had been preserved. Behind them the team had removed some of the fill: bags of stones, created by knotting shicra into mesh sacks, filling the sacks with chunks of granite, and laying the results like fifty-pound bricks in the foundation.
Moving slowly, Haas tweezered out the pieces—they looked like the remnants of a serving platter—and passed them to Ruiz, who dropped them into a resealable plastic bag.
“Are all of those from a single object?” I asked.
“I’d guess so, but your guess is good as mine,” Haas said. With his wide face, gray goatee, and merry smile, he resembled, for the moment, an aging folk singer. “All I can say is, this is really strange.”
Almost twenty people were working on the Huaricanga mound, shoveling away the obscuring loess. Half of them were local workers; Peru has so many ruins from so many cultures that in many small towns archaeological labor is a flourishing blue-collar trade. The others were graduate students from Peru and the United States. After two days of labor, workers and students were halfway through clearing off the top platform and the staircases leading to it; the layout of the structure was visible enough to map. The temple, for the mound was surely built for religious reasons, was laid out in a wide, shallow U about 150 feet long and 60 feet high, with a sunken plaza between the arms. In its day its grandeur would have overwhelmed the visitor. Little wonder: at the time of its construction, the Huaricanga temple was among the world’s biggest buildings.
In college I read a one-volume history of the world by the distinguished historian William H. McNeill. Called, simply enough, A World History, and published in 1967, it began with what McNeill and most other historians then considered the four wellsprings of human civilization: the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, in modern Iraq, home of Sumer, oldest of all complex polities; the Nile Delta, in Egypt; the Indus Valley, in Pakistan; and, in east central China, the valley of the Huang He, more familiar to Westerners as the Yellow River. If McNeill were writing A World History today, discoveries like those at Huaricanga would force him to add two more areas to the book. The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older