1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [105]
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