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By Root 2009 0

purposes, the area is geographically suited for irrigation. The peril of irrigation for farmers is evaporation. Just as water evaporating in a glass leaves behind a film of salts and minerals, water evaporating from irrigation channels leaves deposits in the soil. In a surprisingly short time, the salty deposits can build up to toxic levels, making the land unusable. Because the Cordillera Negra bulges especially close to the coast in the Norte Chico, the valleys are short and steeply walled; almost hurled from the heights, the rivers shoot toward the sea at high velocity. Even after diversion, the water gushes through irrigation channels so quickly that it can’t evaporate and build up salts in the soil. To this day, one can only reach many archaeological sites in the Norte Chico by navigating around surging, brimfull irrigation ditches, some of them probably laid out originally by the same farmers who built the mounds.

The most important product of irrigation was cotton. Almost forty species of cotton exist worldwide, of which four have been domesticated, two in the Americas, two in the Middle East and South Asia. Cotton was known in Europe by the thirteenth century but not common until the eighteenth; Columbus and his men wore sturdy flax and coarse wool.*19 South American cotton (Gossypium barbadense) once grew wild along the continent’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts. It may first have been domesticated in Amazonia, presumably near the river’s mouth. Today it has been supplanted by Mexican cotton (another species, Gossypium hirsutum), which provides most of the world’s harvest. But in the Andean past, the long, puffy bolls of South American cotton, some varieties naturally tinted pink, blue, or yellow, were the soft underpinning of Andean culture. “In the Norte Chico we see almost no visual arts,” Ruiz told me after I gave him the scrap of cloth. “No sculpture, no carving or bas-relief, almost no painting or drawing—the interiors are completely bare. What we do see are these huge mounds—and textiles.”

Cotton was a key element in regional trade. People in shoreline settlements like Aspero could catch vast quantities of anchovies and sardines; Caral, Huaricanga, and the other inland towns had irrigation-produced cotton, fruit, and vegetables. The countless fish bones in inland Caral and Huaricanga and the fruit seeds and cotton nets in shoreline Aspero are evidence that they swapped one for the other. According to Haas, the inland centers must have controlled the exchange, because the fishers needed their cotton for nets. Cotton was both needed and easily stored, which made it useful as a medium of exchange or status. At Upaca, on the Pativilca, Haas’s team discovered the ruins of stone warehouses. If they were for storing cotton, as Haas surmises, they would have been, in this textile-mad society, an emblem of state power and wealth, the ancient equivalent of Fort Knox.

By making these claims, Haas and Creamer were staking out a position in a long-running theoretical dispute. In 1975 Michael Moseley, the Florida archaeologist, drew together his own work in Aspero and earlier research by Peruvian and other researchers into what has been called the MFAC hypothesis: the maritime foundations of Andean civilization. He proposed that there was little subsistence agriculture around Aspero because it was a center of fishing, and that the later, highland Peruvian cultures, including the mighty Inka, all had their origins not in the mountains but in the great fishery of the Humboldt Current. Rather than being founded on agriculture, the ancient cities of coastal Peru drew their sustenance from the sea.

The MFAC hypothesis—that societies fed by fishing could have founded a civilization—was “radical, unwelcome, and critiqued as an economic impossibility,” Moseley later recalled. Little wonder! The MFAC was like a brick through the window of archaeological theory. Archaeologists had always believed that in fundamental respects all human societies everywhere were alike, no matter how different they might appear on the surface. If