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What was it like building these first great structures? In June 1790, a year after the French Revolution swept away a corrupt and ineffectual monarchy, thousands of Parisians from every social class united to create the enormous Champ de Mars as a monument to the new society. Working in heavy rainfall without coercion or pay, they dug out the entire enormous space to a depth of four feet and then filled it up with enough sand and gravel to make an outdoor amphitheater suitable for half a million people. The whole huge effort took only three weeks. Something analogous—an awed, wondering celebration of a new mode of existence—may have occurred at the Norte Chico.

Even today, the contrast is startling between the desert and the irrigated land, with its lush patchwork of maize, sugar, and fruit trees. Beyond the reach of the water the barrens instantly commence; the line of demarcation is sharp enough to cross with a step. To people born into a landscape of rock and fog, the conflagration of green must have been a dazzlement. Of course they would exalt the priests and rulers who promised to maintain this miracle. The prospect of a drunken feast afterward would be a bonus.

The only known trace of the Norte Chico deities may be a drawing etched into the face of a gourd. It depicts a sharp-toothed, hat-wearing figure who faces the viewer frontally and holds a long stick or rod vertically in each hand. When Creamer found the gourd in 2002, the image shocked Andeanists. It looked like an early version of the Staff God, a fanged, staff-wielding deity who is one of the main characters in the Andean pantheon. Previously the earliest manifestation of the Staff God had been thought to be around 500 B.C. According to radiocarbon tests, the Norte Chico gourd was harvested between 2280 and 2180 B.C. The early date implies, Haas and Creamer argued, that the principal Andean spiritual tradition originated in the Norte Chico, and that this tradition endured for at least four thousand years, millennia longer than had been previously suspected.

A recently discovered etched drawing on a gourd (left) has led some researchers to posit that the fanged Staff God was a central figure in an Andean religious tradition that lasted almost four thousand years. (Right, a Staff God from the first millennium A.D.)

Many researchers reacted skeptically to the finding. According to Krzysztof Makowski, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, the image is so anomalous—Creamer found it in a strata dating between 900 and 1300 A.D.—that a more likely explanation is that the figure was carved onto an ancient gourd that had been preserved by the extremely arid climate. Such reuse of old materials is not unknown, though nobody has ever seen it with a gourd three thousand years old. More important, Makowski says, researchers have little evidence that ancient Peruvians actually believed in a single overarching deity called the Staff God. “What we describe as the ‘Staff God’ is a convention,” he explained to me, a standardized pose reminiscent in its way of the standardized poses in Byzantine art. The religious tradition of Peru, in his view, was an overlapping sequence of related faiths that has barely begun to be unraveled; it is as if archaeologists from the far future were excavating in Europe, and mulling over the ubiquitous image of the man on the cross. Was this one man? Many men depicted in a similar fashion? One man whose meaning changed over time?

What is known is that the tradition evolved, as religions will, with the circumstances of its believers. As Andean societies grew richer, their temples and the images in them grew grander and more refined, though the former stayed true to the U-shape-and-sunken-plaza pattern I saw in the Norte Chico and the latter, depicted often in the “Staff God” pose, never lost their erect postures, gnashing fangs, and brandished staffs. Over the millennia, this god