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By Root 1788 0

—a bad time to be launching a nation on the Pacific side of South America. At about that time, Andean societies were assailed by the first of several decades-long droughts, paradoxically interrupted by El Niño–induced floods. Some polities may have disintegrated beneath the climatic assault, but Wari thrived. The principal reason for its success was its innovative techniques of terracing and irrigation, the latter being used to implement the former. Surprisingly, Peru has more arable land above nine thousand feet than below. By diverting snowmelt from the ever-present Andes icecaps to high farm terraces, Wari was able literally to rise above the drought and flooding of lower elevations.

An anomaly in the southern Andes foothills, the great stone of Cerro Baúl dominates the neighboring slopes. On its summit are the remains of a Wari city.

The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which unlike maize regularly grows at altitudes of 14,000 feet; the tubers, cultivated in hundreds of varieties, can be left in the ground for as long as a year (as long as the soil stays above 27°F), to be dug up and cooked when needed. Even frozen potatoes could be used. After letting freezing night temperatures break down the tubers’ cell walls, Andean farmers stomped out the water content to make dried chuño, a nigh-indestructible foodstuff that could be stored for years. (The potato’s cold tolerance spurred its embrace by European peasants. Not only did potatoes grow in places where other crops could not, the plant was an ally in smallholders’ ceaseless struggle against the economic and political elite. A farmer’s barnful of wheat, rye, or barley was a fat target for greedy landlords and marauding armies; buried in the soil, a crop of potatoes could not be easily seized.) Maize, though, was what people wanted, the grain of choice for the elite—it was what you made chicha from. Its prestige was another reason for Wari’s success. Because terraces soak up more sunlight than steep slopes, maize can be grown at higher than usual altitudes on them; irrigation similarly increases the area available for maize farming.

In a process that Michael Moseley has likened to “patenting and marketing a major invention,” the Wari passed on their reclamation techniques to their neighbors, bringing a thousand-mile-long swath of the Peruvian Andes under their cultural sway. A sign of their influence was the spread of the Wari religion, in which the figure archaeologists call Staff God was dominant—though the Wari transformed the staff, as if to remind others of their agricultural beneficence, into a stalk of maize. By the end of the first millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as impossibly dry, steep, and cold. Today three-quarters of the terraces are abandoned, and the alpine landscape has not regained the productivity it had a thousand years ago. But until the Spanish conquest Andean valleys were so thoroughly punctuated by Wari-inspired terraces that to the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo they looked “as if they were covered with flights of stairs.”

Wari’s capital city, also named Wari, occupied an alpine plateau near the modern city of Ayacucho. Construction began in the first few centuries A.D. The city ultimately spread across two square miles, an array of two- and three-story buildings in compounds behind massive walls. Both peasant homes and great palaces were built in similar styles, according to William H. Isbell, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and Alexei Vranich, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Everything was enclosed behind high, white walls, in what the two researchers described in 2004 as a hive of “repetitive, modular cells organized in high-walled geometric blocks.” There were no standout public buildings, no great public spaces, no spectacular vistas—only a thicket of walls and narrow streets strewn with garbage (archaeologists have