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  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 one runs the tape backwards to the beginning, so to speak, the stories are all the same: foraging societies develop agriculture; the increased food supply leads to a population boom; the society grows and stratifies, with powerful clerics at the top and peasant cultivators at the bottom; massive public works ensue, along with intermittent social strife and war. If the MFAC hypothesis was true, early civilization in Peru was in one major respect strikingly unlike early civilization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. Farming, the cornerstone of the complex societies in the rest of the world, was in Peru an afterthought. (In Chapter 1, I called Peru the site of an independent Neolithic Revolution, which I defined, following archaeological practice, as beginning with the invention of agriculture. If the MFAC is correct, the definition will have to be changed.)

  The MFAC hypothesis was radical, its supporters conceded, but the supporting evidence could not be dismissed. Bone analyses show that late-Pleistocene coastal foragers “got 90 percent of their protein from the sea—anchovies, sardines, shellfish, and so on,” said Susan deFrance, an archaeologist at the University of Florida. And the pattern continued for thousands of years and archaeological dig after archaeological dig. “Later sites like Aspero are just full of fish bones and show almost no evidence of food crops.” The MFAC hypothesis, she told me, can be summarized as the belief “that these huge numbers of anchovy bones are telling you something.” That “something” is that, according to Daniel H. Sandweiss of the University of Maine, “the incredibly rich ocean off this incredibly impoverished coast was the critical factor.”

  Further evidence both for and against the MFAC hypothesis emerged in the mid-1990s, with Shady’s pathbreaking work on the Supe River. (Aspero, one recalls, sat at the river’s mouth.) Shady’s team uncovered seventeen riverside settlements, the second-biggest of which was Caral. In her view, monumental buildings implied a large resident population, but again there were plenty of anchovy bones and little evidence that locals farmed anything but cotton. To Moseley, the fish bones suggested that the ample protein on the coast allowed people to go inland and build irrigation networks to produce the cotton needed to expand fishing production. The need for nets, in Haas’s view, gave the inland cities the whip hand—Norte Chico was based on farming, like all other complex societies, although not on farming for food. Besides, he says, so many more people lived along the four rivers than on the shore that they had to have been dominant. Moseley believes that Aspero, which has never been fully excavated, is older than the other cities, and set the template for them. “For archaeology,” deFrance said, “what may be important” in the end is not the scope of the society “but where it emerged from and the food supply. You can’t eat cotton.” Evidence one way or the other may emerge if Moseley and Shady, as planned, return to Aspero. If they are correct, and Aspero turns out to be substantially older than now thought, it might win the title of the world’s oldest city—the place where human civilization began. “Maybe we might actually stop people calling it the ‘New World,’” Moseley joked.

  Norte Chico chiefdoms were almost certainly theocratic, though not brutally so; leaders induced followers to obey by a combination of ideology, charisma, and skillfully timed positive reinforcement. Scattered almost randomly around the top of the mounds are burned, oxidized chunks of rock—hearth stones—in drifts of fish bones and ash. To Haas and Creamer, these look like the remains of feasts. The city rulers encouraged and rewarded the workforce during construction and maintenance of the mound by staging celebratory roasts of fish and achira root right on the worksite. Afterward they mixed the garbage into the mound, incorporating the celebration into the construction. At these feasts, alcohol in some form was almost certainly featured. So, perhaps, was music, both vocal and instrumental; excavating Caral, Shady discovered thirty-two flutes made of pelican wingbones tucked into a recess in the main temple.

  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 or gods transmuted into Wiraqocha, the Inka creator deity, whose worship was brutally suppressed by Spain.

  Whether on the coast or in the river valleys, Moseley said, the Norte Chico lighted a cultural fire. During the next three thousand years, Peru hosted so many diverse cultures that the archaeological timelines in textbooks, with their multiple arrows and switchbacks, are as impenetrable as the family trees of European kings. Despite their variousness, Haas says, all seem to have drawn in their diverse ways from the well of Norte Chico. Characterizing the similarities is as difficult as nailing down a blob of mercury, because exceptions abound and human behavior is always multifaceted. Nonetheless, visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation. The primacy of exchange over a wide area, the penchant for collective, festive civic work projects, the high valuation of textiles and textile technology—Norte Chico, it seems possible to say, set the template for all of them.

  And only Norte Chico. For the next four thousand years, Andean civilization was influenced by only one major import from the world outside: maize. A few other minor crops made the trip later, including tobacco, domesticated in Amazonia, then exported north to become the favorite vice of Indians from Mesoamerica to Maine. But it is a mark of maize’s social, cultural, and even political centrality that it was the first—and for centuries the only—phenomenon to pass from Mexico to the Andes. The next major import, alas, was smallpox.

  TINY COBS

  Although it was just after dawn, several people were already waiting outside the small store. When the metal grating rolled up, I followed them inside. The shop was in a middle-class neighborhood of Oaxaca city, in southern Mexico. Behind the low counter, half a dozen women hovered over waist-high stoves made of concrete block. Recessed into the dome-shaped top of each stove were two shallow clay dishes that served as burners. With expert motions the women slipped tortillas—thin discs of cream-colored flour perhaps nine inches in diameter—onto the hot burners. In seconds the tortilla dried and puffed up like a soufflé. And from the storefront floated the aroma of toasting maize, which has permeated Mexico and Central America for thousands of years.

  Established in 2001, the tortilla store is an innovative attempt to preserve one of earth’s greatest cultural and biological assets: the many local varieties of maize in the narrow “waist” of southern Mexico. The isthmus is a medley of mountains, beaches, wet tropical forests, and dry savannas, and is the most ecologically diverse area in Mesoamerica. “Some parts of Oaxaca go up nine thousand feet,” T. Boone Hallberg, a botanist at the Oaxaca Institute of Technology, told me. “Other parts are at sea level. Sometimes the soil is very acid, sometimes it’s quite basic—all within a few hundred feet. You can go on either side of a highway, and the climate will be different on the east side than on the west side.” The area’s human geography is equally diverse: it is the home of more than a dozen major Indian groups, who have a long and fractious history. Despite the strife among them, all of them played a role in the region’s greatest achievement, the development of Mesoamerican agriculture, arguably the world’s most ecologically savvy form of farming, and of its centerpiece, Zea mays, the crop known to agronomists as maize.

  I was visiting Amado Ramírez Leyva, the entrepreneur behind the tortilla store. Born in Oaxaca and trained as an agronomist, Ramírez Leyva had established a consortium of traditional farmers, Indians like himself (Ramírez Leyva is Ñudzahui [Mixtec], the second most numerous Indian group in the region). The farmers supply eight different varieties of dried maize to his shop, Itanoní, where the kernels are carefully ground, hand-pressed into tortillas, and cooked fresh for customers. Itanoní means “maize flower” in Ñudzahui, and refers to a flower that blooms in maize fields. It is one of the few tortillerías in Mexico—perhaps even the only one—to sell what might be described as “estate” tortillas: proudly labeled as being made from maize of one variety, from one area.

  “Everyone in Mexico knows the rules for making a true tortilla,” Ramírez Leyva told me. “But you can’t get them that way now, except maybe in your grandmother’s kitchen.” First soak the dried maize kernels in a bath of lime and water to remove their thin, translucent skins (a process with its own special verb, nixtamalizar). Then stone-grind the kernels into masa, a light, slightly sticky paste with a distinct maize fragrance. Made without salt, spices, leavening, or preservatives, masa must be cooked within a few hours of being ground, and the tortilla should be eaten soon after it is cooked. Hot is best, perhaps folded over with mushrooms or cheese in a tlacoyo. Like a glass of wine, he said, a tortilla should carry the flavor of its native place. “You want to try some?”

  A gourmet tortilla shop in Oaxaca, Itanoní is an attempt to preserve southern Mexico’s hundreds of varieties of maize, a Mesoamerican tradition that has survived for thousands of years.

  I did. The smells in the shop—dry-toasted maize, melting farm cheese, squash flowers sautéing in home-pressed oil—were causing my stomach to direct urgent messages to my brain.

  Ramírez Leyva gave me a plateful of tlacoyos. “This is exactly what you would have eaten here ten thousand years ago,” he said.

  In his enthusiasm, he was overstating, but not by much. Indians didn’t have cheese, for one thing. And they didn’t eat tortillas ten thousand years ago, though tortillas are indeed ancient. It is known that 11,500 years ago paleo-Indians were hunting from caves in what is now Puebla, the state northwest of Oaxaca. These were not mastodon and mammoth hunters—both
species were already extinct. Instead they preyed on deer, horse, antelope, jackrabbit, and, now and then, giant turtle, as well as several species of rodent. Within the next two thousand years all of these animals except deer vanished, too, done in either by a local variant of overkill, the onset of hotter, drier conditions that shrank the available grassland, or both. Responding to the lack of game, people in Oaxaca and Puebla focused more on gathering. Shifting among productive locations, individual families, living on their own, ate seeds and fruit during the spring and fall and hunted during the winter. During the summer they joined together in bands of twenty-five to thirty—cactus leaves, a local favorite, were plentiful enough in that season to support larger groups.

  All the while their store of knowledge about the environment increased. People learned how to make agave plants edible (roast them), how to remove the tannic acid from acorns (grind them to a powder, then soak), how to make tongs to pick spiny cactus fruit, how to find wild squash flowers in the undergrowth, and other useful things. Along the way, perhaps, they noticed that seeds thrown in the garbage one year would sprout spontaneously in the next. The sum of these questions led to full-fledged agriculture—not just in the Tehuacán Valley, but in many places in southern Mexico. Squashes, gourds, peppers, and chupandilla plums were among the initial crops. The first cereal was probably millet—not the millet eaten today, which originated in Africa, but a cousin species, knotweed bristle-grass, which is no longer farmed. And then came maize.