INITIAL PERIOD (2000-700 B.C.): AGRICULTURE, MONUMENTAL ARCHITECTURE
Lesson Objective: Compare developments in architecture, subsistence, ideology, and society with the Preceramic and interpret the directions of culture change.
The Initial Period was originally defined for Peru based on the appearance of the first ceramics, but we have seen them even earlier outside Peru. How can you summarize the Preceramic period? There is a little agriculture, especially in non-food species. Cotton, bottle gourds, possibly reeds for weaving, are all apparently more important, and coca and possibly other drug plants are as well. The food crops include early highland species such as potato and sweet potato, which reach the coast by 3800 B.C. Squash and others are earlier, and especially important is manioc. This very important root crop may have been domesticated earlier in the lowland forest; it seems to be more associated with early ceramics as well. Fishing and farming lifestyles become more specialized and separated, but groups doing each are interacting and moving things across long distances. It is interesting that there is far less literature on how the maritime hypothesis applies to the Atlantic and Caribbean and north-northwest coasts of the continent (DeBoer 1996, Roosevelt 1991). Stothert has seen it as inappropriate for the Ecuador coast because the greater rainfall there allows mixed rainfall agriculture, gathering, and marine and river fishing by 3000 B.C.
What is happening socially? There are huge population increases through time, both on the coast and the sierra, and probably also far inland in the rainforest. Construction of large centers such as Kotosh in the highlands and Caral in the desert show that some complex social organization is needed. But do you need hierarchy? One person in charge? One group? Could it be hereditary or elected? We have very little evidence of hereditary or ascribed status, even very little evidence of division of labor (even by sex). There is some bias toward male burials in occupied areas, but men die at all ages more often than women. At the Asia site are buried many severed male heads wrapped in cloth. The trophy head idea permeates the entire New World (and Old), but does it indicate warfare or just interpersonal conflict? Remember true warfare involves people far beyond those with the initial grievance (!), not just feuding families. What is happening at the large public architecture? Are they formal, ritual centers or just civic activity locales? Probably both. Moseley shows different kinds of ceremonial architecture by environment. In Ecuador at Valdivia there are oval buildings around oval or circular plazas. Pairs of platform mounds, rectangular on the coast and oval in the sierra, are often created by stacking open fiber bags of rocks. Quarrying the rock and carrying it, piling it on top earlier constructions, then building stepped masonry and plastered adobe walls, stairs, and other architectural features requires both lots of labor and lots of planning. Platforms are areas for show, for public ritual, while inside summit buildings there is hidden ritual. Sunken courts, often in front of platforms, in oval shapes in northern Peru shifted toward rectangular shapes then stayed that way through Middle Horizon times. In the highlands we saw 1-room buildings such as at Kotosh, with the ornamental niches and friezes, suggesting high status all the way through Inca times.
Describe El Paraíso site (it means "paradiseÓ but the place was also called Chuquitanta). This site is very important for understanding the interaction of architecture, agriculture, ceramics, and sedentism. In the Chillon Valley on the central coast of Peru, it is a few miles north of Lima and 2 km from the sea. Dating to 2000-1400 B.C., a time some label the Cotton Preceramic, the site covers 58 ha and is noted by Moseley as being the largest preceramic masonry monument in the hemisphere. See the pictures and dimensions in your texts. There were parallel groupings of buildings that form the wings of a U shape. Two parallel structures are 400 m long, and there are sunken courts, stone blocks with clay mortar and plaster, platforms for buildings and courtyards, with continual construction of platform mounds by filling in old rooms with bags of stones. The uniform nature of the bags in each construction phase may be very early evidence of communal or corporate labor groups; we know the Inca had a labor tax. At Paraíso there is little evidence of habitation but hearths with cyclical reuse and other indications that the place is not for living but ceremonial. One apparent dedicatory offering cache had a red-painted, unworked stone wrapped in cotton and a miniature rock-carrying fiber bag filled with cakes of lime wrapped in coca leaves. Bruhns notes the connections here with Kotosh religious traditions, involving continual reuse of hearths, fire ritual.
Paraíso was dug by Jeffrey Quilter with the goal of testing Moseley's maritime hypothesis. Moseley had said it probably had a small residential population because there was little domestic trash. Quilter used 1/16" screens and worked in both architectural and midden areas and got lots more evidence, showing how field methods are so crucial for accurate interpretations. He found some of the refuse was deliberately burned and put in trash pits and other stuff was incorporated into the stone rubble fill; this explains why little trash was on the surface ø apparently the workers threw their lunch garbage into the fill where they were working, mollusc shell and fruit rinds. In the midden areas 90% of the faunal remains were clams and bony fish, the most prominent of the latter being the anchovy. Wild or domesticated land animals were scarce or absent. Plant data were both expected and surprising: domesticates known to have been already in use for centuries included gourd, squash, chili, cotton, achira, jicama, and lima beans, but others were also fruits such as guava and lucuma ø were they wild or domesticated? Fruit woods were also important in construction, and there were grasses and sedges for fiber mats, roofing, coarse textiles, but some may also have been food such as cattails, with starchy roots and seeds. There was the expectable great preservation, with coprolites, lots of fiber bits, seeds, fish scales, crawfish carapace fragments, mammal meat residue in a few, and 1 dog turd. So there was a mix of wild and domestic items, low labor costs and very different strategies for food procurement. The significance here is that the subsistence economy that supported construction of monumental architecture was NOT based on grain agriculture. This successful adaptation here persisted without ceramics for at least a century or two after pottery appeared elsewhere . Perhaps the U shape of this ceremonial center, which seems to anticipate later architectural trends at major centers supported by irrigation agriculture, begins the view of turning one's back toward the sea and opening arms eastward toward the mountains, the sunrise, and the source of the water, all very important ideologically.
The greater eventual use of agriculture for food may have originated in the greater distancing of sites from the maritime protein sources which was needed to keep expanding and controlling the cotton production. They knew how to intensify production but did not yet, continuing food collection and kept the agriculture for regional economic systems. When they did finally do food agriculture it was just an expansion of what they already knew how to do, not a revolution. People at Paraíso were not elaborately buried, and there was no large-scale religious art so far, suggesting absence of hierarchy and minimal sociopolitical complexity. So we have here no complexity and no food agriculture but yes elaborate architecture and yes industrial agriculture and no ceramics. All these markers that archaeologists use to indicate important transitions or mileposts are just not occurring together like the stereotyped older interpretations or even the evidence in other parts of the world suggested.
What was the original meaning of the term Initial Period? The thing being initiated was ceramics, of course, again such an important artifact because variation is so easy to do and see in such a plastic medium. But there is no easy demarcation line between ceramic and preceramic; it depends where you are. So we will look at sites contemporaneous with and slightly later than Paraíso where ceramics are fairly early on the western side of the continent. We have already seen pottery far earlier in the Amazon and in the north, in Ecuador, Colombia. Now we see some major architectural centers on the Peruvian coast that are important to describe.
Where and what is Las Haldas? This site is on the north coast of Peru, south of the Casma Valley, another huge architectural site that begins in preceramic times, about 1650 B.C., then ceramics come in later with the major construction phases. It has 18 platform mound-courtyard groups and 2 sunken circular structures, with construction of fieldstone in mud mortar then later the same stones in reed bags as at El Paraíso. Large upright stone slabs face the buildings, which are on the shore but face inland toward the circular structures. Floors are yellow or red clay. The midden is full of seafood remains, including deepwater fish, but also maize, cotton, avocado, beans, squash, gourd, and burned Tillandsia (bromeliad like our Spanish moss) for fuel. Some buildings were abandoned before completion, with the sticks and string laying them out still in place. Later occupants built only flimsy houses within the large compounds. We don't know why people left, but we do see possible interaction with riverine agriculturalists not only from the food crops and cotton, but also because there is a 2-km long surviving section of a 60 m wide avenue or causeway leading toward the river (which is 30 miles away).
What is Cerro Sechin? This famous site, first dug by Tello in the 30s, is one of several in the Casma Valley itself that might be linked to Las Haldas during the Initial Period. It is one of the most elaborate of the early monumental sites, with huge platforms and stone carvings that are rare at coastal area sites. There are 300 bas-relief slabs of hard granite, carved of course with no metal tools. The pictures show lines of ceremonially dressed people carrying staffs and between them, human body parts including trophy heads with blood coming outø pretty gruesome. At 1200 B.C., this 1000 years earlier than similar depictions at Monte Alban in Oaxaca, Mexico, and earlier than Chavin in the Peruvian highlands, which marks the Early Horizon. Such imagery is related to Chavin, of course, and probably part of the pan-New World ideology that we see with Olmec, Maya, Southeastern U.S., and other culture areas. But it is hard to interpret ø are these lines of warriors? With banners, pillbox hats, and loincloths, they may be mythical or real figures. Are they evidence of small scale raiding in the initial period? We must discuss the role of violence in the emergence of complex society. Is it necessary to have conflict to become more highly organized and develop hierarchy? Or does it work the other way around? Or do we not need it, necessarily? Burger (1992) says the depictions at Cerro Sechin do not indicate large scale warfare, because it is in a militarily vulnerable location, with no walls or moats. Defensive architecture is not seen for another 1000 years. But Sheila and Thomas Pozorski (1987) think there was constant conflict by this time, real warfare.
What is Sechin Alto? This enormous coastal center was by 1200 B.C. the largest architectural monument in the New World (Moseley p. 131), a U-shaped ceremonial center begun a couple centuries earlier in the Casma Valley. Its stone-faced platform was 120 feet high, 900 feet long, 750 feet wide, with plazas, sunken circular courts, and commanding a 10.5 square km area of large buildings and platforms. We have already discussed La Galgada during the Preceramic; its final stages of mound construction happened during the Initial Period, with a reorganization of the summit space on the platform, a single rectangular structure emerges with a central fire basin with burned chili pepper seeds, white, orange, and green feathers and deer antlers on the floors, and walls plastered white (see Bruhns's photos p. 100-101). This is more evidence of public rituals. There were internal galleries for burials of people with textiles and baskets decorated with images of birds and snakes and other geometric animals; see photo in Bruhns (p.102) of one looped bag with black winged, spotted serpents on yellow. From these cultural deposits was recovered a shell and slate mosaic disc depicting a cat not unlike later Chavin cat images. During the final phase at La Galgada the orientation became U-shaped, with a central public area. Burger (1992:50) sees this as the lowest (in topographic elevation) of the highland centers (it is 80 km from the coast) within the Kotosh religious tradition. The living areas had round houses of stone and clay.
Remember the vagaries of preservation strongly influence this evidence, but it indicates people were intensifying the agriculture, beginning to make pottery, and intensifying the ceremonialism as we go through the Initial Period. What is the evidence for food crop agriculture? As summarized in Bruhns's Chapter 6, corn (we call it maize ), has had far more interest from scholars because it is harder to see root crops (no seeds to be preserved, they propagate differently) and because Western agriculture is so much based on grains. The origins of maize are traced to Mesoamerica very nicely but there could have been separate origins in different environmental zones, or else it was brought into South America by land or water. Remember that maize is so domesticated that there is no wild variety left, and it is so culturally manipulated that there are hundreds of strains, many of which appear very early. The largest kernels on corncobs are found in Peruvian strains today, Cuzco Gigante, round and purple, for making the purple Peruvian corn pudding you can get in St. Petersburg at the Columbia restaurant today. There were many different races of maize for different purposes in South America, including for grinding as a staple food but also for making chicha, corn beer, which was not just for fun but extremely important for religious ceremony. Corn could be roasted, boiled, leached with lime to make hominy. Even without direct evidence of cobs or kernels, corn might be known from manos and metates ø but these grinding stones may be for many other foods and other uses. The earliest maize evidence seems to be from the Vegas and Valdivia areas at about 6000 B.C., based on phytoliths (biosilicates) and a possible cast of a kernel in a clay pot. Maize is not seen in the highlands until much later, and in the Ecuadorian Amazon by 4000 B.C. In Peru it first appears in the latest Preceramic at Aspero and other sites on the central coast, at about 2500 B.C. Bruhns mentions evidence of it in northern Chile within a range of 5000-2000 B.C., within a hunter-gatherer economy, so it was a small-time hobby there. In southeastern South America a rock shelter in Minas Gerais, Brazil, had some maize at 3000 B.C. with similar hunter-gatherer people. So the best model for the entrance of corn is that different groups experimented with it at different times and intensities, similar to the history of most domesticates.
The texts do not have an extensive discussion of manioc, which still is the major staple in the forest lowlands of the northern and eastern continent; it is crucially important. Donald Lathrap (1970) in the 1960s saw it as the major boost to sedentary life and getting people used to food production, so opening the way to agriculture with other crops such as maize. He saw these innovations moving westward out of the tropical forest to the highlands and Pacific coast extremely early. Various developments after his work have added some confirmation to these ideas, such as the early production of coca, a forest plant, at Nanchoc. Lathrap based his ideas on the art of Early Horizon Chavin pottery and other media, which featured jaguars and caimans, cats and lizards from the jungle. Later Anna Roosevelt (1980) agreed that manioc had long settled in as an agricultural staple in the forest lowlands on the Orinoco, for example, but the entrance of maize into the picture then gave the edge to cultures which could expand and intensify. That both are crucially important is not in doubt; see the picture in Bruhns (p. 92) that shows a (much later) Moche pot of a possible corn god holding manioc tubers.
What other domestic crops and animals are of importance to complex society? We've detailed the industrial plants, cotton, gourds, perhaps reeds, which seem to be the very earliest domesticated (the Windover site in Titusville, Florida, a wet site preserving plant remains, has produced some bottle gourd fragments that are about 7000 years old, as well, so it may be a hemispheric phenomenon to plant things for utilitarian use earlier than things for food). Highland crops include the important potato, sweet potato, and other tubers, which are often far more important in the Andes today than is corn. Don't confuse the sweet potato, Ipomoea batata, in the morning glory family, with the yam, an Old World crop; unfortunately the Spanish name for sweet potato sometimes given is Z ame (pronounced nyamay). The regular potato we know of is Solanum tuberosum, in the nightshade family, but unfortunately sometimes also called batata; now in American Spanish it is papa, not to be confused with papá (dad) or il Papa (the pope!). Anyway, starchy tubers come in more species in the central Andes than anywhere else on earth, and they would have been ground and stored as flour or made into chu Z o, freeze-dried potato, made by stomping out the water and able to be stored indefinitely.
The highland grain quinoa was also very important, including ritually, as the mother grain in the Andes. Ethonobotanist Deborah Pearsall (Roosevelt 1980) has determined that camelids may not have been semi-domesticated until after 2000 B.C. based on the occurrence of quinoa, which would have thrived on the manure-rich corral floors. In highlands and lowlands other plants are common though may not have been staples, including the early beans and squash, and fruits, peanuts, and other items. Lima beans may have developed because the common bean does not grow well at high altitudes. Coca, not just a drug plant helping ease ills of high elevation, is now seen as having nutritional value; 100 g of coca contains the recommended daily allowance of calcium, iron, phosphorus, vitamin A and riboflavin. Cuy, guinea pig, in some highland regions would have been the only protein source, but is easy to raise, with a 3-month gestation periods, and to cook, by boiling, roasting, stewing. Early cuy is seen at Kotosh at about 2000 B.C. and Ayacucho caves at 5000 B.C., and later on the coast. Probably the eastern slopes of the Andes and the tropical lowlands are far more important to developing agriculture and complexity than we think; we saw manipulation of forest vegetation even during Paleo-Indian times. Chili, cotton, achira, and many more are lowland crops, and feathers and hallucinogenic drug plants are also from the jungle. With all these species moving around the continent also come ideas, notions of the supernatural and of society. We are Westerners trying to understand this and living in a culture whose religions were developed in Middle Eastern desert regions among pastoralists, so we must think about how different especially tropical forest ideas might be. It is clear that the sequence of culture processes in South America is very different from those in prehistoric Europe, Asia, Africa, where other pristine and early states evolved.
So in the Initial Period we must explain the sudden and dramatic culture change in the Andes, while we do not see it as well to the north and south and east. Whatever was happening, the small village life of the middle Preceramic evolves rather suddenly into the temple-centered society of the Late Preceramic, so that complex cultures many think of as true civilization appear to emerge even before the Early Horizon. As for the ceramics, it is important to note that both texts repeat the received wisdom that ceramic-bearing cultural deposits in the Amazon derive from migrations of ideas or peoples eastward, though we've seen the very early dates from the Roosevelt work. Other sites we've noted with early pottery are in Colombia and Ecuador, and we finally have some in the last two millennia B.C. in Peru and southward. We cannot tell if there is stimulus diffusion, independent invention, or what kind of combination of the two.
Describe Chiripa in the southern highlands. On the densely inhabited shoreline of Lake Titicaca people had probably been using reed boats as early as 2000 B.C. The lacustrine and agro-pastoral subsistence evidence include wild and domestic camelids, weaving tools, seeds and tubers, fiber-tempered pottery and some polychrome wares, and even ceramic trumpets that are among the earliest known musical instruments. By 1000 B.C. there was a platform mound at Chiripa that becomes even more important later, with a large, stone-faced sunken court and carved stone plaques with images of snakes, animals and humans. Open buildings ringing the courts were of adobe and painted stucco, with sliding doors, small doors within larger ones, indications of regional architectural traditions that led to Inca styles.
How can we summarize the Initial Period: On the coast there are more large mound sites than at any other prehistoric time period, and good evidence of new religious concerns (that were probably there much earlier). There was apparently early development of irrigation agriculture and terracing in the highlands, and development of the notion of verticality, in other words, knowing how high you can go to do rainfall agriculture (whose evidence, however, often becomes obliterated), then going higher for irrigation. On the coast, irrigation made the desert habitable, but water comes out of narrow valleys to spread out and slow down, so you need longer irrigation canals, more investment in the structures. Moseley thinks early irrigation enhances the split between coast and inland lower sierra, producing different subsistence and seasonality patterns which might have resulted in different ceremonial cycles (tides on the coast, growing seasons inland). Remember seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere from what we know. Rivers have the most water during the rainy winter, from February to May. Canals may have been built not by individual or independent farmers, but by corporate kin groups, as they are today. These segmented agrarian populations probably developed the earliest architectural monuments and much later evolved into political states. Moseley uses the term "reclamationÓ to mean grabbing water from these short Pacific coastal rivers. He shows how the community work of irrigation may have been maintained through time to be manifested historically as the Inca allyu, the kin collective that managed labor, water, and land, with a hereditary leader called a karaka (2 karakas, 1 for each moiety), who were supposed to mediate between the supernatural and the earth in return for the group members' labor.
Monumental architecture of the Initial Period has elaborate public structures but not elite tombs, suggesting civil and political functions for corporate groups . Local beliefs begin to show evidence of more regional influence. We will see the U-shape persist through Inca times and later (contemporary Aymara Indians near Lake Titicaca worship at a U-shaped shrine with burnt offerings to mountain spirits and rain ceremonies). If we do not have true civilization by the end of the Initial Period, we at least have some kind of powerful chiefdoms, but perhaps chiefs are elected or appointed by councils (the Vatican is often given as an example of a powerful hierarchical tradition with no hereditary rulers). Whatever the sociopolitical organization, there is certainly a variety of subsistence emphases across the continent. As for political complexity, it is important to remember that the earliest complex societies in the central Andes do not show strongly agricultural food economies or large-scale irrigation systems, and monumental architecture appears in many places without evidence of central rule or socioeconomic stratification. Plus we have this huge bias in favor of the western side of the continent, with few lowland complex societies investigated comprehensively (Roosevelt 1999:267).