The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  But arguably the most interesting thing about these mummies, other than their very existence, so early, is that artificial mummification appears to have started with the children. Some 26 per cent of the mummies excavated were less than one year of age, a proportion matched by the high incidence of foetuses and newborns found in Chinchorro cemeteries. This is striking because, generally and cross-culturally, children receive less mortuary attention than adults, especially those who never lived, such as the stillborn. The Chinchorro did not put much emphasis on grave goods – they left a little food and a few fishing tools with most adult remains – but they did give more emphasis to those who never achieved their potential. Arriaza thinks the Chinchorro, being maritime people, adopted the fisherman’s principle, of throwing back small fish into the sea, to give them another chance at life, to grow bigger. This is what mummification of children was designed to achieve.

  And there is compelling evidence that child mortality among the Chinchorro was abnormally high, most likely due to arsenias. For example, the River Camarones, where mummification began, has on average arsenic levels of 1000 µg/L, a hundred times in excess of the 10 µg/L, which is the standard deemed acceptable by the World Health Organisation. It is also well known that chronic exposure to high arsenic levels produces spontaneous abortions, stillbirths and preterm births. Even today, women in Antofagasta (where the arsenic levels are 30–40 µg/L) have significantly lower birth rates than their counterparts in southern and central Chile (1 µg/L). Arsenias also produces keratosis (scaly growths on the skin), and carcinomas of the liver and bladder. Arriaza reports that a modern study of women in Bangladesh, where the drinking water had 100 µg/L of arsenic, showed that birth abnormalities were three times as high as women with no exposure. On this basis, Chinchorro women would have had birth abnormalities thirty times higher than elsewhere.2

  Mummification, therefore, took on a special significance, perhaps helping to assuage communal grief. As Arriaza puts it, ‘The Chinchorro mummies became “living” entities that used the same space and resources as did the living.’3 The dead, in effect, became an ‘extension’ of the living, the mummies maybe even becoming part of an ideology that negated death: through mummification (a form of ) immortality was obtained, in which the body and the spirit survived. And, as the mummies provided a resting place for the soul, they were considered living entities. Of the mummies found, they divide nearly 50–50 into natural and artificial entities, perhaps showing that the Chinchorro saw mummification as a natural process and they believed they could ‘confer’ immortality on the chosen few.

  In addition to the dangers of arsenic poisoning, in the river valleys earthquakes and tidal waves were and are frequent in the area, creating terror. We know from historical records that the region was devastated by earthquakes in 1604, 1868, 1877 and 1987.In 1868 and 1877 large tidal waves nearly destroyed the town of Arica, when the waves were of such a size that entire ships were lifted into in the middle of the city. Archaeologists have established that the ancient Peruvian site of Huaca Prieta was struck by a tsunami in 700 BC. Some Chinchorro cemeteries are located along the slopes of hills, at higher elevations away from the ocean.4 Even today, strong inshore currents make fishing less than straightforward.

  A final aspect of these burial practices is that hallucinogenic kits have been found in Chinchorro graves. ‘This suggests,’ says Arriaza, ‘that hallucinogenic drugs were consumed by the Chinchorro or by a religious leader in order to communicate with the other world during the ceremony of presenting the finished mummy to the ancestors and for the reintegration of the mourners.’5 This practice continued much later, as late as AD ~500–1000 along the Atacama desert, where highly decorated snuffing tablets and tubes are found in graves. Mummified bodies found in Arica with abundant hair provided a unique opportunity to test which hallucinogenic plants were used. Analysis by gas chromatography and mass spectrometry demonstrated the presence of harmine, with the Banisteriopsis vine (ayahuasca, as introduced in chapter twelve) the probable source. Of the 32 mummies examined, three males tested positive for harmine, the alkaloid that aids the catalysis and synergic effects of powerful hallucinogenic drugs. Juan P. Ogalde, at the University of Tarapacá and the leader of the team that carried out this study, suggested that the harmine was related to medicinal practices and not exclusively ingested by shamans. One positive result was found in the hair of a mummified child, supporting the idea either that the drug was being used medicinally or was imbibed through its mother’s milk.6

  The greatest number of highly decorated snuffing implements occurred during the Tiwanaku civilisation, which flourished inland from the Atacama desert around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, between AD 500 and 900, suggesting that hallucinogenic use increased rather than the reverse. Ogalde also observes that the Banisteriopsis vine is an Amazonian plant – it does not grow in the Atacama coastal region. Thus there must have been an extensive plant trade network in antiquity. This underlines how important trance was to the Chinchorro (and hints, perhaps, that they had brought this practice with them when they migrated into the area from the rainforest).

  With three out of thirty-two mummies testing positive for hallucinogens, this is a proportion entirely consistent with what we know about the number of shamans in primitive societies. And another link between mummies and shamanism is tantalising, if speculative. We know that a common vision, or dream, by shamans, is of being dismembered, or reduced to being a skeleton, before reassembly. The overlap is there, with the way they disassembled and reassembled the mummies, though we can probably never know how much the ancient Chinchorro made of this.

  What we can say is that, as in the Old World, in South America there was an interaction between local conditions on the ground – desert, brought about by the world’s overall weather system, which made mummification a natural process, which in turn shaped the Chinchorros’ conceptions of life and death, and in turn dovetailed with shamanistic practices, acquired on the great migration south, into Peru and Chile. The fact that the mummies were kept above ground, on show, to ‘interact’ with the remaining community, suggests to Arriaza at least that mortuary rituals in the Atacama desert could have gone on for weeks or even years. This was not just ancestor worship but a device to have the ancestors present in the community to be guides and gobetweens with the supernatural world, to protect the community in the face of the unpredictable and often hostile environment. It could be that dead shamans were mummified to guarantee their immortality and preserve their supernatural powers.

  Although the Chinchorro eventually disappeared (about 1500 BC), their mortuary practices, and views about life, death and the afterlife, survived in evolved form in later civilisations of South America, as we shall see. Even though mummification developed in Egypt some 2000 years after it did in the Atacama desert, its religious significance was very different, and nowhere near as enduring.

  The Chinchorro are also important to our story because their early sedentism, on the desert coast, goes against the post-World War Two orthodoxy that agriculture is the crucial transformation in the development of civilisation. The Chinchorro stayed where they were, apparently, for two reasons: because they had stumbled across a reliable source of food (protein) in fish; and because naturally occurring mummification, allied to a high rate of birth defects, provided a convenient religious adaptation to their existential predicament. This recalls the idea, explored in chapter 3, that shamans may have originally been selected because they showed evidence of meryak or menerik, arctic hysteria, and the potato pottery, discussed in chapter eleven, where individuals with facial mutilations were somehow regarded as special or sacred. Early peoples, lacking modern medical knowledge, may have had very different attitudes to illness – mental or physical – and to physical deformity.

  THE MARITIME HYPOTHESIS

  Although the Chinchorro disappeared from the historical record ~1500 BC, as was referred to above, several elements of their culture lived on in South America, underli
ning just how different was the path to civilisation there.

  Traditionally, the world’s five ‘pristine’ civilisations developed as follows: in Mesopotamia roughly 3500 BC (at the time of the secondary products revolution), Egypt ~3000 BC, India ~2600 BC, China ~1900 BC and Mexico ~1200 BC. In all these cases the development of complex society followed a similar pattern, food surpluses sparked a growth in population and in population density, together with the development of specialisations not having to do directly with food production (see chapter 5 for Paul Wheatley’s ideas about early urbanisation and religious ceremonial centres). A central element in the creation of this surplus, which fostered the emergence of such non-food-producing specialisms as scribes, artists, craftspeople and maybe early forms of scientist (astronomers or mathematicians, for example), and which help to define civilisation, was irrigation. Irrigation extended the amount of fertile land but itself demanded organisation. It, too, therefore, was an autocatalytic process. A second defining aspect of civilisation was pottery. Complex, sophisticated societies needed to store food, for two reasons: one, to guard against any future failure of the harvest; and two, to trade, to exchange for items the society lacked. The invention of ceramic containers, which were sent abroad, necessitated identification and, as mentioned earlier, the tokens used to do this eventually led to writing.

  This view of early man’s development in the Old World has come under sceptical scrutiny recently, as we have seen. But it had appeared fairly stable until the early 1970s, the similarity of the Mexican civil-isations to the Old World complexes appearing to underline the general picture. But then things began to change, as new evidence emerged to show that the earliest New World urban complexes – the very first civilisations – did not develop as a result of surpluses produced by grain, or even, necessarily, by plants. The Chinchorro, who, as we have just seen, settled along the Chilean coast as early as ~6000 BC, were a predominantly maritime people. Arguably they did not have a ‘civilisation’ – there was no monumental architecture, for example. But that shortcoming does not apply to the inhabitants of ancient Peru somewhat later and further north.

  In the early 1970s Michael Moseley, an archaeologist then at Harvard but now at the University of Florida, identified an important 32-acre site at Aspero on the Peruvian coast at the mouth of the Supe River, north of the capital, Lima. What was unusual about this site was, first, that it boasted six platform mounds – in other words monumental architecture; second, there was no sign of either cereal agriculture or pottery; and third, of course, it was on the same stretch of coast and with much the same geographical configuration as the Chinchorro. And, like them, Aspero was a fishing community: studies of middens, and the bone chemistry of such human remains as have been recovered, show that some 90 per cent of Aspero’s food was obtained from the sea. There was a crop that was grown in Aspero, but it was not grain or any kind of food: it was cotton. Cotton was grown, slightly inland, in order to manufacture fishing nets.

  Moseley reckoned that it would have been possible in settlements like Aspero to create food surpluses once the inhabitants learned to cultivate cotton so as to weave it into netting. In turn this would have led to labour specialisation, some people occupying their time fishing, others looking after the cotton plants, and still others weaving the nets out of the fibres. He reasoned also that small amounts of fruits and vegetables would have been grown, but that the chief aim of farming would have been the growing of cotton, the raw material of nets, by means of which the supply of seafood could be maintained. Probably, said Moseley, there would have been a level of society – priest-technicians – who acted as leaders/organisers so as to build the pyramids to the gods that were the main feature of Aspero.

  In 1975 Moseley published The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilisation, in which he boldly concluded that, ‘The archaeological axiom that only agriculture could support the rise of complex societies is not a universal truth.’ In Peru, he maintained, fishermen had evolved many of the elements of civilisation. Full-blown city-states may have emerged only much later, after 1800 BC, with the arrival of grain and pots to store it in, but ‘the crucible of complexity lay on the pre-ceramic coast’.7

  Moseley’s theory (the ‘maritime hypothesis’) was considered heretical to begin with. However, after radiocarbon dating confirmed that Aspero had flourished as early as 3055 BC, his theory began to catch on and by the end of the 1980s it had become the orthodoxy. It was further refined in 1996 by Ruth Shady, a veteran Peruvian archaeologist. She had spent two years excavating other sites in the area, in particular a site known as Caral, twelve miles inland, up the Supe Valley. In the course of her work, she became convinced that Caral and Aspero were part of the same culture and, moreover, that Caral was in fact a true city-state, roughly contemporary with Aspero ‘but far larger and more advanced’. ‘That’, she says, ‘is when I realised that I had stumbled across a problem that would change the way we perceive history in my country.’ She still held to the basic premise of the maritime hypothesis but, as she discussed it with Moseley, they drew up some elaborations. The most important was that Caral may have started as a colony of Aspero, an agricultural ‘satellite’, whose purpose was to provide cotton for nets; but in fact Caral occupied the easiest location in all Peru where an irrigation system could be laid out. And, as Caral grew, its yield of cotton grew with it but so too did tropical fruits, beans, chilies, gourds and wood. In this way, enough of a surplus was generated for the Caral population to be able to trade such produce for fish, molluscs and salt from Aspero and other coastal towns, and to support more extensive trade with the neighbouring valleys and the mountains inland. Shady found that Caral received several exotic imports – shells from Ecuador, dyes from the Andean highlands, hallucinogenic snuff from the Amazon basin, across the Andes.8

  This trade was so lucrative, Shady observed, that Caral quickly outgrew Aspero in both size and sophistication, with as many as 3,000 people occupying the city. There were at least enough inhabitants to remodel the pyramids at regular intervals. This was done in a particular manner: the old structures were filled with reed bags full of rocks (called ‘shicra bags’), together with sacrificial objects (clay figurines, even human sacrifices), the old structures then covered with a new skin of carved stone and coloured plaster. Remains at the top of multilevel platforms showed that priests had sacrificed burnt offerings, with each layer of society looking on from below. Further excavation exposed workshops that fashioned jewellery comprised of shells and semi-precious stones. Flutes made of condor and pelican bones were also found, located in an amphitheatre lit by sacred fires. The upper levels of society used stools made of blue-whale vertebrae.9

  On this account, then, Caral was important for two reasons. In the first place, it was the oldest civilisation in the New World and, at 3050 BC, though not quite as old as Sumer, it was on a par with Egypt and older than the civilisations in India or China. Second, it had arisen byadifferent route to Old World civilisations: instead of cereal-based-irrigation agriculture producing a complex society, fishing/cotton (and maybe irrigation) had produced much the same. Building on the difference between milpa and conuco agriculture (chapter 6), this made the early years of mankind in the Americas very different from in Eurasia.

  But then, in 2001, and even more in 2004, two American archaeologists produced a major revision. In particular, a few days before Christmas in 2004, the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer announced the discovery of some twenty separate major residential centres, stretching over 700 square miles in three valleys about a hundred miles north of Lima. Ninety-five new radio-carbon dates, they said, confirmed the great age of these sites – between 3000 and 1800 BC. They named the area, which included Caral, Norte Chico, and they described it as a whole culture, where people were producing pyramids and sunken plazas, and they insisted it was a civilisation that survived for more than a thousand years. It was certainly something to put alongside contemporaneous Pharaonic Egypt
.10

  There was, however, a controversial twist to these announcements. Haas and Creamer’s new dates for Norte Chico led them to counter Moseley’s and Shady’s argument that Caral (or Norte Chico) civil-isation arose along the coast. The inland sites, they said, were contemporaneous with Aspero and the other coastal settlements and, furthermore, it was irrigation, inland, that seems to have been the basis for the development of surplus, and the auto-catalyst for an administrative class. At the same time, they did concede that complex society developed in the Andes before ceramics were invented, and that while plants grown with the aid of irrigation, including cotton, squash, chili, beans and avocados were everywhere, there was almost no evidence of preserved corn (maize) or other grain. They agreed with Moseley and Shady that there were numerous remains of fish and shellfish bones recovered from even inland sites, although they pointed out these were less prevalent than on the coast. And they concluded: ‘This early culture appears to have developed not only without pottery, arts and crafts but also without staple grain-based food, which is usually the first large-scale agricultural product of complex societies . . . The ancient Peruvians took a different path to civilisation.’11

  How important is this difference? Well, it may be very important in the sense that early man’s relationship with his environment determined his ideological – his political and religious – beliefs, and those in turn influenced his future development. For example, fishing is governed by lunar and tide cycles, whereas farm work is determined by solar and rainfall cycles. Long canal systems need large corporate work-forces to maintain them and to work the reclaimed land. Small canals, as in the Supe Valley, can be maintained by mere families or clans. In fishing, small craft, manned by small crews, can net more than sufficient food, ‘harvesting’ throughout the year. At the time of the Spanish Conquest indigenous fishing and farming were separate professions along most of the Pacific coast, in both North and South America. The populations, moreover, were self-segregated and people married within their respective vocations, and often spoke different dialects. The maritime people tended shoreline gardens to cultivate tatora reeds for their watercraft. They did not grow staples or pay taxes or tribute as farmers did. Instead, there was an essentially symbiotic relationship between the two communities, who used barter to exchange marine protein for cultivated carbohydrates. Presumably, a similar arrangement existed in earlier times.12