The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  It is fair to say that no one has a convincing answer to the meaning of the lines but some of the latest ideas come from Johan Reinhard, explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, significantly a mountaineer as well as an anthropologist. He has inspected the ‘geoglyphs’, as they are now called, over all 800 miles of their distribution, and observes that they are associated with lakes, rivers, the ocean – and the mountains. He further makes the point that mountain gods are everywhere in the Andean region, where they were believed to protect humans and their livestock, and figure prominently in rain-making rituals, given that mountains were the source of the rivers from where water came. Many Christian churches in Bolivia, for example, lie at the end of Nazca-type lines, lines at the end of which, even today, the local headman will make offerings to encourage rain.4 In support of this, recent excavations by Helaine Silverman at Cahuachi – an enormous 370-acres site, dominated by a central pyramid – have uncovered ceremonial centres, mounds, cemeteries and shrines, where several lines point directly at this ritual centre. Cahuachi was not an urban centre, but a place of natural springs, a ritual location that sprang up and then disappeared. Human heads were found there, which appear to be trophies, so there may have been other rituals practised at Cahuachi. The lines themselves may have been sacred so that, as pilgrims approached the ritual centre, they did so by special routes, transforming themselves – by dance, elaborate costume and hallucinogens – in a shamanic process that applied to everyone. This is supported by the very latest theory, of Tomasz Gorka of Munich University, who found along the lines anomalies in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by changes in soil density. He believes these changes may have been caused by people constantly walking back and forth in prayer rituals. ‘This activity was closely connected to the placing of ceramic vessels along the lines, perhaps as offerings.’5

  It now seems that the Nazca culture collapsed due to a combination of an El Niño event and environmental degradation. The latest studies show that, around AD 500, the pollen of huarango trees (Psosopis pallida) gave way to the pollen of maize and cotton. This suggests the beginning of agriculture but the huarango trees performed a vital function in the area: they have roots which reach as deep as sixty metres underground, in search of water, and are therefore very efficient binders of the soil. Where the pollen transition takes place, the scientists found the remains of many huarango tree stumps. It seems therefore that, in the transition to agriculture, the Nazca farmers cut down the very trees that kept the soil in place. Once the trees – and their all-important roots – had gone, the area was especially vulnerable to extreme weather.6

  PUMAS AND POTATOES

  For many years, research in the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands was hampered by politics – guerrillas occupied large parts of the area and made life very difficult for archaeologists. But recently one breakthrough has followed another and among the more spectacular discoveries has been that of Tiwanaku, or Taypi Kala, ‘The Stone of the Centre’, once a city of 50,000 people on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca.7 The site was first occupied around 400 BC but large-scale construction didn’t begin until around 100 BC, when it continued for nearly three hundred years. It was contemporary with another South American civilisation on the coast, the Moche, whom we shall meet next. But Tiwanaku outlasted the Moche, not collapsing until around AD 1000–1100.

  At its height, around AD 650, Tiwanaku was a place of palaces, plazas and vividly coloured temples boasting many gold-covered bas-reliefs. It was ‘an architectural masterpiece, marked by its many gateways and massive masonry buildings’. The gateways, fashioned from single slabs of rock, formed religious entities, in particular the ‘Gateway God’, possibly a solar deity, which was positioned above the doorway, wearing a headdress with a sunburst motif, with many projecting rays that culminate either in circles or puma heads. The god wears a tunic and skirt, boasts a fine necklace and holds two staffs adorned with condor heads. He is surrounded by three rows of winged figures with human or bird heads.8

  There is abundant evidence that Tiwanaku religion revolved around human sacrifice. The remains of dismembered bodies have been found throughout the area and ceramics often show warriors with puma masks decapitating their enemies and holding trophy heads. Human heads with their tongues torn out were used to decorate belts.

  Aside from the sacred gateways, a large artificial platform, fifty feet high and 650 feet long, dominated the city. At the summit was a sunken court around which the priests lived. When it rained the water was directed through the sunken court, out on to the surrounding terraces and into the temple, sluicing then into a great moat that surrounded the ceremonial precincts. Some archaeologists believe that this set-up was meant to represent a sacred island and it was on this massive terrace (known as the Akapana) that Tiwanaku’s elite appeared, dressed in the manner of gods, or as condors or pumas, wearing sacrificial knives hanging from their belts, alongside the trophy heads of their victims. The bodies of at least a dozen sacrificial victims have been excavated near the bottom of the platform.9

  Other plazas and courts exist at Tiwanaku, some decorated with stone sculptures in the form of human heads or skulls, some with monoliths in human form, some with images of peoples the Tiwanaku conquered, raising the possibility that their gods, as well as their subjects, were held captive there.

  Recent excavations have shown that agriculture at Tiwanaku was much more sophisticated than previously thought. They created raised fields, long ridges that covered the flood plains separated by ditches. When these were recreated, they produced dramatic results: for when frost descended on the altiplano, the raised ridges were protected by the water in the nearby ditches which kept the air warmer and helped form a protective mist in the early mornings. Potato harvests using this system were both larger and more reliable.10 After massive droughts in the sixth century AD, Tiwanaku’s rulers invested huge resources in reclaiming altiplano land in this ridged-field system, achieving yields perhaps four times what modern farmers achieve and supporting a population of somewhere between 40,000 and 120,000 people.

  The llama and alpaca provided wool and some protein for food and the former were used as animals to carry pottery, textiles, wood carvings and gold objects far from the city. By Andean standards Tiwanaku was both large and long-lived, surviving two or three hundred years after the Moche had disappeared, until – probably – the area was hit by a drought that lasted for decades. Not even the ridged-field system could save them.

  PUNISHMENT, PRISONERS AND PRECIOUS METALS

  Copper and gold ornaments first appear in the archaeological record, in an area stretching from Ecuador to Bolivia, as early as 1500 BC. But it was not until the Moche civilisation appeared, about AD 100, that it achieved its apogee – metalsmiths who could weld and even electroplate gold and copper. They also developed sumptuous textiles and elaborate pottery, making this culture one of the jewels of pre-Columbian America. As Brian Fagan correctly says, the Moche never invented writing but we have a vivid record of their lives.11

  Moche was never a large kingdom, stretching at the most for 250 miles along a narrow strip from the Lambayeque Valley to the Nepena Valley on the north-west coastline of Peru. Most people lived in the valleys of short (fifty-miles) rivers. The kingdom’s success was due to the efficient management of water – irrigation canals and ridges, many canals being fortified. Much effort was spent in keeping the canals free of debris, and agriculture was further aided by the industrialised collection of guano, droppings by seabirds that were so rich that Peru exported tons of it each year until the end of the nineteenth century and the revolution in modern nitrogen fixing. This substance was regarded as so precious that anyone who approached the seabird nesting areas during the breeding season was executed.12

  The central ceremonial feature of Moche culture was the huaca, truncated pyramids, the greatest of which, the Huaca del Sol, the Pyramid of the Sun, rises 135 feet above the plain. The pyramids were made of adobe sun-dried bricks �
� 143 million went into the Huaca del Sol – each stamped with a symbol indicating which gang (or kin group) had made it and which quarry it had come from. Michael Moseley, who excavated the Pyramid of the Sun, calculates that it took a century or so for the entire construction.

  These sacred pyramids served as temples, even symbolic mountains, where the elite lived in palaces and presided over human sacrifices which were the main aim of their military campaigns (battles were designed to capture the enemy, not kill him – he would be sacrificed later). The elite were also buried in the pyramids, with an array of fine grave goods. Tens of thousands of people lived around the pyramid/ temples in a loose agglomeration, a different kind of ‘city’ or ‘urban structure’ from those in Mesopotamia or Mesoamerica, but still a sizeable population.

  The Moche were America’s first accomplished metalworkers and their first creators of elaborate pottery. They understood the lost-wax technique, to produce three-dimensional figures in precious metal. They developed a number of techniques to vary the colour of gold, using salt or soda, to produce a vast array of objects. By the same token, the range of their pottery has been compared to classical Greek vases, many of which are as much sculptures as drinking vessels, in the form of houses, blind people, curers treating their patients, anthropomorphic animals, musicians, humans making love with deities, a jaguar attacking a man. ‘Prisoner vessels’ were a particular genre, showing victims seated, with ropes around their neck, and their hands tied behind their back. The pots were placed next to the sacrificial victims and ceremoniously broken beforehand.13 The Moche were the first pot-makers in South America to produce ceramics from moulds. The pots are painted with scenes of battles, sometimes showing decapitation, or lines of prisoners passing before a ruler. According to one archaeologist who made a study of 125,000 Moche art objects, every one has a symbolic meaning.

  Moche iconography shows many images of coca users, use of the San Pedro (psychoactive) cactus, a strange fruit known as ulluchu, not yet identified but possibly hallucinogenic, being associated with coca and feline figures, which in Moche society represented thunder, lightning and rain. There was also a plant, espingo (Nectandra), which was added to chicha beer and made the shaman act, according to one conquistador, ‘as if mad’.14 Papaya (Carica candicans) was also widely used, having properties that prevented blood coagulating, so that it could be employed by the priest/shaman after the sacrifice had been completed.

  The Moche appear to have had many gods but their supreme deity was a sky god creator, with feline fangs, who lived – significantly enough – in the mountains.15 A major theme in Moche iconography was punishment inflicted on human individuals. In some cases sacrificial victims were killed by being left exposed on mountain tops, sometimes after being flayed.16 The idea of punishment was designed specifically to make the victim cry out in pain, so as to be heard by the gods, and to deprive them of the strength to summon up malevolent forces. The Moche believed in a mythic being, or amaru, who lived in a lagoon high in the mountains. Every so often, the amaru emerged with extraordinary violence and destroyed everything in its path, leaving a record of its wrath on the landscape. ‘The amaru’s appearance announces the disorders that provoke ancestral wrath and the lack of respect for ritual.’ This is a fairly obvious reference to a volcano, with the reference to ritual designed to reinforce the role of shaman/priests.

  There was also what Elisabeth Benson calls ‘god-the-son’, a more active form of deity, with a feline mouth and a jaguar or sunrise headdress. He may have been inherited from the Chavín and was much concerned with the doings of humans. But here as elsewhere the dominant sacred image is of the jaguar, who decorated temples, often anthropomorphised, sometimes on top of humans, where it is uncertain whether the animals are attacking the humans or copulating with them.17 Feline figures were common on gold and shell jewellery.18

  Later there is a subtle change as a new god appears ‘to share power with the fanged deity’. He is a warrior, clad in a warriors’ armour and headdress. He may be accompanied by a jaguar but in any case himself has fangs in his mouth and snakes that radiate from his head.

  The elite of the Moche were buried with many precious objects (ten golden heads of felines, others showing spiders) together with wives, concubines and other retainers who were deliberately sacrificed alongside them.

  The Moche elite were all warriors and in their art there are countless scenes of battles and in particular the sacrifice of prisoners. In this case, archaeologists believe there may have been an association between sacrifice and fertility, in that Moche art is famous for its erotic content, in particular showing men and women making love, humans making love with gods, and men with prominent phalli. In sacrifice where death occurs by strangulation or decapitation, the penis can become erect – Moche priests may therefore have formed a conceptual link between these apparently similar processes.

  As with the Chavín peoples, the animals in Moche art are predominantly those of the rainforest – jaguars, pumas, monkeys and ocelots – and they are often combined with plants and mundane objects to represent fantastical images: helmets or weapons with legs, for example, which Brian Fagan says ‘almost certainly’ represent shamans’ visions.

  Moche civilisation disappeared suddenly around AD 8oo. Studies have shown a prolonged drought in the area between AD 562 and 594, and then the region was hit between AD 650 and 700 by a great earthquake that affected many areas in the Andes. Mudslides blocked the canals and disrupted life on the coast, and were followed by a major El Niño event which brought torrential rain and violent winds that swept away entire villages and towns and killed the anchovy harvests. The elite moved north, abandoning the Huaca del Sol but half a century later another El Niño brought yet more mayhem.

  Michael Moseley and his colleagues believe that the El Niño which destroyed Moche civilisation was greater even than the one in 1997–98, the effects of which began in Peru and lasted for eight months, killing ~2,100 people and causing $33 billion of damage, and in which the incessant rain and mudslides lasted for weeks on end as far away as Kenya, Poland, California and Madagascar. It is known that the effects of an El Niño event can last for up to eighteen months but Moseley and his team argue that the part of Peru that was hit by the mega-El Niño shortly after AD 600 created after-effects that lasted for much, much longer.19 Steve Bourget, at the University of Texas at Austin, argues that prisoner sacrifices at the Huaca del Sol were performed in times of crisis associated with torrential El Niño rains, since some of the victims were killed during periods of heavy downpours.20

  An El Niño event may have caused the collapse of Moche civilisation but a further factor appears to have been a commoners’ revolt against intolerable burdens placed on them by the elite, when the residences of the Pampa Grande nobles in the Lambayeque Valley were burned. As we shall see, this is not the only time commoner revolts occurred in pre-Columbian Latin America.

  THE MAYAN MILKY WAY: THE DRAMA OF THE NIGHT SKY

  The Classic Maya civilisation, as it is called, is, with the Aztecs and Incas, the best known of tropical American cultures. It flourished long before the other two, between 200 BC and AD 900 across as much as 100,000 square miles of the Yucatán Peninsula in what is now Guatemala and south-eastern Mexico. There were in fact about fifty independent (city) states, ruled over by a small elite, and tens of thousands of villages.21 They traded widely, their kings were regarded as divine and they built grand urban complexes with pyramids and other monumental architecture, including ball courts.

  Theirs was a world where, as with the Olmec, the natural world and the supernatural world were closely intermingled. Indeed, the classical period itself may have been initiated after a massive volcanic eruption, one of the greatest in the Holocene, at about AD 200. For them, as for others in Mesoamerica, the cosmos was made up of three levels – the Upper World of the heavens, the Middle World, inhabited by humans, and the mysterious Underworld. Linking these three layers was the World Tree, or Wacah Cha
n (literally ‘raised-up sky’), which had its roots in the Underworld, its trunk in the Middle World and its branches and leaves in the Upper World. The souls of the dead could pass via this tree to the other levels.

  The actual position of this World Tree was fixed – or personified – by the body of the king, who could bring the tree into existence ‘as he stood in a trance on top of a temple pyramid’. This act, in which the king performed the most sacred deed of kingship, was achieved through trances and the shedding of his blood, which opened a doorway or portal into the spiritual world. Portals were an important concept in Maya religious belief, being openings or gateways to the ‘Other World’ beneath the Earth, known as Xibalba. Caves could be portals but so too were cenotes, a major geographical feature of the northern lowlands of Yucatán formed, some people believe, 65 million years ago when a giant asteroid hit the earth in the Gulf of Mexico. Cenotes can be very deep water cisterns, and were equipped with potentially dangerous ladders (if they broke) being built down into the deepwater levels, and with many votive offerings being cast into the waters. At the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichén Itźá the remains of many sacrificial victims have been discovered.22

  Linda Schele and David Freidel, two of the foremost Mayan scholars, also argue that the World Tree was seen in the sky, the Milky Way being regarded as the Wakah-Chan and within which many other images were discernible, mostly relating to Mayan ideas of the original creation of the universe. During the course of the night, the Milky Way, as the World Tree, turns in the heavens, to form a canoe-shaped entity which was believed to carry the First Individuals to the Place of Creation. In other words, on certain important nights, great cosmic transformations took place in the Upper World.23 (The Milky Way is both darker in places and lighter in patches in the tropics compared with the northern skies.)