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The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization. The earliest complex societies of coastal Peru may have developed as a result of the intensive exploitation of maritime resources, especially small fish easily netted from canoes.
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The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization • The earliest complex societies of coastal Peru may have developed as a result of the intensive exploitation of maritime resources, especially small fish easily netted from canoes. • In time, abundant food surpluses, growing population densities, and larger settlements may have preadapted coastal people to intensive irrigation agriculture. • These societies were organized in increasingly complex ways.
Coastal Foundations: The Initial Period • During the so-called Initial Period of Peruvian prehistory, large monumental structures appeared, many of them U-shaped, just before and during the transition toward greater dependence on maize agriculture. • This was also a period of continuous interaction and extensive trade between the coast and the highlands.
Coastal Foundations: The Initial Period • Caral - By 2600 B.C., a large kingdom developed in the hot Supe Valley, about 193 km (120 miles) north of modern-day Lima and 20 km (12.4 miles) from the Pacific. • Caral is dominated by six large stone platforms with structures atop them built of quarried stone and filled in with cobbles from the nearby river. • Caral was abandoned for unknown reasons between 2000 and 1500 B.C.
Coastal Foundations: The Initial Period • El Paráiso and Huaca Florida • El Paraíso, built close to the mouth of the Chillón River near an area of arable food plain in about 1800 B.C., is the oldest of the U-shaped ceremonial complexes and the closest one to the Pacific. • Perhaps as many as 100,000 tons of rock excavated from the nearby hills were needed to build the various El Paraíso buildings.
Coastal Foundations: The Initial Period • El Paráiso and Huaca Florida (cont’d) • Huaca Florida - an imposing mound of boulders and adobe lying approximately 13 km (8 miles) inland of El Paraíso (Patterson, 1985). • Built somewhat later, in about 1700 B.C., and on an even larger scale, the great platform is more than 252 m (840 feet) long and 54 m (180 feet) wide and towers 30 m (100 feet) above the valley.
Chavín de Huántar • Chavín de Huántar – started ~ 1200 B.C. • Chavín was never a great city—only 2000 to 3000 people lived there in its heyday. • The Chavín style may have influenced artistic traditions over a wide area of Peru. • The religious beliefs behind the artistic motifs may have been more significant than the art itself. • Settlements like Chavín de Huántar were important ceremonial centers that unified surrounding farming villages in a common religious belief, but Chavín de Huántar was not unique.
Paracas: Textiles and Coastal Prehistory • Few ancient societies rivaled the textile artistry of the coastal Peruvians. • They lived in an environment in which both animal and plant (especially cotton) fibers were plentiful, and they were able to create fine, complex fabrics adorned with colorful, intricate patterns. • The most spectacular textile finds come from very large cemeteries of mummified individuals on the sandy, desolate Paracas Peninsula.
Paracas: Textiles and Coastal Prehistory • From the Paracas mummies, we learn the most minute details of Peruvian textiles, for the wrapping cloths are often almost perfectly preserved. • The earliest textiles preserved on the coast date to approximately 4500 B.C., soon after cotton was first cultivated. • The weavers were expert dyers and used more than 190 hues from plant dyes. The earliest dye in common use was blue, followed by red and then a multitude of bright colors.
Complex Society in the Southern Highlands: Chiripa and Pukara • Chiripa (1400 to 100 B.C.) - on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, was a fishing and fowling settlement where farming and herding were integrated into much earlier hunter-gatherer traditions. • ~1000 B.C. - a platform mound was built in the community. • Between 600 and 100 B.C., the Chiripa platform was enlarged until it measured 55 m square and 6 m high.
Complex Society in the Southern Highlands: Chiripa and Pukara • The Chiripa shrine—especially the stepped doorways, sunken courts, and nichelike windows—are ancestral to the later Tiwanaku architectural tradition, which used the same devices for its ceremonial architecture.
Complex Society in the Southern Highlands: Chiripa and Pukara • Pukara (400 B.C. to A.D. 100) - 75 km northwest of Lake Titicaca, was a major center, with a large residential area and an imposing ceremonial complex on a stone-faced terrace, complete with rectangular sunken court and one-room structures on three sides. • Such a dense population could be achieved only by a major investment in agriculture, including many acres of raised fields and large shallow ponds, known as cochas, which filled seasonally and where crops were planted at water’s edge as the pond dried up.
The Early Intermediate Period • Early Intermediate Period: Moche on the northern coast, Nasca in the south, and Recuay and Pukara in the highlands. • By 200 B.C., some settlements, such as Cerro Arena in the Moche Valley, covered more than a square kilometer. • Ancient irrigation canals wound along the sides of the Moche valley, a series of narrow channels approximately 1.2 m wide, set in loops and S-shaped curves, watering plots approximately 21 m square. • The surplus flowed off into the Pacific.
The Moche State • Moche state - By 200 B.C., it had begun in northern coastal Peru; and flourished for 800 years. • Great ceremonial centers and huge irrigation works • The greatest efforts of the Moche people were devoted not to irrigation systems or elaborate burials but to the erection of vast monumental platforms and temples on the southern edge of the cultivated land in the Moche Valley, approximately 6.45 km southeast of the modern city of Trujillo.
The Moche State • Moche state • A trio of disasters: • An El Niño flooded the imperial capital itself just before A.D. 600. • Only half a century later, another El Niño descended on the coast with catastrophic effects. • Sometime between 650 and 700, a great earthquake struck the Andes, choking rivers with debris from landslides. • Moche civilization collapsed.
The Middle Horizon: Tiwanaku and Wari • Between A.D. 600 and 1000, the wealthiest highland districts lay at the southern end of the central Andes, in the high, flat country surrounding Lake Titicaca. • Tiwanaku - By A.D. 450, Tiwanaku, on the southern side of the lake, was becoming a major population center as well as an economic and religious focus for the region.
The Middle Horizon: Tiwanaku and Wari • Tiwanaku • The arid lands on which the site lies were irrigated and supported a population of perhaps 20,000 around the monumental structures near the center of the site. • By A.D. 600, Tiwanaku was acquiring much of its prosperity from trade around the lake’s southern shores. • Copper working probably developed independently of the well-established copper technology on the northern coast.
The Middle Horizon: Tiwanaku and Wari • Wari - in the Ayacucho Valley, is a highland urban and ceremonial center that stands on a hill. • Associated with huge stone walls and many dwellings that cover several square miles • Wari people seem to have revered a Viracocha-like being. • By A.D. 800, their domains extended from Moche country in the Lambayeque Valley on the northern coast to south of Nasca territory, down the Moquequa Valley of the south-central Andes and into the highlands south of Cuzco.
The Middle Horizon: Tiwanaku and Wari • Wari (cont’d) • Wari itself was abandoned in the ninth century A.D., but its art styles persisted on the coast for at least two more centuries.
The Late Intermediate Period: Sicán and Chimor • The decline of Moche in the Lambayeque Valley had left somewhat of a vacuum, filled by the Sicán culture after A.D. 700. • Sicán reached its peak between A.D. 900 and 1100, centered in the Lambayeque Valley and remarkable for its magnificent gold work. • About A.D. 1375, Chimu, with its great capital at Chan Chan on the northern coast, dominated a wide area of the lowlands. Its compounds reflect a stratified state with many expert craftspeople and a complex material culture. • The Inca conquered the Chimu in the 1460s.
The Late Horizon: The Inca State • During the Late Horizon of Peruvian prehistory (A.D. 1400 to 1534), there was unification of the highlands and the lowlands under the Inca Empire, which may have emerged as early as A.D. 1200 and lasted until the Spanish Conquest in 1532–1534. • The Inca rulers were masters of bureaucracy and military organization.
Amazonia • The Amazon Basin was settled by hunter-gatherers as early as 8500 B.C. • Cultivation began around 3500 B.C. • By 1000 B.C., Awarak and Tupiguarani speakers had spread across the Amazonian lowlands, organized in small chiefdoms • Interacted with one another and with the Inca and other societies on the other side of the Andes
The Spanish Conquest(1532 to1534) • The Inca governed a highly structured state—one, however, that was so weakened by civil war and disease that it fell easily to the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his small army of adventurers in 1532.
