Caral-Supe civilization

By around 2200 BC, the influence of Norte Chico civilization spread far along the coast. To the south, it went as far as the Chillon valley, and the site of El Paraiso. To the north, it spread as far as the Santa River valley.[15]

Circa 1800 BC, the Caral-Supe civilization began to decline, with more powerful centers appearing to the south and north along the coast, and to the east inside the belt of the Andes. The success of irrigation-based agriculture at Caral-Supe may have contributed to its being eclipsed. Anthropologist Professor Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University notes that "when this civilization is in decline, we begin to find extensive canals farther north. People were moving to more fertile ground and taking their knowledge of irrigation with them".[3] It would be a thousand years before the rise of the next great Peruvian culture, the Chavín.

Caral panorama

A broad outline of the Caral-Supe diet has been suggested. At Caral, the edible domesticated plants noted by Shady are squash, beans, lúcuma, guava, pacay (Inga feuilleei), and sweet potato.[9] Haas et al. noted the same foods in their survey farther north, while adding avocado and achira. In 2013, good evidence for maize also was documented by Haas et al. (see below).[18]

There was also a significant seafood component at both coastal and inland sites. Shady notes that "animal remains are almost exclusively marine" at Caral, including clams and mussels, and large amounts of anchovies and sardines.[9] That the anchovy fish reached inland is clear,[1] although Haas suggests that "shellfish [which would include clams and mussels], sea mammals, and seaweed do not appear to have been significant portions of the diet in the inland, non-maritime sites".[13]

The people from the Caral-Supe civilization used vertebrae of the blue whale as stools

The role of seafood in the Caral-Supe diet has aroused debate. Much early fieldwork was conducted in the region of Aspero on the coast, before the full scope and inter-connectedness of the several sites of the civilization were realized. In a 1973 paper, Michael E. Moseley contended that a maritime subsistence (seafood) economy had been the basis of the society and its remarkably early flourishing,[7] a theory later elaborated as a "maritime foundation of Andean civilization" (MFAC).[19][20] He confirmed a previously observed lack of ceramics at Aspero, and he deduced that "hummocks" on the site constituted the remains of artificial platform mounds.

This thesis of a maritime foundation was contrary to the general scholarly consensus that the rise of civilization was based on intensive agriculture, particularly of at least one cereal. The production of agricultural surpluses had long been seen as essential in promoting population density and the emergence of complex society. Moseley's ideas would be debated and challenged (that maritime remains and their caloric contribution were overestimated, for example),[21] but have been treated as plausible as late as 2005, when Mann conducted a summary of the literature.[1]

Concomitant to the maritime subsistence hypothesis was an implied dominance of sites immediately adjacent to the coast over other centers. This idea was shaken by the realization of the magnitude of Caral, an inland site. Supplemental to a 1997 article by Shady dating Caral, a 2001 Science news article emphasized the dominance of agriculture and also suggested that Caral was the oldest urban center in Peru (and the entire Americas). It rejected the idea that civilization might have begun adjacent to the coast and then moved inland. One archaeologist was quoted as suggesting that "rather than coastal antecedents to monumental inland sites, what we have now are coastal satellite villages to monumental inland sites".[14]

These assertions were quickly challenged by Sandweiss and Moseley, who observed that Caral, although being the largest and most complex preceramic site, it is not the oldest. They admitted the importance of agriculture to industry and to augment diet, while broadly affirming "the formative role of marine resources in early Andean civilization".[22] Scholars now agree that the inland sites did have significantly greater populations, and that there were "so many more people along the four rivers than on the shore that they had to have been dominant".[1]

The remaining question is which of the areas developed first and created a template for subsequent development.[23] Haas rejects suggestions that maritime development at sites immediately adjacent to the coast was initial, pointing to contemporaneous development based on his dating.[2] Moseley remains convinced that coastal Aspero is the oldest site, and that its maritime subsistence served as a basis for the civilization.[1][22]

The use of cotton (of the species Gossypium barbadense) played an important economic role in the relationship between the inland and the coastal settlements in this area of Peru. Nevertheless, scholars are still divided over the exact chronology of these developments.[1][13]

Although not edible, cotton was the most important product of irrigation in the Caral-Supe culture, vital to the production of fishing nets (that in turn provided maritime resources) as well as to textiles and textile technology. Haas notes that "control over cotton allows a ruling elite to provide the benefit of cloth for clothing, bags, wraps, and adornment".[13] He is willing to admit to a mutual dependency dilemma: "The prehistoric residents of the Norte Chico needed the fish resources for their protein and the fishermen needed the cotton to make the nets to catch the fish."[13] Thus, identifying cotton as a vital resource produced in the inland does not by itself resolve the issue of whether the inland centers were a progenitor for those on the coast, or vice versa. Moseley argues that successful maritime centers would have moved inland to find cotton.[1]

In a 2018 publication, David G. Beresford-Jones with coauthors have defended Moseley’s (1975) Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (MFAC) hypothesis.[24]

The authors modified and refined the Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization hypothesis of Moseley. Thus, according to them, the MFAC hypothesis now “emerges more persuasive than ever”. It was the potential for increased quantities of food production that the cultivation of cotton allowed that was the key in precipitating revolutionary social change and social complexity, according to the authors. Previous to that, the gathering of bast fibers of wild Asclepias was used for fiber production, which was far less efficient.

Beresford-Jones and others also offered further support for their theories in 2021.[25]

It was Swiss archaeologist Frédéric Engel, originally, who coined the term "Cotton Preceramic Stage" in 1957 in order to describe the unusual coastal sites such Norte Chico that had cotton but lacked ceramics and were very ancient. This stage was seen as running for about 1200 years from 3000 to 1800 BC.[26][27]

The development of Caral-Supe is particularly remarkable for the apparent absence of an agricultural staple food. However, recent studies increasingly dispute this and point to maize as a dietary backbone of this and later pre-Columbian civilizations.[28] Moseley found a small number of maize cobs in 1973 at Aspero (also seen in site work in the 1940s and 1950s)[7] but has since called the find "problematic".[22] However, increasing evidence has emerged about the importance of maize in this period:

Archaeological testing at a number of sites in the Norte Chico region of the north central coast provides a broad range of empirical data on the production, processing, and consumption of maize. New data drawn from coprolites, pollen records, and stone tool residues, combined with 126 radiocarbon dates, demonstrate that maize was widely grown, intensively processed, and constituted a primary component of the diet throughout the period from 3000 to 1800 BC.[18]

For Beresford-Jones, his new research on the two nearby ancient coastal settlements of La Yerba, on the east bank of Ica River, Peru (Río Ica) was very important. This is not far from the southern Peruvian town of Ica. The earlier of these settlement was La Yerba II (7571–6674 Cal BP, or ca 5570-4670 BC). When it was occupied, La Yerba II shell midden was situated rather close to the ancient surf line. This was not a permanently occupied site.[24]

A somewhat later site, La Yerba III, on the other hand, was a permanently occupied settlement, and shows a population that was an order of magnitude greater than earlier. Obsidian debitage was abundant at La Yerba III, as opposed to earlier. This suggests an increasing interaction extending to the highlands where obsidian was procured.[24]

The population of La Yerba III already practiced some floodplain horticulture. They cultivated gourds, Phaseolus, and Canavalia beans, and plant fiber production was of great importance for their fishing economy. Therefore, they were “pre-adapted to a Cotton Revolution".[24]

Remains of the two main Caral pyramids in the arid Supe Valley

Monolith in Caral

Altar of the Holy Fire, on top of the Templo Mayor

The degree of centralized authority is difficult to ascertain, but architectural construction patterns are indicative, at least in certain places at certain times, of an elite population who wielded considerable power: while some of the monumental architecture was constructed incrementally, other buildings, such as the two main platform mounds at Caral,[9] appear to have been constructed in one or two intense construction phases.[13] As further evidence of centralized control, Haas points to remains of large stone warehouses found at Upaca, on the Pativilca, as emblematic of authorities able to control vital resources such as cotton.[1]

Haas suggests that the labour mobilization patterns revealed by the archaeological evidence, point to a unique emergence of human government, one of two alongside Sumer (or three, if Mesoamerica is included as a separate case). While in other cases, the idea of government would have been borrowed or copied, in this small group, government was invented. Other archaeologists have rejected such claims as hyperbolic.[1]

In exploring the basis of possible government, Haas suggests three broad bases of power for early complex societies:

• economic,
• ideology, and
• physical.

He finds the first two present in ancient Caral-Supe.

Economic authority would have rested on the control of cotton, edible plants, and associated trade relationships, with power centered on the inland sites. Haas tentatively suggests that the scope of this economic power base may have extended widely: there are only two confirmed shore sites in the Caral-Supe (Aspero and Bandurria) and possibly two more, but cotton fishing nets and domesticated plants have been found up and down the Peruvian coast. It is possible that the major inland centers of Caral-Supe, were at the center of a broad regional trade network centered on these resources.[13]

Citing Shady, a 2005 article in Discover magazine suggests a rich and varied trade life: "[Caral] exported its own products and those of Aspero to distant communities in exchange for exotic imports: Spondylus shells from the coast of Ecuador, rich dyes from the Andean highlands, hallucinogenic snuff from the Amazon."[29] (Given the still limited extent of Caral-Supe research, such claims should be treated circumspectly.) Other reports on Shady's work indicate Caral traded with communities in the jungle farther inland and, possibly, with people from the mountains.[30]

Haas postulates that ideological power exercised by leadership was based on apparent access to deities and the supernatural.[13] Evidence regarding Caral-Supe religion is limited: in 2003, an image of the Staff God, a leering figure with a hood and fangs, was found on a gourd that dated to 2250 BC. The Staff God is a major deity of later Andean cultures, and Winifred Creamer suggests the find points to worship of common symbols of deities.[31][32] As with much other research at Caral-Supe, the nature and significance of the find has been disputed by other researchers.[NB 2]

Mann postulates that the act of architectural construction and maintenance at Caral-Supe may have been a spiritual or religious experience: a process of communal exaltation and ceremony.[23] Shady has called Caral "the sacred city" (la ciudad sagrada)[8] and reports that socio-economic and political focus was on the temples, which were periodically remodeled, with major burnt offerings associated with the remodeling.[33]

Haas notes the absence of any suggestion of physical bases of power, that is, defensive construction, at Caral-Supe. There is no evidence of warfare "of any kind or at any level during the Preceramic Period".[13] Mutilated bodies, burned buildings, and other tell-tale signs of violence are absent and settlement patterns are completely non-defensive.[23] The evidence of the development of complex government in the absence of warfare contrasts markedly to archaeological theory, which suggests that human beings move away from kin-based groups to larger units resembling "states" for mutual defense of often scarce resources. In Caral-Supe, a vital resource was present: arable land generally, and the cotton crop specifically, but Mann noted that apparently, the move to greater complexity by the culture was not driven by the need for defense or warfare.[23]