Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (33 page)

Around him, as dusk began to fall, people chanted and stared and even collapsed on the floor of the great plaza where the shaman had gone into trance. As it began to clip the horizon, the huge orange sphere of the desert sun bathed the scene—and groups of strange “buildings” around the plaza—in a warm red glow.

This was the Nascan capital, a vast city without citizens, a place reserved for priests, pilgrims, and the Nascan equivalent of prayer—soul-flight communication with the next world. Known to modern archaeologists as Cahuachi (its original name remains a complete mystery), it had an architectural style that was a bizarre blend of natural and manmade elements. Although the city covers 375 acres, technically it had virtually no true buildings, for almost all the forty structures in Cahuachi (all of them step pyramids) were to an extent never actually built. Instead, they were sculpted out of the living rock and then given further shape through the addition of quantities of mud bricks. The largest had six tiers and were some 50 feet high.

In the plaza, the shaman continued to shake and shudder, arms outstretched in trance. His altered state of consciousness was lasting longer, the crowds were bigger, and the mixture of despair and hope etched on people’s faces was more intense than normal, for on this occasion the shaman’s mission was one of life or death. A great drought had struck the Nasca valleys and brought famine and death in its wake, and the traditional shamanic soul flight journey across the cosmos to secure water was, on that occasion, more crucial than it had ever been before.

T
he scenes above, or something very like them, probably did occur, although the actual details have had to be re-created from images on Nasca pottery and textiles, from anthropological accounts of the behavior associated with surviving Peruvian shamanic traditions, and from the archaeological evidence that Cahuachi was a city of religious ritual, not of citizens.

But archaeological and ice-core evidence also suggests that the Nascan efforts to secure rain utterly failed, as the drought continued for some thirty years.

Dating in Nasca archaeology is far from being an exact science, but the available evidence suggests that Cahuachi was abandoned as a great ritual center around the very time that the drought started. Certainly, even after just a few years of crop failure and famine, it is likely that the abject failure of established religious practice would have begun to provoke religious and political tensions and change. And according to the archaeological record, that is precisely what seems to have occurred.

The first act in the drama appears to have been the abandonment of Cahuachi and a switch of ritual and religious emphasis away from the city to the open wilderness and its sprawling proxy cosmos—the vast desert drawings.

There seems to have been a decentralization of religious practice, probably with different Nascan clans or tribal subgroups etching very large numbers of new line systems on the desert floor. Dozens of new ray complexes were created, and virtually every hillock worthy of the name was turned into a proxy mountain on which rituals were then carried out in an increasingly desperate bid for water. On their summits, archaeologists have found the still perfectly preserved offerings made almost fifteen hundred years ago to the gods or to the ancestors to coax water from the skies. Maize cobs, the remains of sacrificed llamas and guinea pigs, and quantities of smashed pottery have been discovered lying exactly where they were left back in the sixth century.

Along with the sudden proliferation of ray systems came an intensification of other forms of desert mega-drawing. Giant trapezoids were introduced, and increased numbers of zigzag patterns, some over three hundred feet long, may at this stage have been meticulously etched onto the scorched surface of the Nasca desert.

But it wasn’t just the desert drawings that changed and proliferated. The iconography on the Nasca pottery—among the finest in the world—also began to change. The images on the pots became more violent, more jarring. Increasingly they featured spikes, jagged staffs (probably spears), warriors, severed heads, and even killer whales replete with fanged mouths dripping with blood. A key religious icon—a probable deity—evolved from being fairly human into a far more demonic and aggressive monster.

The abandonment of Cahuachi and the orgy of line drawing were followed not only by more aggressive iconography but also by more real conflict. As the long drought continued, not only religious but also political stability seems to have broken down. Competition and raiding for food became the order of the day, and archaeologists have succeeded in uncovering compelling evidence to illustrate the full horror of this increase in warfare.

In 1989, on a hillside overlooking a valley near the modern town of Palpa, archaeologists excavated a cache of forty-eight sixth-century severed heads.
⁶
Detailed forensic examination of the skulls and associated material revealed that the victims had first had their throats slit.
⁷
Once dead, their brains, tongues, facial muscles, and skin were removed. Then the skin was refitted and the cheeks and eyeballs were stuffed with cloth. Finally, a hole was punched in each forehead so that the severed head could be suspended from a cord of cotton or human hair. It’s likely that the heads originally belonged to warriors killed or captured in battle and were displayed as trophies on some sort of timber scaffold erected by the victors above the very valley in which the victims had been slaughtered.

Increased conflict was an almost inevitable consequence of the growing competition and political chaos that flowed from prolonged drought. The drought-period Nasca fought with weapons that were crude but nonetheless cruelly effective. The pottery and textile iconography and other evidence show that they included five-foot-long spears (for lunging with), wooden clubs, stone axes, slings, and eighteen-inch-long throwing spears launched by wooden spear throwers with whale-ivory handles.

Warriors would have fought wearing short, often sleeveless tunics, probably sometimes reinforced with padded cotton armor. To protect their heads, they would often have sported conical padded cotton helmets, each topped with a fan-shaped crest of brown feathers.

But politico-religious change and warfare were not the only Nascan responses to the great drought. In a few areas the Nasca fought back against natural catastrophe with their own version of high technology—and it must almost have worked, at least until other factors overwhelmed them. The “high-tech” solution was to dig for water deep underground, capture it, and channel it to where it was needed.

Almost certainly while the drought was raging, the Nasca invented and then engineered around fifty such water-extraction systems, with a total length of some thirty miles. Thirty-six systems survive, and some are still in use to this day. They vary from narrow, three-foot-wide tunnels deep underground to large, V-shaped, cobble-faced canals three feet wide at the bottom but ten times that width at the top.

Each system, known as a
puquio,
was a purely local solution and was usually between 1,300 feet and 1.5 miles in length. Their age was for a long time a mystery, but now three types of evidence have combined to tie them to the sixth century. First of all, careful water-level analysis of the
puquios
has revealed that they were built in conditions of extreme drought, much more extreme than even the ultradry conditions that exist in the Nasca desert today. Second, to dig thirty miles of
puquios
requires more than just a few years. Third, radiocarbon and associated pottery dates all point to the sixth century.

But there is one last piece of fascinating and poignant evidence that also links it to the great drought, namely, an extraordinary piece of local folk memory. Local legend has it that the
puquios
were built at a time of great drought to collect the tears wept by the local Indian god as he beheld the suffering of his people. Some linguistic authorities have even suggested that the history of the great drought is preserved, in a sense, in the very name of Nasca itself, for in the local Quechua language the word for pain,
nanay,
is said to have evolved into the name
nanascca,
which has come down to our own times simply as Nasca.

A
nd so it was that the creators of the largest artworks on earth became victims of the mid-sixth-century climatic catastrophe. But they were certainly not the only Peruvian victims of the great drought.

T H E  M U D
O F  H A D ES

N
aked, terrified, staggering from blows delivered with wooden mace heads, and prodded with copper-tipped lances, the half-dead gifts to the storm god entered at last the place of their deliverance.

Their suffering at the heart of one of South America’s most sacred ancient sites—the now long-deserted city of Moche in northern Peru—formed part of what probably qualifies as the world’s most bizarre mass human sacrifice. Many of the victims had their fingers and toes sliced off and inserted into the dead bodies of their colleagues. Other individuals had their fingers crushed with rocks. Still others had their feet pierced by copper lance heads. Most were probably finally dispatched by decapitation or with a blow to the head administered with a heavy wooden mace. Others, however, were almost certainly bled to death.

For their tortured corpses, however, the ordeal was far from over. Some of the bodies were systematically chopped up and ritually rearranged. In certain cases heads were placed between legs—and bodies were deliberately positioned on top of each other.

But in terms of probable meaning, the most telling aspect of this ghastly ritual deposition was its precise location—buried within a matrix of sacred mud. For the torrents of clinging mud in which the butchered bodies were finally laid to rest were nothing less than the “melted” outer surfaces of a giant adobe temple.

The sacrificial victims’ rendezvous with the mud of their mass grave was no coincidence. The utilization of the sacred mud from the elaborately decorated outer surfaces of the temple was a deliberate act that by its very nature had to coincide with an extremely heavy rainstorm. And in and around the north coast of Peru, where the sacrificial site is located, the only occasions on which such intense downpours occur are during the very worst occurrences of the intermittent climatic phenomenon known to the world today as El Niño.

Recent archaeological excavations show that these mass sacrifices took place in association with at least two El Niño events, and that each ritual slaughter involved up to forty victims.¹ The excavations have even revealed the tombs of the executioners—almost certainly warrior-priests of some sort. In one such tomb was found the skeleton of a sixty-year-old man who had been buried together with the macabre tool of his trade—a three-foot-long mace still encrusted with the blood of his victims. Medical analysis of his bones suggest that, even at sixty, he had massive muscles and must have been physically very strong. With him was buried a child—a sixteen-year-old boy, perhaps his personal servant, who was probably put to death in order to accompany him to the next world. A nearby double tomb also housed an adult male, also around sixty, and another young boy, this time just thirteen years old.

The mass sacrifices—and there are probably many more groups that have not yet been discovered—took place at some point between the years
A
.
D
. 500 and 700. They illustrate the sort of extreme ritual religious reaction that occurred when Moche society came under climatic threat. In the examples excavated so far, these associated threats were the massive El Niño rainstorms, cataclysmic events that were capable of washing away whole towns, destroying entire irrigation systems, and plunging societies into chaos.

During the mid-sixth-century climatic problems, the Moche civilization was hammered mercilessly by a combination of intense drought and intermittent devastating floods. The evidence for a great drought in the Americas has already been outlined in Chapter 23, but one of the sources for that evidence, the Quelccaya glacier ice core, also revealed the increasing frequency of major El Niño events: in c. 490, c. 526, c. 556, c. 580, c. 590, c. 592, and c. 630. Notice that between 490 and 592, the gaps between really major El Niños decreased from thirty-six years, to thirty, to twenty-four, to ten, and finally to two years (see Chapter 23).

It is almost certain that the great Andean drought (c. 540–570) was part of the mid-sixth-century climatic crisis, but whether that crisis played any part in accelerating the frequency of sixth-century El Niños is less certain. However, the worldwide problems almost certainly made the El Niños substantially more severe than they would otherwise have been.

The Moche reaction to intense drought, just as much as intense flood, would have included attempts to placate their gods with human sacrifice. Like Nasca religion, Moche religion is likely to have been largely shamanic in nature. Contact with ancestors, especially in times of climatic crisis, would have been a vital ingredient—ancestors could intervene with the gods or with the powers of nature to prevent disaster, terminate adversity, or bring prosperity.

Contact with the dead was of real economic and political impact, and a recent archaeological discovery may well be illustrative of just how important it was. Buried within the floor of one of a Moche temple’s many rooms were found what appear to have been a set of life-size dancing skeleton puppets—made out of real bones. Detailed examination of the bones revealed that they were deliberately defleshed using butchering instruments and that all the bones were kept in an articulated state.