Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (34 page)

In Europe, such a concept would be straight out of Dante’s
Inferno,
but in a mid-first-millennium Peruvian context, the skeletons need to be seen as elements of rituals designed to breach the barriers between this world and the next. They may even have symbolized the ancestors whose intercession would so desperately have been required in times of climatic crisis.

At the height of its power, probably in the early sixth century
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., the Moche state controlled up to fifteen thousand square miles of territory between the Piura River in the far north of Peru and the Huarmey, three hundred miles to the south.

The capital covered at least three-quarters of a square mile, had an estimated population of up to ten thousand, and was dominated by two huge buildings, the largest of which was a massive cross-shaped structure with a 160-foot-high pyramid at its southern end. This vast cruciform edifice covered 14 acres and consisted of 2 million cubic yards of mud bricks and other building material—three-quarters of the volume of the Great Pyramid in Egypt! Most of the complex was ultimately destroyed by Spanish treasure hunters, who diverted an entire river in their desperation to wash away the mud bricks in their search for hidden gold.

But it was the second great structure in the city center, a slightly smaller temple, that has revealed most about Moche religion and ritual. It was here that archaeologists found the human mass sacrifices, the tombs of the executioner priests, the skeleton marionettes, and a series of spectacular wall paintings depicting frightening large-fanged anthropomorphic and zoomorphic beings, probably deities.

The climatic events of the mid–sixth century—the drought and the El Niños—had the effect of destabilizing the Moche empire. The thirty-year drought must have led to severe famines, and the c. 556 El Niño flood would have destroyed irrigation systems, thus making the food supply situation even more precarious. The population, weakened by starvation, would then have fallen prey to a range of contagious diseases, much as the Teotihuacanos of Mexico were succumbing to famine and disease at exactly the same time.

Although the entire Andean region was hit by the climatic problems, the already arid coastal plain was almost certainly affected more disastrously than the highland areas to the east. In times of drought, lowlands normally suffer worse than highland areas. Those few rain clouds that are around will tend to shed their load when they encounter mountain terrain. What is more, the reduced rainfall in the mountains is not sufficient to sustain the river volumes required to water coastal plains. The water-starved lowlands would have lost much of their vegetation cover, and the loss in turn would have reduced water retention, accelerated soil erosion, and encouraged the encroachment of desert terrain.

Additionally, the large coastal plain populations had only two ecological niches to exploit for food—the flatlands and the sea. By contrast, highland peoples, with a variety of altitudinal zones at their disposal, had more options. They could exploit valley bottoms, mountain slopes, high mountain pastures, and even lakes. Even when the lakes shrank, they often actually assisted agriculture by revealing new, ultrafertile land. And of course all mountain peoples were, by definition, closer to key water sources.

At first the change in geopolitical balance would probably have allowed foothill areas between the coastal plain and the highlands to break loose from Moche control. This would have made access to their food, copper, gold, and silver resources, as well as the ritually important drug crop coca, much more difficult for the Moche and much easier for the highland peoples, especially the most powerful highland group, the Huari.

As the economic as well as geopolitical situation increasingly favored the mountain areas, the north-south highland trading trail would have become the key commercial highway in Peru—very much at the expense of the only other major north-south trail, the one that ran along the coast.

Moreover, the coast soon began to suffer the bizarre secondary effects of drought and severe El Niño flooding. During the brief yet severe episodes of such flooding, millions of tons of sand were scoured out of the parched landscape, swept coastward by the El Niño torrents, and dumped immediately offshore. Long-shore drift then spread them out along the coast, while the tides swept them onto the beaches and strong coastal winds formed them into dunes and drove them inland. In classic dsert fashion, the dunes marched inland—well after the drought had ended—and destroyed agricultural land and even towns. Indeed, part of the Moche city around the Huaca del Sol was inundated by this tide of sand.²

Thus it was that this lethal cocktail of disasters affected the highland and coastal areas to quite different degrees, and the people of the relatively poor mountainous interior almost certainly suffered less than their ostentatiously rich, coastal-plain opposite numbers.³ Demographically and in terms of social organization and control, the coast no longer had an advantage. The Moche civilization appears to have fragmented politically, probably under pressure from highland peoples, especially the Huari.
⁴
Moche itself, the pyramid city, survived relatively unscathed, but it lost much of the territory it controlled. In one area eighty-five miles to the north, a new city, Pampa Grande, grew up and eventually adopted a strongly Huari-influenced culture, which probably reflected increasing Huari geopolitical power.
⁵

In fact, within a few generations, highland-influenced populations were living in a new town—now a group of ruins known to archaeologists as Galindo, just twenty-three miles northeast of Moche.
⁶
The ancient city became more and more isolated; Moche survived at least another century, but its glory days were over.

Along with this decline in Moche’s power came a marked increase in warfare. A series of massive defensive walls were built by various northern Peruvian coastal cultures, including the Moche. The most spectacularly located was built on the rugged mountain summit near modern Chepen, a hundred miles north of Moche, by the same highland-influenced culture that created Galindo. This now-deserted mountaintop city is surrounded by massive, twelve-foot-wide stone ramparts that even today stand in places to a height of twenty-seven feet. With an estimated population of around five thousand, it boasted large apartment complexes and a probable palace—but, extraordinarily, it appears to have had no water supply! Water probably had to be carried by porters from the valley below and somehow stored. And south of Moche are the ruins of further massive defenses, in the Santa Valley and at Cerro de La Cruz in the Chao Valley, where piles of stones meant to be slung at enemies still lie as mute testimony to the deterioration of security conditions following the climatic problems of the mid–sixth century.

Even near Moche itself, a massive 1,600-foot-long stone and adobe-brick rampart was built, presumably to defend the city, while at Galindo a 13-foot-high wall complete with parapet cut across the valley in a great 1,300-foot curve.

M
eanwhile, as the Huari began to expand in central and then northern Peru, a similar or related process was taking place in the extreme south of Peru, in Bolivia, and in northern Chile with the expansion of the highland state of Tiwanaku, again at the expense of the coastal plains—and these Huari and Tiwanaku superstates influenced the long-term future of South America.

B I R T H  O F  A N
E M P I R E

A
hundred and fifty miles from the distant ocean, deep in the interior of central Peru, surrounded by sixteen-thousand-foot-high peaks, is one of South America’s strangest ancient cities.

Covering almost half a square mile, it consists of a series of twenty great rectangular plazas, each flanked by as many as 150 cell-like rooms, many stacked up to three stories high. Each plaza was separated from the next by massive forty-foot-high stone walls, and the three thousand cells were all built to just half a dozen basic designs.

At first, archaeologists thought the entire complex—at a place called Pikillaqta, near Cusco—must have been a vast ancient prison. Its sheer uniformity, and the military precision with which it was built, certainly seemed to betray an obsession with control and organization. Even now, its precise function remains a mystery, especially as it is merely the largest example of a whole series of these mystery complexes scattered throughout Peru.

They have the same basic layout and they all date from the early phases of the first great pan-Peruvian empire, that of the Huari—an imperial system that started to emerge following the climatically triggered geopolitical dislocation of the mid– to late sixth century.¹ They were almost certainly constructed as visually impressive imperial administrative centers and may well have been used to house officials, some ordinary civilians, and probably substantial military garrisons as well as to store vast quantities of tribute and tax in kind.

The Huari created an empire of some 130,000 square miles—900 miles from north to south and, on average, around 150 miles from east to west. It had a population of several million and a capital city—also called Huari—that covered 1,750 acres and had an estimated thirty thousand citizens. The emergence of their empire profoundly changed subsequent Peruvian—indeed, subsequent South American—history. As the first pan-Peruvian imperial system, it was the prototype that paved the way for the much later Inca empire and then, in a sense, for Spain’s Andean empire in the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

It was probably the Huari who developed the large-scale agricultural terracing system that boosted food production, which in turn permitted demographic expansion and so helped enable the highlands (including the later Incas) to dominate the coast for much of the region’s subsequent pre-Columbian history. It is conceivable that the agricultural terracing system was developed as a response to the great drought that disrupted the Andean world between
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. 540 and 570, and that it was this response that helped Huari to expand during and after that thirty-year disaster.

It was also Huari who probably built the vast road system that helped hold subsequent Inca and early Spanish Andean empires together and helped make them economically viable. These people are also thought to have invented the unique Andean record-keeping system, the quipu, which helped facilitate the running of their empire and of subsequent Andean imperial systems. Consisting of a set of cords in which knots denote numerical values, the quipu would have been used to maintain records of tax and tribute payments and the performance of labor obligations.

Prior to the Huari empire, Andean states had been fundamentally monocultural and relatively small. The largest, the Moche, covered no more than fifteen thousand square miles. The Huari, by contrast, controlled directly or through client relationships an area of around 130,000 square miles (the size of Britain, Ireland, and Holland combined), and therefore automatically had to accommodate dozens of different cultures and belief systems. Again, the concept of a pan-Andean empire resurfaced in Inca times, and continued in Spanish colonial and even postcolonial times.

The cultural diversity of the Huari empire meant that a central state religion had to be developed to provide a unifying factor. Thus it was that a particular solar deity—probably associated with the imperial family—was elevated to the level of a supergod. This deity—a male holding two staffs, possibly weapons—was not designed to replace local deities within the multicultural empire, but was intended to act as an elite addition to the various pantheons; in a sense, it was a common apex shared by them all. The emperor no doubt saw himself as the earthly reflection of this cosmic arrangement: as in heaven, so on earth.

In Inca times, the same superimposition occurred with the Inca sun god, and in Spanish colonial times and even today, the unifying religion, Christianity, is still only the top layer of a multilayered religious cake.

In linguistic terms, too, the Huari empire probably changed Peru. Some scholars believe that it led to the spread of early Quechua, perhaps initially as a lingua franca and then as the dominant pre-Columbian language. Most observers have always attributed the spread of Quechua to the Inca, but in fact the Huari may well deserve a large share of the credit.

In terms of historical continuity, the Inca empire was not the direct successor to that of the Huari. There was actually a five-hundred-year gap between the two imperial systems. However, it was the economic and communications infrastructure (especially the agricultural terracing and the road network) established by the Huari that helped highland Andean imperialism to reemerge under the Incas.

There may also have been some political continuity. Although the Inca empire itself only came into existence in c.
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. 1300, it probably grew out of the merger of two small but locally powerful states—the Killke and the Huari-derived Lucre, a polity that seems to have started off life as the most militarized and politically strategic province of the Huari empire. The administrative capital of that Huari province had been no less a place than the mystery city of Pikillaqta itself, with its three thousand cells and militaristic ambience.