"Lost Empires of the Americas" by: William F. Allman with Joannie M. Schrof in: "U.S. News and World Report" (April 2, 1990) The Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his invading force of 167 soldiers must have felt a faint, eerie shock of recognition when they first encountered the Inca Empire nearly five centuries ago. Though the civilization cradled between South America's Pacific coast and the towering Andes lacked the wheel, iron and a written language, in many other ways it was as sophisticated as the societies Pizarro had left behind in Europe. In the Andes ruled a powerful monarch who commanded an empire of aristocrats, bureaucrats, accountants, artisans, priests, peasant farmers and skilled warriors. The mountain terrain was sculpted with terraced farmland and scored by vast networks of irrigation canals. An 18,000-mile system of paved roads, dotted with thousands of state-owned storehouses stocked with freeze-dried food, linked together 12 million people over an area that stretched farther than the Roman Empire in its heyday. The Inca capital city, Cuzco, was "so beautiful and has such fine buildings," wrote one chronicler to the Spanish monarch, King Charles, "it would be remarkable even in Spain." Now, on the eve of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landfall in the Caribbean, the New World is providing another shock--this time to scientists. A recent series of stunning archaeological finds in South America has revealed that the Incas were merely the final act in an Andean civilization that was far older and far more sophisticated than ever imagined. New excava- tions have turned up huge stone pyramids and other monuments that date back nearly 5,000 years, to about the time when the Great Pyramids were being constructed in Egypt. Another dig has uncovered a Peruvian "King Tut," an elaborate tomb containing the 1,500-year-old remains of a ruler buried with hundreds of price- less gold and silver artifacts. Archaeologists working near Bolivia's Lake Titicaca have resurrected an ancient irrigation system and discovered that it produces more food than the modern farming methods used in the area today. Even the Incas, whose vivid description by 16th-century Spanish travelers made them the best-known of the ancient South American societies, have been revealed in a new light by archaeologists who find that the Incas' domination of their empire relied as much on their skills in management and public relations as on their abilities as soldiers. Not only are the recent findings giving a new picture of Andean civilization; they are also providing new clues to the fundamental nature of civilization itself. Archaeologists have long puzzled over why, after nearly 90,000 years of living as small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers and in tiny villages, humans around the world began forming complex societies about 8,000 years ago, undertaking huge construction projects, building cities, becoming specialists in various crafts and stratifying into a hierarchy of social, economic and religious classes. Six civilizations. The Andes region is one of only six sites in the world where civilization arose out of simpler human existence--the others being Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, China and Central America, home of the famed Maya and Aztec societies. The archaeological evidence overwhelmingly indicates that while there was some contact among the Old World societies, these six centers of civilization arose independently as an expanding human population responded to environmental and social pressures. (The theory that civilization began only once and them was spread around the globe by explorers or fishermen is still argued by some scholars.) South America's Andean region presents a unique laboratory for studying the origins of complex societies. The Andes can be regarded almost as a parallel world where the "experiment" of human habitation in the Old World has been carried out in an exotic climate and rugged terrain, yet has yielded surprisingly analogous results. "The similarities between these independent civilizations give us the challenge of explanation," says Timothy Earle, an archaeologist at the University of California at Los Angeles who has long studied the fundamental mechanisms by which complex societies arise--and fall. The extremely arid climate of Peru's coast has preserved the distant past perhaps better than anywhere else on earth. Researchers, for instance, have found intact seeds, potatoes and bits of fabric that are 5,000 years old. Yet only a tiny fraction of the remains of the ancient civilization that flourished in the Andes has been excavated. Archaeologists have been hampered by harsh weather, grave robbers fueling the lucra- tive trade in pre-Columbian art, guerrilla warfare and lack of funds in countries that often lack money for basic needs. The result is that new excavations are upsetting the theories of past archaeologists, who were forced to base their ideas on far scantier evidence. The most dramatic upheaval in understanding the New World's ancient past has been the revelation that the beginnings of Andean civilization go back nearly 2,000 years further than scientists previously believed--1,000 years before complex societies arose in Central America, which has long been con- sidered the cradled of civilization in the New World. Until recently, the remains of dozens of ancient stone monuments that dot Peru's coast and highlands were thought to have been built several centuries before the time of Christ, when Andean civili- zation was dominated by a religious cult, called the Chavin, that archaeologists traditionally regarded as the wellspring of Andean civilization. When artifacts from these monuments were dated for the first time, however, researchers were stunned to find that the structures preceded the Chavin period by as much as two millennia. "We've suddenly discovered 2,000 years of missing civilization," says Richard Burger, a professor at Yale University. Civil Engineering. These first societies to emerge in the Western Hemisphere were not as advanced as contemporary Old World societies such as those in Mesopotamia and Egypt; they lacked pottery, weaving and large-scale agriculture, but the structures they built nevertheless reveal sophisticated labor organization and engineering skills. One ancient monumental center called El Paraiso, for instance, has more than a dozen monuments containing 100,000 tons of quarried stones and is estimated to have taken more than a million person-days of labor to build. The rise of complex societies has long been thought to have been triggered by agriculture because the high productivity of the land enabled a large population to live more closely together, leading to the creation of specialized laborers such as food producers, craftsmen and bureaucrats. But the ancient peoples who constructed these Andean monuments appear to have depended mostly on fishing for their sustenance. The remains of finely meshed nets and fish bones found at many sites along the coast indicate that these ancient societies caught anchovies, from which they presumably made fish meal, as part of a diet complemented by mussels, clams, larger fish and vegetables like sweet potatoes and beans, which they grew in small plots. Lacking the lush land that nurtured Mesopotamia, it seems, the ancient Americans turned to the Pacific Ocean off Peru's coast, one of the richest fisheries in the world, for their garden. "People normally associate anchovies with the tops of pizzas, not the rise of civilization," says Michael Moseley, an archaeologist and Andean expert with the University of Florida. These coastal peoples did not rely entirely on the sea for their sustenance, however. A key to the emergence of civiliza- tion in the Andes is that these societies began trading with farming societies in the highlands that had arisen at the same time--a practice that laid the foundation for trade routes connecting the far corners of South American cultures up through the time of the Incas some 40 centuries later. Archaeologists have recovered obsidian, which is available only in the moun- tains, among the refuse at coastal sites. And the remains of the highland settlements, though miles from the ocean, are littered with seashells and fish bones. This ancient trade network appears to have stretched even farther: At one highland center, researchers found the jawbone of a piranha, apparently brought from the Amazon rain forest to use in woodworking. When the coastal peoples suddenly, and mysteriously, moved farther inland along Peru's many river valleys some 4,000 years ago, they developed the new technologies of irrigation, pottery and weaving--but maintained the old traditions with a boom in monument construction. Built in a characteristic U-shape that is found throughout the valleys, the stone monuments are larger and more sophisticated than their predecessors. The main pyramid at a valley site called Sechin Alto, for instance, is one of the largest prehistoric monuments in the New World, nearly 1,000 feet wide at its base and standing 12 stories high. More remarkable than the size of these huge U-shaped struc- tures is that many appear to have been created without the presence of a Draconian ruler who forced others to work, as was the case in ancient societies such as Egypt. Anthropologists have long assumed that such enormous construction projects were an indication that the society that built them had become stratified into haves and have-nots, with the ruling elite forcing other members of the society to work on projects that were largely for the benefit of the rulers. Religious motives. In many of the early monument-building societies, however, there is little sign of this economic social stratification, says Yale's Burger, who is excavating a 3,000- year-old monument center called Cardal. There are no elaborate burials of rulers, for example, nor signs of the accumulation of luxury items by a select few. "In Egypt, pyramids were expres- sions of royal power," says Burger. "But it may be that here we are seeing a type of society where religion was a more important motivator." At Cardal, for example, Burger and his colleagues recently uncovered evidence that the building of the monument may have been undertaken by a populace that feared its gods, not its rulers: A huge frieze of menacing, interlocking fangs painted red and yellow flanks both sides of the doorway at the top of the pyramid, creating a terrifying supernatural display. At another early monument site, however, there are hints of the coercive bureaucracy that eventually was to become a powerful force in daily life. Shelia and Thomas Pozorski, a husband-and- wife team of archaeologists from the Pan American University in Edinburg, Tex., have uncovered what they believe to be the oldest warehouse in the New World. A 450-by-450-foot building with walls nearly 20 feet high and dating back to 1500 B.C., the structure contains numerous smaller rooms containing niches that the Pozorskis believe were used to store potatoes, beans, peanuts and perhaps luxury goods such as cloth and beads. All of the nearly 100 doorways to the building's rooms were blocked by a wooden bar that could be slid back to allow entrance. The Pozorskis interpret these elaborate gateways, as well as the tiny clay "stamps" that were found near the warehouse, as evidence that a powerful bureaucracy controlled access to food in the society and used that power to coerce the populace to build the many other public and religious buildings at the site. "The Pozorskis' work shows that nobody gave up their simpler life, they were forced to give it up," says Jonathan Haas, an anthro- pologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. "Leaders gained control over food production and then exploited that power, which led to the thing we call civilization." This growing concentration of religious, military and economic power in the hands of an elite is strikingly evident in the recent discovery of the spectacular tomb of a "warrior- priest," a nobleman in a society known as the Moche that flourished on the North Coast of Peru from roughly A.D. 100 to 600. Excavated by Walter Alva of the Bruning Archaeological Museum in Lambayeque, Peru, the tomb is one of the richest ever found in the Americas. It contains the remains of the gold- bedecked ruler, who died in his mid-30s, as well as several women and men thought to have been servants and family members, and his pet dog. Also buried with the ruler was a treasure-trove of feathered headdresses, gold, silver and copper ornaments, ear- rings, bracelets and face masks, a gold rattle, a gold armor plate, dozens of exotic seashells, fine cloth and various weapons. Ritual sacrifice. Like the Incas, the Moche left no written records of their society, but the extravagance of the nobleman's burial suggests that he was one of the ruling elite who figure prominently in the depictions of Moche life drawn on pottery vessels and hammered into metal implements. Almost godlike in status, the warrior-priest oversaw the ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war and is often portrayed drinking their blood from a tall goblet. The grisly blood rituals that often characterized ancient American societies have led many in the modern world to regard these ancient peoples as less than civilized. This attitude obscures the amazing achievements in other quintessentially civilized activities such as astronomy, art, engineering and agriculture. New archaeological finds reveal, for example, that the people of the ancient Andean empire of Tiahuanaco, which flourished from about A.D. 500 to 1000, combined their knowledge of hydrology and farming to produce irrigated fields that far outproduced modern farming methods despite harsh environmental conditions such as drought, flooding, frost and extremely high altitude. In a remarkable example of "experimental archaeology," Alan Kolata and his colleagues at the University of Chicago reproduced the irrigation technology practiced 1,500 years ago by the Tiahuanaco people in test plots near modern-day Bolivia's Lake Titicaca. The resulting bumper crops--in some cases seven times the average yield of land farmed using modern techniques-- suggest that to this long-lost method of constructing raised fields among irrigation channels could have allowed more than 100,000 people to thrive more than a millennium ago in a region that now supports approximately 7,000. The widespread benefits of these ancient irrigation canals and other large-scale projects illustrate the complex relation- ship between the rulers of a society and the ruled. Political scientists point out that while societies often arise as a result of elites seizing power solely for their own benefit, leaders must continue to reaffirm their legitimacy through a mix of force, ideology and, most important, responsiveness to their subjects' needs. "People will participate in a social system only to a point where it benefits them," says Earle. "The state, in trying to do good for itself, must also do good for the underlying population." One key to understanding this complicated relationship between a ruler and the ruled has come from the Incas. New studies demonstrate that while the "Pharaohs of the Andes" were never reluctant to use force to control their enormous empire, their real genius lay in their ability to cajole rather than coerce. The Incas recognized that maintaining an army in hostile territory can be very expensive, says Terence D'Altroy, an archaeologist at Columbia University who has recently written a book on Inca governing methods, and so they preferred to use economic, political and religious strategies to persuade con- quered tribes to coexist peacefully within the Empire. While the Incas committed bloody massacres of tribes who resisted their conquest and forcibly relocated entire communities they regarded as dangerous, in many other cases they left the existing social structure of a conquered people relatively intact. The local leaders often remained as governing officials, although answering to the Inca hierarchy. Peasants had to pay a labor tax by working part time in state-owned fields, serving in the military or producing goods like pottery and cloth; other- wise, life for a typical farmer cold remain largely unchanged. Like modern U.S. politicians, inca rulers also were well aware that style is often more persuasive than substance when trying to win their subjects' hearts and minds. Excavating a major Inca administrative center that had been set up in a province far from the Inca capital of Cuzco, for instance, archaeologist Craig Morris of the American Museum of Natural History found to his surprise that the prime function of the site appears to have been hosting lavish ceremonial feasts for the locals, rather than administering political or economic control. The purpose of these feasts was a sophisticated public-relations strategy, Morris suggests: The Incas relied on such ceremonies to create an ideological bond between faraway rulers and the people of the province, subtly suggesting that participation in the Inca Empire "was something more than working the state's fields or fighting a distant war." Imperial entanglements. One of the paradoxes of structured societies is that despite the onerous burdens rulers may place on their subjects, the lives of common people often improve, at least materially. Studying the daily life of a tribe known as the Wankas before and after their conquest by the Incas, D'Altroy and his colleagues found that in many respects people in the tribe had a better standard of living as part of the empire, including less warfare with neighboring tribes and greater access to food and other goods. Yet such material gains are not always sufficient to maintain the status quo: The Wankas, for example, readily helped Pizarro's invading forces against the Incas, as did many other tribes. As archaeologists learn more about the governing strategies used by the Incas and other rulers of ancient civilizations, they are beginning to see complex societies as fragile, often ungainly, entities that are always compromises between the rulers and the ruled, no matter what the ideology behind them. As such, advanced societies appear to represent neither the near perfec- tion of the human condition, as some would have it, nor an ugly manifestation of human nature at its worst. Relative latecomers in the span of human history, civiliza- tions have taken on a dazzling variety of forms--since the first simple tribes began building massive stone monuments thousands of years ago. Yet an enduring equation remains: "Human societies have a limited set of fundamental problems that they face and a limited number of successful strategies to solve them," says D'Altroy. But if the events of the past year in Eastern Europe and other areas of the world are any indication, the human race surely has not exhausted its potential for surprise. ALLMAN01.ART