Andean civilizations

• 1. Introduction

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  The Caral or Norte Chico civilization of coastal Peru dates back to 3500 BCE, making it the oldest known civilization in the Americas. It was contemporaneous with the building of the Egyptian pyramids, yet it arose in total isolation, half a world away. This is the story of the Andean civilizations, the complex societies that ran for 4000 km down the spine of the Andes, from southern Colombia through Ecuador and Peru to north Chile and northwest Argentina. They built monumental architecture and an extensive road system. They wove intricate textiles. And they did all of it without a written language, without wheeled vehicles, without draft animals, and without money. How does a civilization keep records when it has no alphabet? How do people farm freezing mountains and hyper-arid desert? And how did one empire, in less than a century, swallow nearly all of it?

• 2. Pristine And Alone

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  Scholars place the Andean civilizations among at least five, by another count six, deemed pristine in the entire world. A pristine civilization is one that developed independently, not derived from any other. Cut off from outside influence, the indigenous people of the Andes had to invent their own answers to every problem of environment and society. That isolation produced something striking. Andean civilization lacked features that defined the pristine civilizations of the Old World and the cultures of Mesoamerica. It had no writing, no wheeled vehicles, no draft animals capable of plowing or carrying adults, and no money in the usual sense. These absences were not failures. They were the shape of a society that answered its own questions. The earliest of these societies grew not in fertile river basins but on the hyper-arid desert coast of Peru, a place that seems to forbid civilization entirely.

• 3. The Knotted Cords

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  The quipu was a system of knotted and colored strings used to convey information in place of writing. Few quipus survive, and they have never been fully deciphered. Scholars still disagree about what the quipu could do. Some argue the knotted cords could only record numerical data. Others believe they carried narrative communication, a true system of writing. If the quipu is writing, it is unlike any other on earth, built not from symbols but from knots. The device is ancient. Its use dates back at least to the Wari Empire of 600 to 1000 CE, and possibly to the much earlier civilization of Caral and Norte Chico in the third millennium BCE. A society that never wrote a sentence still found a way to remember.

• 4. Farming The Impossible

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  Freezing temperatures may strike in every month of the year above 3000 m, and that altitude was home to many of the highland Andean civilizations. The Andes denied its farmers nearly every advantage the Middle East enjoyed. There were no large-seeded grasses like wheat and barley, and no large, easily tamed animals like horses and cattle. So the Andeans engineered around the mountains. On the desert coast, agriculture was possible only with irrigation in valleys fed by rivers from the high Andes, plus a few fog oases called lomas. In the mountains, farmers built terraces, exploited microclimates, and bred crops selectively. Against climatic uncertainty, a single farmer would plant several crops at several elevations and exposures at once. Whole societies did this on a grand scale through the vertical archipelago, planting colonies at different elevations to raise the odds of a harvest somewhere. What grew from this struggle reshaped the world's dinner table.

• 5. Gifts To The World

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  The Andeans cultivated an estimated 70 different plants, almost as many as were grown in all of Europe and Asia combined. Their greatest contribution to the modern world was botanical. Many of those plants are now minor or forgotten, but the survivors are everywhere. Potatoes, quinoa, tomatoes, chile peppers, cotton, coca, tobacco, pineapples, peanuts, and several varieties of beans were domesticated in or near the Andes. Crops such as potatoes, peppers, peanuts, manioc, chocolate, and coca became of worldwide importance. Maize, by contrast, was an import, arriving from Mexico to become the leading crop at lower and intermediate elevations. The Andeans also domesticated animals: llamas and guinea pigs. Farming itself may have begun far north, in coastal Ecuador, with the domestication of squash around 8000 BCE by the Las Vegas culture, the deep root from which later cultures grew.

• 6. Cities Of The Coast

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  The Norte Chico civilization, also called Caral, included as many as 30 major population centers in north-central coastal Peru, flourishing between the 30th and 18th centuries BCE. Its alternative name, Caral-Supe, comes from the Sacred City of Caral in the Supe Valley. It arose a full millennium after Sumer in Mesopotamia and predated the Mesoamerican Olmec by nearly two thousand years. Far to the north, the Valdivia Culture thrived on the Santa Elena peninsula near modern Valdivia, Ecuador, between 3500 BCE and 1800 BCE, having emerged from the earlier Las Vegas culture. Chavín, beginning in the Peruvian highlands, was thought to be primarily a religious movement, spreading outward with a distinctive art style of feline-shaped effigy pots. Its ritual center, Chavin de Huantar, dates to around 1500 BCE. These were the foundations on which everything later would be built.

• 7. Masters Of Craft

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  The Nazca built underground aqueducts called puquios that still function today, beside the dry southern coast of Peru between 100 and 800 CE. Heavily influenced by the earlier Paracas culture and its extremely complex textiles, the Nazca produced ceramics, textiles, and the geoglyphs known as the Nazca lines. The Moche, in northern Peru from about 100 to 800 CE, were likely not a single empire but autonomous polities sharing a common elite culture, famous for elaborately painted ceramics, gold work, and monumental huacas. Chimor, with its great adobe capital of Chan Chan in the Moche Valley near present-day Trujillo, arose around 900 CE and grew from the remnants of Moche culture; its ceramics are all black. High in the cloud forests of the Amazonas region lived the Chachapoyas, the Cloud People, whose largest known site is Kuelap. At Tiwanaku in western Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca, the Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León stumbled upon the ruins in 1549 while searching for the Inca capital Qullasuyu.

• 8. The Empire And The End

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  In 1438 the Incas founded Tahuantinsuyu, the largest empire the Americas had ever seen, governed from the capital city of Cuzco. The empire rose from the Kingdom of Cuzco, founded around 1230, and grew through both conquest and peaceful assimilation. Less than a century before the Spanish arrived, the Incas united most Andean cultures into a single empire spanning Peru, southwest Ecuador, Bolivia, northwest Argentina, northern Chile, and a small part of southwest Colombia. Not everyone fell into the Inca orbit. The Timoto-Cuica of western Venezuela stayed outside it, a peaceful farming people credited with inventing the arepa, now a staple of Venezuelan and Colombian cuisine. The Inca ruler Topa Inca Yupanqui had conquered the Chimú around 1470, just fifty years before the Spanish came, which let Spanish chroniclers record Chimú life from people who remembered it. In the 16th century the Spanish arrived in the Andes. The last Inca stronghold fell to them in 1572, and Spanish rule transformed the religion and architecture of the Andean world.