Category Archives: South American archaeology

The Archaeologist as Artist

June 15, 2012

On the taxi ride there, I felt a little ill. The long, sleepless flight to Lima, a dodgy lunch that was coming back to haunt me, and the abrupt swerving and lurching of the taxi through the congested streets of the Peruvian capital—all seemed to be taking their toll.  By the time I and my companions clambered out at the Puruchuco Museum and filed into a small backroom to meet the director, I was certain I was in for a long, queasy afternoon. Then I spotted two old notebooks lying on the table.

To read more,  please click here.

Keep Your Enemies Closer

March 27, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This story of a golden crown with an exquisite golden plume caught my eye yesterday. Actually, it did far more than catch my eye. It brought to mind a relatively little-known chapter in the history of the Inca Empire—the fierce conquest of the proud and wealthy chiefs of highland Ecuador, nearly a thousand miles away from Cuzco.

But before I get to that, let me tell you first about the crown. It comes from a royal tomb in or near the small Ecuadorian town of Chordeleg, a place where the Cañari people once buried their greatest chiefs and nobles. In 1854, someone digging in the site—someone I haven’t been able to track down, so possibly a curio collector—discovered this Andean masterpiece. What happened next is unclear, but in 1862, the president of Ecuador sent the crown as a present to one of the greatest queens of the day, Victoria, soon after the death of her beloved Albert. Perhaps this Latin American statesman was a sentimentalist and meant to cheer her up. In any case, the queen’s officials duly logged it into the royal collection at Windsor Castle. And there it remained until another British queen, Elizabeth, prepared to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

To mark the grand occasion, curators planned a major exhibition of the queen’s royal treasures in Edinburgh. The gold crown from Ecuador fit the bill perfectly, but no one knew much about it, though some had described it as a symbol of the Inca Empire. Was it really? The queen’s curators called in the experts, who proceeded to conduct metallurgical studies and stylistic analyses. These revealed a surprise. The crown wasn’t Inca at all: it was likely the work of a Cañari goldsmith. And this raised two different scenarios. Quite possibly, the goldsmith fashioned it for a wealthy Cañari chief in the early 1400s.  Or perhaps he designed it later in the century for an Inca king.  Such rulers, after all, delighted in donning crowns adorned with the plumage of tropical birds. Read more…

Lords of the Flies: New Clues to Ancient Cultures from Very Old Bugs

November 5, 2010

In Science this week,  I write about some very ingenious research that a new breed of archaeologists–archaeoentomologists, as they like to be known–are carrying out on insect remains recovered from ancient sites.  By poring over fly puparia preserved in an 1800-year-old grave at the Moche site of Huaca de la Luna in Peru,  French archaeoentomologist Jean-Bernard Huchet has completed a CSI-style study of Moche burial practices.  And by studying small weevil-shaped holes in Jomon pots dating to at least 9000 years ago,  Japanese archaeologist Hiroki Obata and his team raise the possibility of very early agriculture in Japan.

The article lies behind a paywall,  unfortunately,  but you can read the short summary here.

Photo:  Painted facade of the Huaca de la Luna, Trujillo, Peru.  Source: Martin St-Amant

Francisco Pizarro’s Forgotten Army?

April 5, 2010

Who really conquered the Inca Empire?  I found myself mulling over that question for the first time today, after reading a really fascinating new paper published online in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology by a team of American and Peruvian scientists.  Led by Melissa Murphy,  a physical anthropologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie,  the team has just pored over the skeletal remains of 258 Inca men and women,  who perished from extreme violence sometime between 1470 and 1540.

First,  let me very briefly summarize the conventional view of the Conquest of Peru.  According to the Spanish chronicles (the only surviving written source of the invasion),  Francisco Pizarro set sail from Panama in January 1531 with 3 ships and  180 men.   Landing near the port of Tumbes in the midst of a civil war in the Inca realm known as Tawantinsuyu,   Pizarro and his men journeyed inland.   At the Inca provincial town of Cajamarca, they laid an ambush and captured  the Inca king Atawallpa,  whom they subsequently executed.   In November 1533,  Pizarro’s force occupied the Inca capital of Cuzco, bringing the empire to its knees.

I personally don’t recall hearing or reading much about  indigenous Andean peoples fighting on the side of the  Spanish invaders.  But as the new paper by Murphy and her team points out,  aboriginal people  certainly seem to have played a part in the Conquest of  Peru,  and perhaps quite a large part.

Murphy and her colleagues examined human remains excavated from two large Inca  cemeteries in the archaeological zone of Puruchuco-Huaquerones,  7 miles from the center of Lima.  Many of these individuals likely died during the ill-fated siege of Lima,  when Inca forces tried to expel the Spaniards in 1536.  As expected, Murphy and her colleagues found ample evidence of severe injuries caused by medieval European weaponry–the top spike of a polearm, the beak of a war hammer,  and possible gunshot wounds.   (Intriguingly,  evidence of slashing injuries from swords is missing from these victims.)

But what I found especially intriguing in this study was the evidence that team-members found for wounds inflicted by  indigenous weapons,  such as clubs and maces.  Indeed,  as the authors note,  “the majority of perimortem injuries to the cranium were likely due to blunt force trauma, probably from native weaponry like maces or clubs,  with only a few of the injuries caused by Spanish weapons.”

Now of course,  Spanish soldiers might well have picked up native weapons and used them expediently.  But some Spanish chroniclers do refer on occasion to indigenous allies and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that they were under-representing the numbers in order to make themselves look especially courageous to readers back home.

Moreover,  we know that the Incas had made a host of enemies during their own conquests, particularly on the northern coast of Peru.   And these dissidents might have seen Pizarro and his men initially as liberators,  before they truly understood the rapacity  of the Spanish forces.   Certainly, this is what happened in Mexico, when aboriginal people rallied to the banner of  Hernando Cortez,  eager to rise up against their oppressors, the Aztecs.

This new research by Murphy and her colleagues is the first forensic-style study of the Inca victims who fell during the Conquest of Peru.  I really look forward to reading more.

Women, The Earliest Brewmasters?

March 31, 2010

Until last night,  I had never given much thought to the  gender of the world’s  ancient brewmasters.   But while surfing the net in the wee hours,  I came across a British newspaper article with an irresistible  headline:   “Men Owe Women for ‘Creating Beer’  Claims Academic.” According to the Telegraph, British author Jane Peyton now proposes that Bud Lite, Tsingtao and Victoria Bitter drinkers around the world owe their favorite suds to women brewmasters.

Peyton furnishes several examples in this article.   Only women,  she noted, were permitted to brew beer in Mesopotamia.  Much later, among the Vikings,  women owned all the equipment for beer making and controlled the entire process.  And until the beginning of the 18th century,  most of Britain’s ale came from ale-wives who worked out of their homes for extra income.   But the mass production of beer during the Industrial Revolution apparently put a end to all these  female microbreweries.

The Telegraph article made no mention,  however,  of who Jane Peyton is.  So I googled her and stumbled upon a whole unsuspected world of beer pedagogy in Britain.   Peyton is a tutor at the Beer Academy in London.   She  is also the principal of the School of Booze,  an outfit whose model is “Think While You Drink,”  (a splendid oxymoron) and which offers tutored beer tastings.   Clearly there are a lot of  beer connoisseurs  out there who want parity with wine snobs.

I don’t know where Peyton is getting her info from or whether she has a book on the way on feminist beermakers.  Her website offers few clues.  And because of this,  I might have dismissed the article entirely,  but for one thing.  Peyton mentioned that before the Industrial Revolution,  people thought of beer as a food:  as a result,  many cultures deemed beer-making women’s work.

Although my knowledge of early brewing is very limited,  I recently read a wonderful paper by Justin Jennings, a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto,  on the Andean art of making chicha,  or corn beer.   According to Jennings,  Andean families have long brewed two types of this beer–one thin,  the other quite thick.   They reserve  the thicker and more filling chicha for daily consumption as a food.  But they prepare  a thinner corn beer for festivals, so that celebrants can drink more and get pleasantly high faster.

As Jennings points out, “gender roles are often fluid in the Andes,”  but “chicha brewing is primarily a female activity. ”  He then goes on to note that “the preparation and serving of chicha,  like all food,  is central to women’s identity,  and for women who sell chicha [today] the drink offers considerable social power and autonomy that they aggressively defend.”

I think Jane Peyton is on to something here.


Google Streetview and the World’s Megaliths

March 24, 2010

This is pure genius.  Over at The Megalithic Portal, they are having a competition.  Between now and May 31st,  they are asking megalithomaniacs around the world to help them locate  henges,  barrows, mounds and the like on Google Streetview.  There’s a lot of turf to cover.  Two weeks ago, Google rolled out a deluxe version of  Streetview in the U.K., encompassing 95% of the roads.

And the organizers aren’t just limiting the competition to good old Albion.  “There are thousands of obscure and unloved standing stones, earthworks etc in roadside locations all over the world,”  say the organizers.  With a little crowdsourcing and a few  prizes to the sharpest eyes, they hope to locate these sites for all of us on Google Earth.

What a brilliant scheme!  A few months ago,  I posted on the immense fun I had toodling around Pompeii for hours on Google Streetview.   An astute reader then put me on to the Google views of Stonehenge,  and there went another good hour as I moved around inside this wonder –something I’ve never been able to do in the real world.  So the folks at Megalithic Portal hope to do us all a big favor by mapping thousands of other sites,  and I think the least we can do is return the favor,  by sinking a little spare time in hunting for megaliths.

I have to say, though,  that I’m  both touched and a little dismayed by some examples they have posted to date.   At 7 Ravenswood Avenue,  Edinburgh  (my father’s home town),  there’s a standing stone piercing the sidewalk in front of what looks to be an apartment block.  It’s completely encircled by a black iron fence.  I suppose the iron bars are there to protect the stone from vandals or careless parkers.  But  the fence reminds me a little of a miniature prison,   dividing the past from the present, the mystery from the mundane,  the ritual world from the real one.

Who’s really in prison here?

The Emperor and the Horse

March 15, 2010

Last summer while I was researching an article for National Geographic magazine in Ecuador,  I had the remarkable pleasure of staying at the Hacienda Guanchala.  Lying almost exactly on the equator, the Hacienda Guanchala is the oldest colonial hacienda in Ecuador.  Indeed,  some of its buildings date back as early as 1580,  and its shadowy corridors  feel haunted by all the history that has passed through them.

I arrived at the hacienda late in the day,  well after dark,  and after dining there I retreated to my room and lit a fire in the old stone fireplace.   Someone had left several glossy Spanish language magazines there,  and so I began to thumb through them:  they were all devoted exclusively to the Peruvian Paso horse.  I had never heard before of  the Peruvian Paso,  and I was too tired to dig out my Spanish-English dictionary to begin translating the articles.  But I was much struck by the athletic appearance of this horse–with its massive deep chest and its powerful looking haunches.

Yesterday,  I came across a fascinating blog post on the Peruvian Paso.  It turns out that the Francisco Pizarro and his men brought the ancestors of this horse with them when they landed in Tumbes in early 1532 and embarked on their invasion of the Inca Empire.  And they later rode and led these horses by halter through the Andes to a fateful encounter with the new  Inca emperor,  Atahualpa,  in the provincial center of Cajamarca.

Atahualpa had just defeated the forces of his half-brother Huascar in a lengthy civil war,  and he was resting with his wives,  lords and elite bodyguard in the hills outside Cajamarca.   He and his entourage had never before seen a horse.  But in the preceding months,  Inca scouts had sent them a good deal of intelligence about the  Spanish invaders and the large foreign animal they rode.

Pizarro sent one of his bolder captains,  Hernando de Soto,  and several men out to Atahaulpa’s camp to invite him to a meeting in Cajamarca.  To impress on the Inca entourage the power of horses,  de Soto first led a charge on several of Atahualpa’s bodyguards,  sending panic into the crowd.  Then the Spanish captain reined his horse in sharply and trotted over to where Atahualpa sat on a low wooden throne.  He nudged his horse so close to the  divine king that the animal’s exhalations ruffled the braided royal fringe–a mark of imperial office–that hung from Atahualpa’s forehead.  But the emperor betrayed no fear:  he sat impassively as the animal gazed down at him.

Tragically the intelligence that Atahualpa had received about the Spaniards was badly flawed.  His scouts informed him,  for example,  that the Spanish could not ride their horses in the dark.  So Atahaulpa delayed his arrival at  Cajamarca for the meeting until late afternoon the next day.  But the Spanish forces and their horses were ready and waiting,  quickly  slaughtering the emperor’s bodyguard and taking Atahualpa himself a prisoner.

Seldom has one breed of horse witnessed so much tragedy and misery.

My apologies to subscribers who received a garbled version of this blog earlier today.   Something went a little wrong in the blogging software this morning.

Liquid Time Capsules

January 5, 2010

I’ve never had the pleasure or good fortune to travel to the quirky resort town of Rehoboth,  Delaware.   Rehoboth,  I hear,  has charm,  fine beaches,  a boardwalk,  and something known as the Sea Witch Festival.  Washingtonians flock there each summer to escape the city heat.   But what interests me most about Rehoboth is a very cool pub there,  known as Dogfish Head Brewing & Eats.    Its founder and proprietor, 40-year-old Sam Calagione,  specializes in brewing ancient types of grog–what he likes to call liquid time capsules.

I first came across a mention of Sam Calagione  in a very funny article in the New York Times last September.  Calagione and two researchers from the Penn Museum–Patrick McGovern (mentioned in my post yesterday) and Clark Erickson–had decided to brew a batch of the ancient Andean corn beer known as chicha.   The kicker was that they decided to make this beer the traditional way,  by chewing wad upon wad of milled Peruvian corn,  just as women in the Andes once did.   Natural enzymes in human saliva break down starches in the corn, and turn them into fermentable sugar.   And because the chewing happens before the boiling,  the final result can be drunk quite safely (though most chicha makers in South America today use a different and far more sterile method to make their brew).

But Calagione and his two companions gamely attempted to chew their way through 20 pounds of purple Peruvian corn.   Here’s what happened,  according to New York Times reporter Joyce Wadler:

“As befitting a bold craftsman, Mr. Calagione took the first chomp, grabbing a small handful of corn and plopping it into his mouth. A small puff of flour escaped his lips. Mr. Calagione choked, concentrated and then chewed. After a few minutes, he removed a gravelly, purple lump from his mouth and put it on the tray.  It resembled something a cat owner might be familiar with, if kitty litter came in purple.”

What the team learned was that it was hard, dry work to make chicha this way:  after hours of dessicated chewing the men worked their way through just seven pounds of corn.

The pub offers a range of ancient ales–from Midas Touch,  which it describes as an ancient Turkish recipe using the original ingredients from a 2700-yea- old drinking vessels discovered in the tomb of King Midas,  to Sah’tea, a modern update on a 9th century Finnish proto-beer.   Dogfish Head is a favorite watering hole of archaeologists,  and it’s high on my list of places to visit.

I personally can’t wait to taste authentic chicha.

If you’d like to see Calagione make this beer, please check out the video below.