The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (40 page)

Some of the large upright stones at Cerro Sechín depict warriors holding clubs. Others show enemies cut in half, sometimes with their intestines dangling. Severed arms and legs are featured on some stones; vertebral columns decorate others. Trophy heads were a particularly favored theme. Heads stacked many layers high appear on the taller stones; individual heads are portrayed on smaller ones. Some heads have blood streaming from below their eyelids, indicating that the eyes had been gouged out; not surprisingly, one carved stone depicts a collection of eyeballs. In all, there may once have been 700 gruesome carvings on the enclosure wall of the temple.

Such use of art, of course, has a propaganda component. Some societies on the Peruvian coast were now as militaristic as those of the sixteenth-century Cauca Valley. Almost certainly they had war leaders, or “nobles by command,” whose role it was to subdue their society’s enemies. Displays like the temple wall at Cerro Sechín were warnings to potential rivals, letting them know what might happen to them. If this propaganda worked, perhaps some future battles would never need to be fought.

THE RISE OF HIGHLAND RANK SOCIETIES

Some 2,800 to 2,200 years ago, many rank societies of central Peru began to exhibit a pattern seen already in pre-Hispanic Mexico and Colombia: chiefly families began to exchange sumptuary goods over an extremely wide region. Like the Quimbaya goldwork, the Coclé polychrome, and the early Mexican pottery bearing Earth and Sky motifs, the pottery and goldwork of central Peru shared style and symbolic content. Among other things, the shared style emphasized the role of the chief as warrior; it featured not only trophy heads but also dangerous animals such as the jaguar and caiman. These were all creatures of the Amazon lowlands, but the Andes were now so crisscrossed by trade routes that even the irrigators of the coastal desert were familiar with them.

Seven thousand feet up in the Andes, near the headwaters of the Jequetepeque River, lay the site of Kuntur Wasi. Here the builders had turned a natural mountain peak into a stepped pyramidal temple platform, with four terraces and an artificially leveled summit covering more than 30 acres.

A Tokyo University expedition discovered the burials of three highly ranked leaders of Kuntur Wasi society. Each individual’s body was found in a tomb, hidden at the base of an eight-foot-deep cylindrical shaft. The first tomb was that of a 50- to 60-year-old man with a gold crown or headband, embossed with images of trophy heads in net bags. He was also accompanied by two pottery bottles and a cup, three large conch shell trumpets, two polished stone ear ornaments, two polished stone pendants, and a variety of stone beads. The individual in the second tomb had a gold crown or headband with an embossed panel of jaguar or puma faces, two gold pectorals with complex feline and snake motifs, two rectangular plaques of embossed gold, and two pottery vessels. The occupant of the third tomb, an elderly woman, had two gold ear ornaments, two stone ear ornaments, a pottery cup, and a distinctive vessel with a stirrup-shaped spout. The floor of her tomb was covered with 7,000 beads that had once adorned a perishable garment.

By this point, in other words, we are dealing with rank societies whose elites wore gold ornaments on the scale of the sixteenth-century chiefs of Panama. Their chiefs liked to be symbolized by dangerous predatory animals and were happy to patronize artisans skilled at chiefly iconography.

Chavín de Huántar

We previously suggested that Peru is a graveyard for theories of environmental determinism. Nowhere is that more true than at the chiefly center of Chavín de Huántar in Peru’s Mosna Valley, some 10,395 feet above sea level. One cannot explain the presence of such an impressive center based simply on the agricultural potential of its steep-walled valley. Frost is so common at that altitude that farming is limited to one harvest a year, based mainly on potatoes and other indigenous root crops. To be sure, llamas and alpacas could have been raised in the area, as long as they were moved from one grazing area to another during the year.

To understand Chavín de Huántar, one must realize that it lay along a trade route linking the Pacific coast, the Andes, and the Amazon basin. From Chavín to the Pacific would have been a six-day walk behind a llama pack train. From Chavín to the Amazon jungle would have been a six-day trip going the other direction. Chavín, in other words, was the midpoint for the long-distance movement of goods among three major cultural provinces: coast, highlands, and tropical forest.

Chavín de Huántar was founded 2,900 years ago and declined some 700 years later. Archaeologist Richard Burger estimates that, during its peak, Chavín might have been a community of 2,000 to 3,000 people. At that point its temple center alone exceeded 12 acres, and the associated residences covered more than 100.

Chavín’s major temple was unlike any we have examined so far, though it borrowed a few details from earlier societies. Its first version, called the Old Temple, was built from granite slabs some 2,800 to 2,500 years ago. This temple had the form of a U, with truncated pyramids serving as its lateral wings; its builders had also placed a sunken circular court directly in front of it. The most striking feature of the Old Temple, however, was a basal platform honeycombed with secret rooms and windowless passageways known as “galleries.” These galleries were connected by stairways, vents, and drains. Given the Andean peoples’ long tradition of supplying oxygen to fire pits through subfloor ducts, the architects of Chavín probably had no trouble getting air to the innermost galleries.

Placed deeply into one of the darkest and spookiest interior galleries was a carved stone monolith 15 feet tall—so tall, in fact, that its pointed crown extended through the ceiling of the gallery into a hidden, still higher passageway. The image carved on the monolith was that of a terrifying humanoid with a snarling mouth, its hands terminating in claws and its long hair ending in snakes’ heads (
Figure 33
).

Of the many interpretations of this remarkable monolith, we are most persuaded by the one proposed by archaeologist Craig Morris. Morris, an expert on the later societies of Peru, points out that the fame of many Andean temples derived from their possession of an oracle. Andean oracles (like their Greek counterpart at Delphi) foretold the future and answered travelers’ questions in the form of riddles. Morris suspects that the carved monolith hidden in the bowels of Chavín’s Old Temple was one of the Andes’ earliest oracles. Its answers would have been spoken aloud by an unseen priest, hiding in the upper passageway penetrated by the monolith’s crown.

FIGURE 33.
   The Old Temple of Chavín de Huántar, Peru, was honeycombed with underground galleries. In one of the galleries visitors would have encountered the 15-foot-tall image of a terrifying humanoid that may have been considered an oracle.

Imagine the leader of a llama caravan passing through the canyon of Chavín de Huántar on his way between the Pacific coast and the Amazon jungle. He has questions that need to be answered. In return for payment of some kind (perhaps trade goods, to be deposited in one of the building’s other galleries), a ritual specialist lights a torch and leads the traveler down a darkened gallery to the terrifying humanoid image. In the flickering light of the torch, a disembodied voice answers the traveler’s question with a riddle. He returns to the surface, pleased not only to have received an answer but also to have returned safely from a place with such dangerously high levels of life force.

Between 2,500 and 2,300 years ago the elite of Chavín de Huántar created a New Temple, one that swallowed up and incorporated the Old Temple. The New Temple was an immense stone masonry building, standing more than 30 feet high; one entered the building through a portal with columns of white granite and black limestone. The original oracle had by now lost its importance, but the New Temple featured two
stelae,
or freestanding stone monuments. One of these stelae, more than six feet tall, featured a grotesque supernatural being with a feline mouth, staffs of authority in its hands, and long hair ending in snakes’ heads. The other stela, more than eight feet tall, displayed a pair of caimans flanked by spiny oyster and conch shells, gourds, chile peppers, and manioc plants.

In addition, the entire façade of the New Temple was decorated with tenoned stone heads, frightening human or animal faces projecting out from the building. Many of these heads, displayed as high as 30 feet up on the temple, would have looked down menacingly on all who approached.

The Nature of Hereditary Inequality in Early Peru

Peruvian societies of 2,500 years ago, both on the coast and in the highlands, had invested in all of Irving Goldman’s proposed sources of chiefly power. Their elite families claimed descent from supernatural ancestors, possessed dangerous levels of life force, and had the authority to sacrifice and mutilate their enemies. They patronized and rewarded the craftsmen who carved their stone monuments, hammered out sumptuary goods of embossed gold, and produced pottery covered with chiefly symbols. Included among the symbols were stylized references to jaguars or pumas, birds of prey, snakes, caimans, and crocodiles—all animals associated with ferocity and predation. The religion of this period, centered on the temple, included well-regulated processions, human sacrifice, and the likely use of oracles. Peru had reached the point where a handful of changes in social logic could have led to the creation of a kingdom. We will describe just such a transformation in a later chapter.

THIRTEEN

Aristocracy without Chiefs

We have learned a great deal from societies speaking Tibeto-Burman languages, but there is more to be learned. In this chapter we return to Assam to look at three more societies: the Dafla, the Miri, and the Apa Tani.

In the 1960s there were roughly 40,000 Dafla in the hills of Assam, all tracing descent from a legendary ancestor. The Dafla grew dry rice and millet by slash-and-burn farming and raised pigs, goats, oxen, and mithan cattle.

Like the Etoro of New Guinea, the Dafla lived in longhouses that accommodated up to 12 families. Also like the Etoro, they displayed little in the way of cohesive leadership. They had no hereditary leaders, and their existing headmen and elders could not prevent one longhouse from feuding with another. Some degree of inequality had been introduced into Dafla society by the fact that captives taken in raids were kept as slaves. Such slaves, however, were not prevented from working hard and accumulating sufficient resources to purchase their freedom.

The Miri claimed descent from the same ancestor as the Dafla. Both groups referred to themselves by the ethnic term
Nisü
and shared a wide range of behaviors.

The Apa Tani were related to the Dafla and Miri but had created a strikingly different society by altering traditional social logic. The changes they introduced were supported by a type of agriculture that surpassed that of their Dafla and Miri neighbors.

The valley of the Kele River lies 5,000 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Himalayas. In 1944, according to anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, there were only seven Apa Tani villages in a valley just two miles wide and six and a half miles long. Expansion was limited by mountains that rose 3,000 feet above the swampy valley floor. In 1961, during a second visit by Fürer-Haimendorf, the population had grown to 10,745 persons, who lived in a total of 2,520 households.

The largest Apa Tani villages had 500 to 700 houses; the smallest had less than 200. Each village was divided into wards, occupied by one or more
halu,
or clans, whose members reckoned descent in the father’s line and were required to seek brides from other clans. Each ward maintained a ceremonial building called a
nago,
in which rituals were carried out and trophies (including the severed hands of enemies) were curated. The village also maintained a more secular public structure called a
lapang;
this was a large, open sitting platform like those of the Angami Naga.

Inequality in Apa Tani society was reflected in two types of clans:
mite
and
mura.
The mite were hereditary aristocrats, while the mura were former slaves. Some mura had won their freedom when the British colonial government abolished slavery. Others, like debt slaves in Naga societies, had won their freedom through hard work and loan repayment. However, even when adopted into aristocratic clans as poor relations, the mura were seen as lowly in rank.

Despite the existence of hereditary aristocrats, the Apa Tani did not have chiefs like the great Angs of the Konyak Naga. Their village affairs were managed by a council of aristocrats, all mite citizens, men of character and ability drawn from wealthy lineages. This council, called a
buliang,
included elders, middle-aged men, and a few young men who were regarded as future leaders. In return for their community service, the men of the buliang received gifts of rice beer and meat. These gifts were presented at major feasts, which rotated among village wards so that the costs would be shared by all.