Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2017 - 64

LETTER FROM PERU
it to predict the future. "It's likely that
Chavín had an oracular function," says
Burger, "and hallucinogens may have
played a role in making predictions or
explaining past events."

t Santa Ana-La Florida, Valdéz's
excavations have revealed a
village with about 20 stone
circles, each up to 40 feet in diameter,
a sunken plaza, and a wide ceremonial
platform on a bluff overlooking the
rushing river. "It's hardly what you'd
expect of a simple settlement or even a
small village," says Valdéz. Like Huayurco and numerous other Amazonian
sites, the ancient village was built at
the convergence of two rivers, a place
believed to possess transcendent cosmic energy. Valdéz, now at the Research
Institute for Development in Paris,
believes the site was a civic or ceremonial center where people from surrounding valleys gathered for rituals led
by a charismatic leader. Stone spirals,
smaller than those at Montegrande,
coil up from the structures, like snakes
ready to strike. "The logical interpretation of this spiral architecture is that

it represents a sacred ideology, imbued
with the notion of movement between
different realms of reality," he says.
"This was expressed in rites and ceremonies during which it was common
to consume hallucinogens."
The evidence from Santa AnaLa Florida is in agreement with the
emerging view of life in the ancient
Amazon. People resided in fixed,
well-built settlements, with imposing
ceremonial centers and complex rituals
that relied on visions and insights supplied by hallucinogens. They proudly
traded their medicinal plants and
crafts with Andean cultures. And there
is proof that they stayed in one place
for extended periods. Valdéz ran 32
radiocarbon dating tests on charcoal
samples and found that the settlement
at Santa Ana-La Florida dates as far
back as 3300 b.c. Dates associated
with the main ceremonial center were
clustered between 2800 and 1800 b.c.,
which would make it older than Montegrande, and nearly as old as centers
on the north-central Peruvian coast
such as Caral, often called the oldest
known city in the Americas.

Spirals such as this one that is similar to-but even older than-those at Montegrande
have been found at Santa Ana-La Florida in Ecuador, suggesting region-wide belief
systems in the ancient Amazon.
64

mile up a dirt road from Montegrande stands an even bigger
and, judging from Olivera's
first excavations, potentially even
older mound. Occupied today by an
elderly man with chickens and barking
dogs, the mound, which is known as
San Isidro, was excavated by Olivera in
2010 and 2012. It held the remains of
22 children and newborns buried over
a period of several centuries in the first
millennium b.c. If Montegrande was
the local center for shamanic ritual,
San Isidro may have been where parents took sick or dying children to be
cured-or sacrificed. Bones unearthed
at San Isidro show signs of trauma
and deformation. A newborn dating
from about 800 b.c., who had been
decapitated, was found entwined in
the arms of a young woman, who had
also been decapitated. The remains of
a boy aged about six, his teeth showing
signs of severe iron deficiency, were
buried with guinea pigs, river crabs,
and a shell necklace still around his
tiny neck.
A few feet away, Olivera uncovered
the remains of the mound's resident
healer or priest, his face turned toward
the east, as if awaiting the rising sun.
His body was adorned with some 180
snail shells, whose shapes echo that
of the Montegrande spiral. Peruvian
archaeologists often give names to the
charismatic dead, and Olivera calls this
man "The Lord of Snails." He died
around 2,800 years ago, judging from
the pottery sherds buried with him,
and he must have been a prominent
member of his community at a time
of major technological change, as the
introduction of ceramics revolutionized the way people stored and carried
food. In the still-earlier layers beneath
his tomb, the sherds disappear, and the
mound's as-yet unexcavated history
trails off into the earliest millennia of
Amazonian civilization. n
Roger Atwood is a contributing editor at
Archaeology.
ARCHAEOLOGY * July/August 2017

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