The valley of Moquegua has a richly varied past that reaches back at least twelve thousand years. At different times, Moquegua been a crossroads and a border zone, a thriving province and a quiet backwater, a tense patchwork of opposing fortress towns and a harmonious mix of disparate peoples sharing the valley in peace. Stretching from the cold grasslands of the high puna to the green coastal valley and little springs scattered along the desert shore, the valley of Moquegua is a microcosm of the Andean world.
The landscape
The Moquegua drainage is made up of several habitable parts. On the shoreline to the north and south of Ilo, coastal springs provided fresh water and stands of lomas fog vegetation in the hills offered hunting and pasture. The coastal segment of the valley itself, from the mouth of the river to some 25 kilometers inland, is a narrow strip of arable land at the bottom of a deep, steep-sided canyon. The next 25 kilometers are a dry, rocky gorge that offers few possibilities for settlement as it ascends the foothills of the Andes. Then the middle valley opens up, forming the long, wider ribbon of farmland the broadens near Moquegua and comprises the breadbasket of the drainage. Above Moquegua, several upper, tributary drainages lay in rougher, steeper, and higher terrain, where most farmland is on terraced hillsides watered by long canals. Beyond about 3,800 meters above sea level, the thin air and cold temperatures make farming virtually impossible, but the high mountains harbor game and wild plant foods. Higher yet, the rolling puna grasslands and the altiplano provided rich hunting and grazing lands for those able to master the harsh climate.
For the last twelve thousand years, these natural divisions have greatly affected where and how people lived in the Moquegua drainage. These divisions by elevation, topography, and climate have been cultural divisions, too.
The first inhabitants
The first people probably entered South America some 15,000 years ago, as the last Ice Age faded. They most likely avoided the snow-covered mountains and spread southward along the coast, fishing, gathering, and hunting animals unaccustomed to human predators. We know that people reached the site of Monte Verde in southern Chile over 14,700 years ago. Unfortunately, as the world's ice cover melted, the sea level rose and submerged most of the evidence of these earliest coastal immigrants.
In a spectacular recent discovery, Dr. Michael Moseley, Dr. Susan deFrance, and Dr. David Keefer found that as much as 12,700 years ago, a few mobile foragers hunted and cooked birds in the lomas at Quebrada Tacahuay, south of Ilo, and presumably in other, similar places. This would have been just part of the hunting and gathering activities of people who also must have exploited fish and shellfish from the coast, and probably ranged further inland, as well. By around 11,300 years ago, people were camping at the Ring site on the coast south of Ilo. By this time, the mountains were becoming habitable, and these mobile bands probably moved in seasonal rounds from the coast, up the river valleys, to the high mountains, and back, hunting and collecting wild plants. By about 8800 years ago, they had separated into two kinds of bands, one kind living in the middle valleys and high mountains, and the other staying near the coast. This separation of coastal and highland people has persisted in its essence into historical times.
Early people of the highlands
The first people in the highlands were small, mobile family bands that hunted game and collected plants from the coastline to the edge of the altiplano. One of their campsites was at the high mountain site of Asana, excavated by Dr. Mark Aldenderfer. Asana was a pleasant, flat spot next to a marshy bofedal alongside one of the rivers that flows towards Moquegua. Perhaps as early as 10,500 years ago, these bands came to Asana to hunt guanaco, vicuña, and deer at the nearby pasture. They built round huts of poles, possibly covered with hides, for their brief stays.
As time passed, the visiting groups grew larger and stayed longer, perhaps for three or four months at a time. They probably came from more permanent base camps in the lower elevations closer to the valley of Moquegua, or further up at the edge of the puna grasslands. Up to eight houses were occupied at Asana at the same time, suggesting that several families may have lived there together.
Perhaps as early as 8800 years ago, the highlanders began using natural caves as lookouts, temporary shelters, and settings for paintings of the hunt and prey, although the cramped spaces and their locations far from water made most caves inconvenient for larger groups or longer stays. A famous example is Toquepala cave, in the mountains between Moquegua and the Locumba valley to the south. Visitors to Toquepala cave painted pictures on its walls with mineral colors of white, red, and green, showing animals (probably guanaco, vicuña, and deer) and human hunters.
By about 5000 years ago, growing numbers of people filled the highlands and the altiplano. The people who stayed at Asana were excluded from hunting in the puna. As their territory shrank, they became less mobile, built larger houses, and shifted their focus away from hunting and more towards gathering and grinding wild seeds, including a form of quinoa.
At about the same time, they began to leave traces of more complex social and ceremonial life. One example is a burial found in the cave of El Panteón, where a child was buried with a necklace of stone and shell beads. Around 4800 years ago, the people at Asana built what may have been a ceremonial dance floor of white clay, larger than the ordinary houses around it, enclosed by a fence of poles and brush. This is the oldest known ceremonial structure in the south-central Andes. Later ceremonial structures at Asana were larger and had many small oval hearths were people probably burned offerings much as Aymara people do today. Unlike the earlier open, public areas, these later structures were divided by walls, with cross-shaped altar-like platforms of white clay and glittering rock enclosed in rooms that could hold only a small number of people at a time.
Around 4400 years ago, people shifted their livelihood from gathering plants to herding, and they stopped building ceremonial structures at Asana. For several centuries people continued to return to Asana for seasonal visits to pasture their herds, living in small, temporary huts like those used by pastoralists today. By 4000 years ago, they stopped visiting Asana at all.
Early fisherfolk of the coast
The oldest known spot where people settled at least semi-permanently is the Ring Site, on the Pampa del Palo south of Ilo, dating to about 11,300 years ago. The site was named after a distinctive ring-shaped mound of shells that was intentionally built long after the place was first occupied. Although they did eat some sea birds, land animals, and plant foods, research by Dr. James Richardson and Dr. Daniel Sandweiss showed that the early inhabitants of the Ring Site seem to have lived mostly on the kinds of fish that would have been caught with fishhooks and line, and shellfish gathered from the beach and the rocky shore.
Some 8000 years ago, some of the coastal fishing people from Ilo to the north of Chile developed the custom of artificially mummifying the bodies of their dead and burying them in special cemetery areas. The first of these "Chinchorro" mummies are the oldest artificially mummified bodies in the world, thousands of years earlier than the mummies of Egypt, and the tradition continued and evolved until about 3000 years ago. The most elaborately prepared bodies were provided with internal supports, plant fiber stuffing, and painted clay masks, perhaps so that they could stand up like statues of the deceased. This reverence for ancestors and the repeated use of fixed cemeteries may indicate that Chinchorro bands were settling down in particular places and using their elaborate burial practices to establish ancestral claims to their territories. Although the mummies are best preserved in the slightly drier climate of Chile, Dr. Karen Wise discovered traces of decayed Chinchorro burials at the site of Villa del Mar at the mouth of the Ilo river, and at Kilometer 4, located by an extinct spring on the shore north of the river.
Around 5000 years ago, people at the Ring Site began to use grinding stones to process seeds, broadening their diet to include more land plants. To the north of the river, people settled by the coastal springs at the sites of Carrizal and Kilometer 4. Although still primarily dependent on the sea, they, too, expanded their food sources to include a broader range of land plants, and they began to gather cotton to make nets and textiles like loincloths and blankets.
At about the same time, the people of the Ring Site built the shell ring, perhaps as some sort of ceremonial or monumental work. Meanwhile, at Kilometer 4, a 45 to 50 year old man was buried with over two dozen artifacts including stone beads and a projectile point, shells, at least six different textiles, a leather bag, a twig of an unidentified plant, and other offerings, many of which probably relate to the ritual use of hallucinogenic drugs.
These changes in diet and ritual are roughly contemporary with similar shifts to plant foods and ceremonialism in the mountains at Asana, perhaps reflecting a gradual, regional trend.
The first farmers on the coast
By at least 200 BC, and possibly as early as 1000 BC, people living next to coastal springs at sites like Carrizal had begun to plant and harvest corn. Dr.Garth Bawden found quantities of charred corn cobs in his excavations there. Farming freed people from their dependence on the sea, and allowed them to settle in the valley of Ilo, as much as 20 kilometers from the shore. Dr. Bruce Owen has shown that by about 100 BC, people living in the valley of Ilo grew large quantities of corn, beans, yuca (manioc), and other crops such as cotton and bottle gourds. The transition to farming was probably gradual, growing out of the use of wild plants that had been increasing since 3000 BC. Those who lived close to the sea continued to fish, all the farmers continued to hunt in the lomas and collect wild foods, and at least those who lived in the valley of Ilo began to keep cuyes (guinea pigs) for food and llamas for wool, meat, and probably to carry cargo.
Some of the early farming villages were large, with hundreds of residents. People at the coastal springs built houses with cane walls with simple stone foundations, while in the valley, they aparently lived in lightweight reed huts on terraces with sturdy stone retaining walls.
The early farmers were the first people in the region to make pottery, which was useful for boiling tubers and other crops. These early ceramics were plain, and had simple, rounded shapes with wide mouths, probably modeled after the gourds that had been used as containers for thousands of years. Almost all are burnt black and caked on the outside with soot from cooking fires. The large size of many of the pots suggests that the early farmers often cooked for large groups at once, perhaps as many as ten to forty people at a time.
When they died, most of these early farmers were buried in plain pits with just a reed mat and a pot or two. A select few were accorded a more unusual treatment. The survivors divided the body of such a person into a few large pieces, packed the pieces into a small cylindrical pit dug in a cemetery reserved for this type of burial, and covered the pit with a roof of canes. Over this tomb they built a mound of alternating layers of dirt, rock, and reeds, from one to several meters tall. One of these mounds covered the burial of a child who died at only three or fours years of age. This treatment might have been an honor reserved for special people such as chiefs or shamans, but it could equally well have been a ritual treatment for an inauspicious death or other special circumstances.
The first farmers in the highlands
At about the same time as people began farming on the coast and in the coastal portion of the valley, others began to farm in the middle valley of Moquegua. These "Huaracane" people were similar in many ways to the coastal farmers, but given the long-standing division between coastal and mountain groups, it is not surprising that they were also a bit different. Like the early coastal farmers, the Huaracane people lived in large, terraced villages, and made similar plain pottery, but they also made delicate, finely finished ceramic serving bowls.
The Huaracane people shared the custom of mound burials, but Dr. Paul Goldstein has shown that they added another form of burial that was more certainly intended for respected people. These "boot tombs" were narrow, deep, vertical holes with a low side gabber at the bottom. This chamber held the body and a number of pots and other goods, including carved wooden spoons and other decorated items. These rare boot tombs may indicate an emerging class of respected leaders.
Tiwanaku colonizes Moquegua
While the villagers of the coastal and middle segments of the Moquegua valley farmed for century after century with little apparent change, far away in the altiplano the town of Tiwanaku grew into an enormous city populated not only by farmers, but also by specialized craftsmen, administrators, and priests. Built around a monumental ceremonial core of cut stone buildings, sunken courts, and stepped platform mounds, the city was supported by vast expanses of farmland as well as fishing in lake Titicaca and herding.
By around 600 AD, the growing Tiwanaku state was establishing colonial outposts in the warmer valleys of the east and west slopes of the Andes, intended to produce corn, coca, ají peppers, and other lowland crops for the altiplano core. One of the most important of these colonies was the middle valley around Moquegua.
The initial "Omo phase" Tiwanaku colonists settled in several villages along the east side of the valley. They chose open, exposed spots near springs. The local Huaracane people shared the valley with the Tiwanaku colonists, and their relationship was apparently peaceful. The largest of these early Tiwanaku villages, excavated by Dr. Paul Goldstein, may have held 500 people living in airy, multi-roomed houses of cloth or skins hung on a framework of poles. At least one of these houses was a ritual drinking place, where large jars for fermenting chicha beer were found, along with incense burners, red pigment thought to have been used as face paint, and the pieces of a matched set of blackware drinking cups modeled with nearly identical faces.
The Omo phase colonists remained closely linked to their altiplano homeland, using pottery and textiles decorated in the Tiwanaku style, and probably exchanging food and other goods regularly with people from the urban center.
One small Omo phase village, excavated by Dr. Bruce Owen, was different from the others. Located in the Torata valley, well away from the rest of the Tiwanaku colonists, this site boasted a complex of fieldstone and adobe walls that enclosed three large, rectangular plazas stepping up the gentle hillside, with a small precinct attached the uppermost wall. Standing at the foot of Cerro Baúl, a towering, sheer mountain that is revered as a sacred site or huaca today, this structure was probably the first ceremonial site built to honor the imposing natural formation.
Wari builds an outpost on Cerro Baúl
Tiwanaku was not the only urban state in the Andes. At the same time as Tiwanaku was sending out colonists, the site of Wari, far to the north near Ayacucho, was growing rapidly into a tangled urban center of towering multistory buildings. Wari, too, sent settlers and builders to distant parts of the Andes. Unlike Tiwanaku, which established colonies in places well suited to supply the urban core with food crops, the Wari state built widely scattered centers throughout the Andes, many of them far too distant for simple agricultural purposes. Most of these centers consisted of a single, huge building complex in the standardized Wari style, often featuring many small rooms that have proven to be barracks or laborers' quarters. Whatever their purpose, these centers are found throughout most of the highlands of modern Perú.
The southern boundary of Wari occupation seems to reach only slightly past Arequipa, with one exception. Around 650 AD, seemingly well outside its sphere of influence, the Wari state built its southernmost compound on top of the sheer cliffs of Cerro Baúl. Cerro Baúl is a natural fortress, and the several satellite Wari sites around it are all located in highly defensible positions, mostly behind massive stone walls. Cerro Baúl stands just outside the Tiwanaku farmland of the middle Moquegua valley, which had probably been occupied by Omo phase colonists for a brief period before Wari arrived. Only the colonists at the Omo phase temple would have been in close contact with the Wari people, who seem to have expected a hostile reception.
The buildings on top of Cerro Baúl include long, tall, rectangular rooms arrayed around open patios, in typical Wari style, as well as the characteristic "D-shaped" structure found at many Wari sites that seems to have served as a ceremonial area. The rest of the site is covered with more rustic stone houses. Excavations by Dr. Robert Feldman showed that at least one of the finer buildings was used for storing, serving, and drinking chicha beer from highly decorated ceramic cups, probably in a ritual or courtly setting. In the more rustic part of the settlement, people prepared the chicha and made stone beads and textiles.
The purpose of this fortified intrusion is still unknown. Cerro Baúl is too far away to send crops to the capital. The suggestion that it controlled a source of highly valued obsidian has been disproved by field and lab studies. The idea that it produced copper for the Wari capital has also been rejected because no slag, significant quantities of ore, processing tools, furnaces, unfinished products, or other supporting evidence has been found on any Wari site in the area, and no traces of Wari are found further up the valley where mines would have been. Cerro Baúl might have controlled an onyx quarry in the Torata valley, but again, there is no hint of Wari architecture or artifacts anywhere near it.
Cerro Baúl could have been a commercial center, and indeed a few fragments of Wari pottery have been found on each of several Huaracane sites, suggesting some minor exchange with the local people. Fragments of local onyx and a blue stone used for beads were found in the residential area of Cerro Baúl, and might have been acquired by trade. More likely, Wari occupied Cerro Baúl either to mark and defend a frontier against further Tiwanaku expansion, or to appropriate the sacred place or huaca that was already revered by the Omo phase colonists. Perhaps the settlement served some combination of these roles.
Dr. Paul Goldstein has noted that the pottery used by the Omo phase settlers is quite different from the pottery used by later Tiwanaku colonists. This difference may indicate a gap in the Tiwanaku occupation of the middle Moquegua valley. The Omo phase colonists may have withdrawn from the area while Wari occupied the stronghold of Cerro Baúl. This could explain why virtually no Wari artifacts contemporary with Cerro Baúl are found at Tiwanaku sites, nor Tiwanaku items at the Wari sites. If they remained in the area, the Tiwanaku colonists must have had almost no contact with the Wari people, even less than the local Huaracane farmers living nearby.
Although Cerro Baúl was occupied long enough for several areas to be remodeled, it was apparently never completed. Some areas seem to have been marked out, but the walls had not yet been built when the site suffered a disastrous fire around 800 AD. This fire was no accident, because all the highly decorated pottery in the buildings was smashed and thrown onto the burning thatch roofs. The Tiwanaku colonists may have returned or risen up to oust the Wari intruders, or the Wari themselves may have destroyed the site as they abandoned it. The natural citadel of Cerro Baúl was not occupied again for several hundred years.
The Tiwanaku colonists return in force
After Wari abandoned Cerro Baúl, Tiwanaku colonists of the "Chen Chen phase" returned in greater numbers than ever before. Tiwanaku was reaching the peak of its political and economic expansion. This time, the colonists built impressive canals to irrigate great expanses of desert, and they produced extra corn, beans, squash, peanuts, and other crops to send by llama caravan to the altiplano capital. The largest of several towns, the site of Chen Chen, was surrounded by cemeteries that eventually held some 13,000 burials in pits and cylindrical stone-lined tombs. Portions of these cemeteries were excavated by a large project under Bertha Vargas and a smaller one by Dr. Bruce Owen.
Although the Chen Chen phase colonists established a new village near the old temple at the foot of Cerro Baúl, the Torata valley was still isolated from most of the Tiwanaku settlers in the middle Moquegua valley. Dr. Paul Goldstein has shown that the Chen Chen colonists built a new temple, almost twice the size of the old one, downriver from Moquegua at the site of Omo. Although it echoed the overall plan of the temple at Cerro Baúl, the new temple was much more elaborate, with beautifully cut stonework, red clay floors, walls painted in bright red, green, yellow, and white hues, a steep staircase rising up to a monumental doorway, and in the uppermost precinct, a sunken rectangular court in Tiwanaku style, with evidence that a stone monolith once stood in its center. As Goldstein pointed out, it may not be a coincidence that the upper part of this temple is one of the few places in the middle valley with a view of Cerro Baúl.
While the old temple could have been built by a handful of villagers, the new temple must have been the work of the Tiwanaku state. As the only place outside the basin of Lake Titicaca with a Tiwanaku temple, the middle Moquegua valley must have been an important province, and the altiplano government must have been deeply involved in its affairs.
Meanwhile, on the coast
Neither Tiwanaku nor Wari seem to have had much interest in directly occupying the coastal springs or the coastal part of the valley. The middle valley colonists may have traded for fish, shells, and shellfish, but the contact was apparently minimal. In fact, the population of the coastal valley seems to have declined drastically during this time, perhaps because the extensive irrigation projects around Moquegua and Cerro Baúl reduced the flow of the coastal river so much that it became difficult to farm there.
The collapse of Tiwanaku
Around 1000 AD, the altiplano state of Tiwanaku collapsed abruptly. Dr. Alan Kolata has shown that a severe, prolonged drought lowered the level of Lake Titicaca, drying out the fields around Tiwanaku and depriving the state of its economic base. The food crisis in the altiplano led to a social crisis in Moquegua. Perhaps Tiwanaku began to demand excessive shipments of food, or it failed to provide enough altiplano products and services in return. Reduced irrigation water flowing down the rivers due to the drought would have made the situation even worse.
Violence broke out in Moquegua. The temple at Omo was sacked, the walls knocked down, and the cut stone blocks smashed in the middle plaza. Not content with destroying the emblem of state religion, people went on to ransack Chen Chen phase villages. Rather than simply looting, they laboriously and systematically reduced entire villages to churned up heaps of rubble in what looks like a show of bitterness equal to the Romans salting the earth at Carthage. Stranger yet, it must have been the Chen Chen phase colonists themselves who did this, perhaps targeting rival villages when state control broke down.
The former colonists disperse
The former colonists found themselves stranded in Moquegua in an atmosphere of conflict, without the Tiwanaku state to keep the peace. Many families had probably lived in the Moquegua colony for generations, and since the situation in the altiplano was as bad or worse, they had little choice but to stay in the region. The established Chen Chen phase villages were in flat, open places near the middle valley farmland, impossible to defend, and they were rapidly being destroyed.
The former colonists abandoned these villages and moved to more defensible spots guarded by cliffs, on steep hill slopes, or surrounded by walls to protect their settlements from attack. They left behind the canal and expanses of irrigated fields around Chen Chen, and the furrows from the last planting are still visible in the desert one thousand years later. Probably hoping to escape conflict as well as gain new farmland and better access to irrigation water, many of them fled the middle valley and settled in either the unpopulated upper valleys above Moquegua, or the coastal valley of Ilo. Ironically, this "Tumilaca phase" dispersal spread the Tiwanaku tradition to many areas for the first time, after the state had collapsed. Without the state to unite them, each part of the valley seems to have become a separate district, where people had contact mostly with villagers living nearby. Each of these areas, partially isolated from the others, began to develop its own variant of the old Tiwanaku styles of pottery, house construction, clothing, and so on.
Tumilaca and Chiribaya in the coastal valley
With the collapse of the Tiwanaku state, the former colonists no longer needed to produce extra crops to be shipped to the altiplano capital. They abandoned the reclaimed fields near Chen Chen, and the water that had been diverted to irrigate them once again flowed down the river to the coastal valley of Ilo. After centuries of near-abandonment, the coastal valley once again became attractive for farming, and Tumilaca phase settlers founded numerous small villages all along the coastal valley.
The Tumilaca phase settlers were not the only people to move into the coastal valley. At about the same time, the "Chiribaya" people founded settlements from the mouth of the river to some 25 kilometers inland. The Chiribaya are famous for their well made pottery with complex, colorful geometric designs and their magnificent decorated textiles, which are stylistically quite different from anything seen in the region before. Precisely where the Chiribaya came from or how they developed is still unknown, but the Chiribaya founded numerous villages from the Tambo river on the north to the Azapa valley in the south, and as far up into the mountains as Moquegua.
There are hints that in addition to the Tumilaca and Chiribaya settlers, as many as four other minor groups with distinctive pottery and burial practices may have established one or two settlements each in the coastal valley. Two of these groups were former Tiwanaku colonists from the middle Moquegua valley, or other valleys to the north or south, while the other two seem more related to the Chiribaya and to the Churajón tradition of Arequipa.
The Chiribaya, Tumilaca, and other types of villages were intermixed all along the valley, often packed very close together. In contrast to the defensible settlements in the middle and upper valleys, almost all of the coastal valley sites were located near the valley floor and had no defensive walls. This patchwork of different social groups apparently shared the valley peacefully.
Dr. Bruce Owen's excavations in Chiribaya and Tumilaca villages show that the new settlers harvested the same principal crops as the early farmers before them, including corn, yuca (manioc), beans, cotton for string and nets, and gourds for containers. They also added a wider variety of other crops, including achira, squash, lucuma, guava, pacay, and coca. The villagers who lived closer to the coast ate more fish and shellfish. All the villages seem to have kept llamas, but those closest to the pastures of the lomas fog vegetation seem to have concentrated more on herding. They also raised cuyes (guinea pigs) and dogs.
The settlers must have quickly occupied all the farmland on the narrow valley floor, because they soon built a canal nearly seven kilometers long to irrigate some natural terraces that stand well above the river. Long portions of the canal cross steep bedrock cliffs, partially cut into the rock and partially supported by tall retaining walls. Since both Tumilaca and Chiribaya villages seem to have benefited from this canal, it may have been a joint project.
Both Tumilaca and Chiribaya families lived in rectangular, cane-walled houses, but the layouts were quite different. Tumilaca houses were lightly built, free-standing structures with one or a few rooms, surrounded by some open terrace space. The largest Tumilaca house known in the coastal valley had four rooms of about two by five meters, with a small two-room kitchen shack built against an outside wall. David Jessup, Lic. Ana Miranda Umire, and others have shown that Chiribaya families lived in large rectangular compounds with heavy cane perimeter walls along the edges of the terrace, enclosing a maze of rooms, patios, and long, narrow corridors. Architectural evidence and huge amounts of domestic garbage suggest that Chiribaya houses were occupied much longer than Tumilaca phase dwellings. Apparently, the Chiribaya lived in larger, more permanent households.
The coastal Tumilaca settlers
The coastal Tumilaca settlers wore plain, thigh-length, sleeveless brown wool shirts, probably tied at the waist with a belt or cord. Sometimes they decorated their shirts, bags, and belts with a few narrow bands of embroidery, and they occasionally used cloth covered with narrow stripes of up to seven colors. Unlike their Chiribaya neighbors, the Tumilaca people rarely, if ever, wore hats. Both men and women wore complex braided and plaited hairdos.
The Tumilaca farmers continued to make pottery in the Tiwanaku tradition, but the vessels were often more carelessly made and the designs simplified or confused. The same is true of wooden spoons, the handles of which had been elaborately carved in Chen Chen times, but were reduced by the Tumilaca settlers to simple silhouettes.
No Tumilaca village stands out as a possible capital, and all the known Tumilaca burials contained the same limited range of up to two pots, up to two baskets, and a few other items, suggesting that there were no particularly wealthy or powerful people among the Tumilaca settlers.
The Chiribaya
The Chiribaya present quite a different picture. While some Chiribayas were buried in simple pits with few goods and plain textiles, others were buried in rectangular tombs with dozens of well-made, highly decorated ceramics, brilliantly colored clothing, hats, feathers, basketry, wood and leather goods, copper and gold, food and coca, and even, in the case of one important male, two female companions. These rare and extremely wealthy burials suggest that Chiribaya society was ruled by powerful chiefs.
Equally important are the large numbers of burials at many different villages that span the whole range from impoverished to opulent, suggesting sizable upper and middle classes as well as ordinary farmers. The quality and quantity of fine Chiribaya pottery, textiles, and other goods suggest that they were made by specialist craftworkers, perhaps supported by members of the wealthy elite. The products of these artisans, far from being restricted to the homes of the wealthiest, were widely distributed throughout society. All but the poorest Chiribayas used, and broke, fancy pottery in their homes.
The most impressive burials were found by Dr. Jane Buikstra's project at Chiribaya Alta. Chiribaya Alta was the only clearly defensible site in the coastal valley, located on the sharp edge of the valley and surrounded by a defensive embankment and ditch. Many unusually large house compounds were packed inside the wall, while large cemeteries dotted the interior and surround the site outside the embankment. Chiribaya Alta was undoubtedly the seat of regional prestige and the home of a powerful leadership class.
Changing relationships in the coastal valley
When people first returned to the coastal valley, the Tumilaca settlers may have outnumbered the Chiribayas, the variation in wealth found in burials was minor, and Chiribaya Alta was probably little more than a prestigious village where the more fortunate Chiribayas and Tumilaca people were buried. As time passed, however, the Chiribaya population grew rapidly, produced increasingly sophisticated and costly craft goods, and began to bury some people with significant riches, suggesting the emergence of a more complex society. Meanwhile, the Tumilaca population declined and made ever cruder ceramics and fewer decorated textiles. The minor immigrant groups disappeared entirely.
Although they continued to use their own village cemeteries, descendants of the Tumilaca settlers ceased to be buried at Chiribaya Alta, suggesting that they had dropped out of the upper levels of society. The Chiribaya eventually built the embankment and ditch around Chiribaya Alta, protecting the rising elite within. By around 1250 AD, there were no visible descendants of the Tumilaca settlers left in the coastal valley. Perhaps the Tumilaca people "became" Chiribaya through marriage or other means, or they moved elsewhere, or they simply had smaller families and dwindled away.
The end of the Chiribaya
The Chiribaya prospered in the coastal valley until around 1350 AD, when torrential rains from a severe El Niño lashed the southern Andes. Dr. Michael Moseley has shown that enormous floods wiped out the fields and canals on the entire coastal valley floor, and massive mudslides destroyed the main canal, covered the reclaimed fields, and buried many Chiribaya villages. Many Chiribayas must have been killed immediately, and with their homes and farmland demolished, the rest would have suffered from exposure, poor nutrition, and disease. Although the Chiribaya did rebuild some fields and villages, their population never recovered, and they were ultimately absorbed by the next wave of immigrants to the coastal valley.
Fortresses in the mountains
Some time around 1200 AD, much of the Andes plunged into a period of constant raiding and warfare. Moquegua was no exception. People we call "Estuquiña" began to build walled villages on prominent hilltops and rocky ridges in the upper and middle Moquegua valley. Far more defensible than the Tumilaca phase settlements, these dense clusters of rectangular fieldstone houses were true fortresses, often ringed by two high, parallel walls with narrow gateways, separated by an empty no-man's land, and provided with parapets from which defenders could hurl sling stones that were cached there in case of attack. Steep-sided ditches and additional walls blocked access routes. Since the fortresses depended for drinking water on canals that an attacking force could easily cut off, they seem designed to repel brief raids rather than the siege of a conquering army. The enemies were probably other Estuquiña villagers.
Along the town walls and access routes stood cylindrical stone monuments, ranging from squat little platforms to massive towers three meters around and almost as high. Each one of these chullpa monuments contained the bones and burial offerings of numerous ancestors of both sexes and all ages, most likely members of the same family. Perhaps they staked a claim to the place or struck fear into the hearts of attackers. These traditions of building and burial, as well as a comparatively crude style of pottery, suggest that the Estuquiña tradition derives at least in part from the altiplano.
The Estuquiña population grew much larger than any that had gone before it, eventually expanding all the way to the coastal valley and the shoreline springs. In order to feed so many people in the upper valleys, they carved steep hillslopes into countless agricultural terraces supported by well-built stone walls, equipped with networks of feeder canals and reservoirs, and irrigated by long main canals built across rugged terrain. Many of the canals and fields in use today in the upper valleys were built by the Estuquiña.
Excavations by Dr. Donald Rice, Dr. Geoffry Conrad, Dr. Charles Stanish, and Antonio Ribiero show that the terraces were largely planted with corn, some of which may have been traded for fish, coca, and other products from the coast, and for charqui (dried llama meat), potatoes, or other specialties from the altiplano. By the mid 1400's, this trade with the altiplano apparently put the Estuquiña in indirect contact with the growing Inka state to the north, since they began to use some Inka pottery and an increasing number of small, generic copper items such as tupu clothing pins that were more widely produced and distributed in areas controlled by the Inka.
The Inka take control
Late in the 1400's, the armies of the Inka Maita Capac conquered the Titicaca basin and then marched towards Moquegua. According to the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, the Inka laid siege to an Estuquiña fortress, often thought to have been atop Cerro Baúl, although some other sites are also good candidates. Garcilaso says that after defeating the Estuquiña, the Inka built a town called Cuchuna on the slopes below the fortress, and another called Moquegua.
The Inka site of Moquegua has been virtually erased by continuous occupation of the historic city, but pieces of Inka pottery recently turned up near the Plaza de Armas when trenches were dug to install drain pipes. Cuchuna is probably the badly damaged Inka ruin of Sabaya, where typical Inka buildings, a plaza, and a small ushnu, or ceremonial mound, are still visible.
In addition to the two new towns, the Inka erected several other settlements in the upper valleys, built roads or modified existing ones connecting the towns to the coast, the altiplano, and other valleys, and built a small colca warehouse complex next to the main road in a large area of agricultural terraces. Much of the labor to build these works and to produce the crops to fill the Inka warehouses would have been provided by the Estuquiñas, who were forced to abandon many of their fortresses and move to lower villages where they posed less of a threat to the empire. The Inka did not depend only on brute force, but also encouraged the cooperation of Estuquiña leaders by granting them valuable cloth, ceramics, and metal goods, and rewarded many of the Estuquiña men with public ceremonies that involved drinking quantities of chicha beer.
The Inka were mostly interested in the corn production of the upper valleys, and evidence of their presence is scarce downstream from Moquegua. A few Inka burials in the coastal valley and by coastal springs suggest that the Inka may have obtained fish or other coastal resources there, but the Inka empire does not seem to have had much impact on the coastal Estuquiña. The changes that would transform the whole region more profoundly than the Inka ever did, brought by the Spanish conquest and the forced conversion from traditional farms to comercial plantation factories for wine, brandy, and olives, were yet to come.
Acknowledgements
The rich past of the Moquegua region has been rediscovered through decades of hard work by many archaeologists, foreign and Peruvian, far too numerous to list here. Their research has been generously supported by local government agencies, foreign scientific grants, and especially by Southern Peru Copper Corporation, through its long-term support of the Programa Contisuyo and the Asociación Contisuyo.
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