Origins of the North Coast
Tradition of Civilization
Initial Period
(1800/1600 BC – 500 BC)
1. The Initial Period was a 1000-year span in which agriculture was adopted on the coast as the primary source of subsistence and in which a way of life based on irrigation agriculture consolidated and evolved with its accompanying political, economic and ideological features. While these used existing traits of the Maritime Civilization Period significantly, they also modified and changed these to fit the requirements of new geographical settings and social circumstances.
2. Around 1800 BC sites like El Paraiso emerge to mark the transition from a primarily marine to an agricultural subsistence base. By the middle of the millennium, this transition was complete and although marine exploitation continued to play a significant role in coastal economy, it remained secondary to agriculture from this time on.
3. The chief features of the Initial Period agricultural society were
- Change in focus of subsistence from sea to inland coastal river valleys and adjacent desert.
- Change in population concentration from near shore to a more scattered pattern through the valleys.
- Change in location of major settlements from shore to inland coastal valley locations.
- Development of valley-wide irrigation farming systems fed by canals tapping coastal rivers.
- Move from primary subsistence dependence on marine resources to one based on cultivated plants.
- Rise of maize, beans and a variety of secondary warm-climate crops as the dietary staple.
- Move toward unification of several valleys into large economic units.
- Progressive centralization of political authority.
- Progressive increase in size and elaboration of architectural center of social integration.
- Large-scale labor mobilization and control by progressively more powerful rulers.
- Increased social ranking.
- Labor specialization.
- Evolution of multi-valley political units from small inland origins near the primary water sources.
- Emergence of “codified” iconography as the artistic expression of official political ideology.
- Evolution of transcendental political/religious ideologies from restricted local origins.
4. The long Initial period saw the early movement from the large shoreline centers of the Maritime period like Aspero back into the necks of the coastal river valleys where it was easiest to tap the rivers with canals and to create irrigated field systems near the river. As time elapsed numbers of these small agricultural societies emerged, each coalescing around a small ceremonial/religious center with its focal platform mound (inherited from the Aspero tradition). Probably each of these constituted a kin-based ayllu society with its few ranked lineages giving political primacy to the senior line. Each of these societies maintained and controlled its own canal system and fields as in the later ayllu model. Through time as population increased greater expanses of land were brought under cultivation with longer canals, which required multi-community cooperation. This trend led through informal cooperation to the establishment of larger centers, first religious, later more overtly political, under the senior lineage of one community. Ultimately this development led to the incorporation of all of the previously autonomous societies into valley-wide segmentary polities within which they represented the local, rural social component. At their greatest extent huge sites like Sechín Alto may have consolidated the first multi-valley political system on the north coast (although El Paraiso may have been the “social/religious” center of a considerable area even earlier).
1. Initial Period architectural centers were based on the platform mound. This was essentially a flat-topped stone and/or adobe brick pyramidal structure approached by a central ramp or flight of steps. Later in the northern part of the region ramps were aligned laterally up the sides of the platforms – a regional stylistic variation.
2. The Initial Period platforms were often arranged in U-shaped pattern with the arms of the U consisting of one or more platforms on each side flanking a large rectangular plaza that sometimes contained a sunken court. Examples like the Huaca de los Reyes in the Moche Valley and Cerro Sechín in the Casma Valley illustrate the pattern.
3. The large summits held small room arrangements and large open courts upon which rituals of political power were performed. These rituals, directed by rulers acting as shamanistic officiates, probably enacted the myths that gave north coast people cosmological order and assured them of the ability of their rulers to mobilize the spirits of nature and the ancestors to ensure social health and the continued largesse of the rain and earth. In addition this role elevated the ruler’s authority by utilizing basic Andean conception and changing it in scope to be the official ideology of political power.
4. These ideological systems were kept to the forefront of social awareness by placing their symbolic representations through monumental friezes on the facades of the platforms where they were visible to the population at large. In this way they permanently encoded the official state ideology and communicated it to the onlooker, asserting the basis and presence of the prevailing political order.
5. This general pattern of political control was apparently subject to local modification to fit the specific beliefs and myths of the kinship groups whose integration had originally created the Initial Period polities. Through most of the Initial Period each valley polity appears to have retained its own version of north coastal ideology and belief. Thus, although the general features of style and technique of the monumental ideological art is similar through the north coast valleys, each valley possessed its own specific iconographic content.
1. In the period ca. 600-400 BC the Initial Period pattern comes to an end; its large centers are no longer built and many are abandoned. It is replaced by a relatively short period of transition before the Moche unification. The first part of this transition is termed the Early Horizon.
2. The Early Horizon is characterized by a distinctive elite artistic style expressed in a variety of portable media, accompanied by related technological developments and economic interaction, that brings at least superficial connections to the previously distinct cultural expressions of the north coastal valleys and beyond.
3. This phenomenon is most easily identified by the spread of an art style whose iconography draws on that of the ceremonial site of Chavín de Huantar in the Central Highlands. This stylistic unity probably reflects the attempts by the failing elites of the coast to bolster their power by adopting a new powerful ideology that transcended the local traditions of the individual valleys. By accepting the new Chavín traits they tried to base their authority on wider conceptions that linked elites and broke the traditional strength of local kinship groups – a basic move toward separating the rulers structurally from the population at large as in truly stratified societies.
4. Chavín de Huantar was an early site of the Kotosh Tradition. It remained fairly modest in size and appearance until around 500 BC when it experienced a rapid period of expansion with the construction of major ceremonial architecture containing a variety of highly complex monumental sculpture that incorporated elements from the coast, highlands and tropical forest. The great platforms of Chavín were approached through sunken courts and flights of stone steps and possessed unique features in their internal galleries, elaborate water channeling, and embellishment. These, together with its iconography, suggest that the settlement became the center of a religious complex that incorporated concepts from large areas of the Andes and adjacent rain forest into a highly influential cult whose symbolism was adopted widely on the north and central coast.
5. Advances in metallurgy (gold, silver, copper), ceramic, and textile technology were probably stimulated by the need for the elaborate symbolism of the Chavín Horizon by the threatened elites of the coast. In addition the newfound interaction initiated by the widespread adoption of a common ideology also caused more intensive economic interaction as reflected in the distribution of obsidian throughout the Central Andes.
6. Finally, in several areas such as Pachacamac and Paracas on the central coast almost the entire complex of Chavín symbolism occurred by contrast with other areas where only limited elements were adopted. It has been suggested that these specific sites were the locations of oracles or pilgrimage areas where they represented junior members of the “kin” of the senior pilgrimage center at Chavín in the characteristic Andean belief system.
7. Around 200 BC the Chavín “horizon” came to an end and the regional development of the north coast continued into the Early Intermediate Period in the context of further unrest.