Where is the evidence of Cities and Buildings – Part I

Map of the largest concentration of early Peruvian construction at Aspero

 

Aspero is a well-studied Late Preceramic site of the ancient Norte Chico civilization, located at the mouth of the Supe river on the north-central Peruvian coast. The site covers an area of approximately 35 acres and is made up of two large platform mounds, Huaca de los Sacrificios and Huaca de los Idolos. There is noquestion that Aspero had a cultural connection with  neighboring sites. Researchers have established a general timeline which links Aspero and its adjacent sites to a much larger cultural system that spread across several valleys (Jonathan Haas, et al., “Dating the LateArchaic occupation of the Norte Chico region in Peru,” Nature, vol.432, 2004, pp1020-1023).

Aspero was the largest concentration of early communal constructions existed between the Chicama and the Rimac Valleys, with community labor construction defined as a building or architectural feature believed to be the product of an organized work force larger than several nuclear families—the phrase “nuclear” is from the noun nucleus, itself originating in the Latin nux, meaning "nut", i.e. the core of something.

The amount of community labor at Aspero suggests the beginnings of a complex, nonegalitarian society (Moseley and Willey 1973:453). The Aspero site, in the Supe drainage near the Pacific shoreline with nearby floodwater farmland, represents one of the earliest Preceramic period monumental constructions (R.A. Feldman, “Preceramic Corporate Architecture: Evidence for the Development of Non-Egalitarian Social Systems in Peru,  In Early Ceremonial Architecture in the Andes, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, 1985, p17)

The large preceramic site of Aspero, on the central Peruvian coast, was explored in the past; however, these investigators did not recognize the presence of sizable artificial platform mounds or “community labor structures” at the site, where they moved from a marine economy to an agricultural one at the close of the Cotton Preceramic period about 2000 BC.

The Aspero site has 150,000 to 200,000 cubic meters of cultural deposits and covered 35 acres, on which were 6 truncated pyramids among the 17 mounds. 

The isometric Reconstruction pyramid at Aspero called the Huaca de los Idolos built around 2500 BC

 

The largest of the mounds or pyramids, called Huaca de los Idolos, measured 131 feet by 98 feet by 35 feet high and was topped with summit rooms and courts (K.D. Kornbacher, “Cultural Elaboration in Prehistoric Coastal Peru: An Example of Evolution in a Temporally Variable Environment,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, vol.18: 1999, pp282- 318).

The raised platforms feature modeled and painted clay friezes, and the mounds evidence cobble and basalt block masonry in adobe construction. The pyramids are composed of successive phases of stonewalled rooms, built by progressive infilling around the rooms. The outer platform walls are of large, angular basaltic rocks set in adobe mortar with a smooth outer surface coated with plaster and occasionally painted (M.E. Moseley and G. R. Willey, “Aspero, Perú: A Reexamination of the Site and its Implications, American Antiquity, vol.38: 1973, p459).

Another pyramid, huaca de los Sacrificios is similar in size to Huaca de Los Idolos, and has rooms over 33 square feet, with stone walls 3½ feet thick and 8 feet high, with stones almost 3½ feet square in volume.

According to Moseley and Willey, the Aspero site yielded the earliest date of all Early horizon structures (900 to 200 BC—the period where the apogee of Chavín de Huantar in the northern highland of Peru and the successive widespread of the Chavín culture and its artistic motifs. Inadditin to the Chavín, this period also included the Late Chripa, Paracas, Pechiche, Pucará, and Sechura. 

 Some of the style of walls and construction in the Casma Valley

 

Also contemporary was the Casma–Sechin culture (Sechin Complex) to 200 BC, which refers to the large concentration of pre-historic ruins in the valleys of the Casma River and its tributary the Sechin River and along the nearby coast of the Pacific. These ruins include major archaeological sites such as Sechin Bajo, Sechin Alto, Cerro Sechin, Mojeque; also at this time were the Chankillo and Taukachi-Konkan, as well as other smaller sites. El Paraíso, situated just over one mile inland from the mouth of the Chillón River and adjacent to floodplain cultivation land, was the largest of the Preceramic period monuments, and, at three times larger than any of its contemporaries, was once the largest expression of organization and labor investment in all of South America.

Most of these inland sites are found in the river valleys about 20 12 miles distant from the ocean. The seaside sites of Huaynuná and Las Haldas found about 10 miles north and south of the mouth of the Casma River on the coast. In addition, at this time, the Moche culture of the north underwent a radical reorganization, with the move of its main city farther north and inland.

It might be of interest that this large area of the Land of Promise is never mentioned in the scriptural record, yet Mormon writes that the Nephites “did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east (Helaman 3:8). 

There are 20 rivers crossing the coastal desert, from the snow-covered Andes to the coast, between Pachacamac and Chiclayo

 

Fronting this driest of deserts is the world's richest fishery, and according to Feldman, inclusion of the large quantities of available small fish along the Peruvian coast in resource inventories allows a theoretical population level of over 1 million persons.

Among the other earliest stone buildings are those of Río Seco and Bandurria, the latter a Preceramic period site near the shoreline of the Huaura River, which has an unexcavated pyramid mound. Río Seco is near the seacoast along the Chancay River, with the Preceramic period constructions there that include five or six pyramid mounds built by successive room filling, with two mounds measuring 33 to 50 feet diameter by 35 feet high (Rosa Fung Pineda, “ The Late Preceramic and Initial Period,” Peruvian Prehistory, edited by R. W. Keatinge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p72).

So where is the evidence of cities and buildings that show such ancient wide-spread development and occupation in the Western Hemisphere?

(See the next post, “Where is the evidence of Cities and Buildings – Part II,” regarding the lack of evidence of wide-spread occupation and its evidence of building and streets on the magnitude of Mormon’s many descriptions of the Nephites being on “all the face of the land”)