The Norte Chico Civilization: A Glance We Don’t Understand

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When we think of ancient civilizations, we think about the Middle East. However, there is one ancient civilization, that not even a lot of researchers knew about until very recently, the Norte Chico . They lived in coastal Peru from 3,000 BC all the way to 1,800BC, as old as ancient Egypt. Despite their age and obvious importance to our history on the planet, the sites were only discovered in the 1940s, with people only really starting to pay attention after a particularly famous paper was released in 2001. Despite this new interest, we still know very little about the Norte Chico. And what we do know, is very weird. Let’s dive in, to the Norte Chico.

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The Norte Chico: What we actually know

We do not know very much about the Norte Chico. There has been extensive carbon dating of a large number of sites, so we know that the areas were well inhabited from 3,000 BC to 1,800 BC. This means they are a very early civilization, comparable to Sumeria and Egypt, but half the world away. Previously to their discovery, it was thought that the first civilizations in the Americas were the Olmecs and other central American civilizations a few hundred years AD. The Mayans, Incans and Aztecs that we all know and love came few a millennia after them. The discovery of the Norte Chico destroyed these ideas. They were around more than two millennia earlier than any of the previously known American civilizations. They almost seem to come out of nowhere. And frankly, once they disbanded, it doesn’t really seem like any other similar civilizations came after them either. They really are just out on their own.

The first thing to know about the Caral area, where the Norte Chico lived, is that it is very dry. In fact, it is one of the driest places on earth. The civilization is all densely crowded around the few rivers the flow through the area. Compared to the fertile Egyptian Nile and Mesopotamian banks, the Norte Chico seemed to have started to thrive in a very difficult part of the world.

The second thing to know about the Norte Chico is that we don’t know much about them. Their sites lack a lot of things that are normal to find in ancient civilizations’ sites. For instance, from what we know, the Norte Chico seemed:
– to have no visual art whatsoever – no carvings, no paintings, no sculpture, no metalwork;
– to have no pottery – all their food seems to have been roasted; and
– no written language – we can’t seem to find any symbols that could have been functioning as a written language; and
– almost no agriculture – only seeming to grow cotton; and
– no warfare – we have never found any weapons and none of their cities seemed to have any defensive structures.

Now we might just be wrong about a lot of this. It is obviously possible that they had art, written language and the evidence just didn’t survive into the modern world.

However, it is also possible that they just relied on these things a lot less than other ancient civilizations. It seems from the evidence of skeletons we have recovered, that they ate had mainly a marine-based diet of fish and sea birds (we have almost never found any other animal bones). We have also found a large number of bone flutes – so they were almost certainly musical.

Also, while they may not have had a writing system, they may have had a very different way of recording things. We know they had something called “Quipu”. Quipu are recording devices used to store information in certain South American cultures. They are basically long strings, with a large number of smaller strings attached, which have knots tied into them. A knot in a quipu can indicate almost anything, a number, a date. They could also notably be read by blind people, as the knots were large enough to feel. The Incans used them, and also probably lacked a writing system.

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The Norte Chico: What we can learn

The Norte Chico can teach us many things. But one thing, in particular, is humility. The Norte Chico were clearly a great human civilization, with a remarkable number of similarities to Egypt, Sumer and Indus. However, they evolved halfway across the world, completely independently, developing a completely different way of living. And they did this, not on fertile luscious planes like Egypt, but in a harsh and dry desert. They both confirm our theories about human civilization, that it formed from nomadic peoples settling down and creating shared cultures through gods, rituals and temples. But they also challenge those theories, with their almost complete absence of written language and art.

We have so much more to learn about them. Not only have we not finished learning about them, really it feels like we have not even started.

There is so much mystery and wonder in the world.