South American Indian

Early man

Archaeological evidence demonstrates that South America was occupied by early man at least 10,000 years ago, ample time for high civilizations to have evolved in the central Andes and for ecological adjustments to have been worked out elsewhere on the continent. Scientific dating techniques establish that agriculture was practiced along the Peruvian coast at least as early as 2300 bc. By 1000 bc agricultural societies flourished. This does not mean that all of South America had reached this stage of development nor that it was densely populated by farming communities. On the contrary, the continent was spottily inhabited by simply organized hunters and gatherers who then occupied the most favourable regions. As knowledge diffused from the central Andes to other parts of South America and as agriculture and other techniques were adopted by those peoples living in favourable environments, farming communities took form, and populations among them began to increase. Thus, on the foundation of early hunting and gathering societies, the more complex social and cultural systems gradually were built in those areas where agriculture developed; cultural growth and social complexity followed apace. Hunters and gatherers were pushed out of the farming regions to agriculturally marginal areas, where some of them are found today.

The original migrants to the New World had no knowledge of the domestication of plants or animals, with the exception of dogs, which were used in hunting. Recent discoveries in Mexico indicate that agriculture was independently discovered in the New World in roughly the same era that it was established in the Middle East (about 7000–8000 bc) and that New World civilizations were built on an indigenous agricultural base.

It is known archaeologically that cultural influences from Asia, as well as latter-day migrations of people such as the Eskimo, continued to impinge on parts of the New World over the millennia, but New World cultural developments that culminated in the formation of high civilizations in Mexico and Peru were overwhelmingly the product of native, independent invention in almost all spheres of cultural and social life. Sporadic influences probably reached Peru and the western parts of the tropical forests from across the Pacific Ocean, but their effect on the course of cultural development in this hemisphere was negligible. Native America constituted a separate cultural unit, comparable to that of the Old World.

The development of civilizations

The archaeological record for the central Andes shows a step-by-step development of cultural and social forms from a preagricultural, hunting and gathering baseline some 10,000 years ago to the Inca empire in the 15th century ad. The record does not show any significant cultural influence on this development from transpacific contacts.

The evidence on early hunting and gathering peoples in Peru is still sparse. It is not yet possible to reconstruct social patterns, since most of the remains consist only of shellfish middens and small, widely scattered campsites along the coast. It was a period of thousands of years’ duration, however, toward the end of which some knowledge of plant domestication reached the Peruvian coast.

The next major era is set off by incipient agriculture and also is characterized by the remains of small, hamlet-type communities along the Pacific Ocean near river mouths, where the alluvial soil was able to support crops. Technology remained simple, irrigation was not practiced, and population remained small.

After the passage of 1,000 years or so, marked developments appear in the archaeological record. These include many new crops, irrigation ditches that extended the arable area and controlled the supply of water, more and larger communities that attest to a growing population, and important temple mounds that formed the symbolic centres of theocratic government controlled by a priestly class. The formative era saw the development of the basic technologies and life-styles that were to become elaborated into even more complex cultural forms and state institutions. The emergence of city-states and empires in the central Andes is the result of local cultural-ecological adjustments of this sort, based on an irrigation agriculture that supported growing populations and necessitated controls in the hands of priests and nobles, with a warrior class subservient to the state.

About 500 bc strong regional styles began to appear in the manufacture of utilitarian and luxury goods and public buildings. An abundance of large temple mounds, more extensive and intricate irrigation networks, cities, roads, bridges, reservoirs, and other works calling for mass labour and tight controls characterize this cultural florescence. It was capped by the crystallization of class-organized societies, supported by masses of farm families and conscript labour, defended by well-organized and well-disciplined troops, catered to by a large number of master craftsmen, and ruled and regulated by a class of priests and nobles.

During the last phase of the prehistoric era in the central Andes, which began about ad 1000, regional states came to be absorbed into vast empires, the best known of which was the Inca empire. The Inca began their expansion in 1438 and completed it in 1532, by which time the Spaniards landed on the northern coast of Peru at what is now the seaport of Paita. The Inca spread their imperial bureaucracy from Ecuador to central Chile and implanted their religious beliefs and practices, as well as much of their culture and the Quechua language, in the process of empire building. Their achievement was cut short by the Spanish conquest under Pizarro, at a time when the Inca empire seemed on the verge of civil war.