Chankillo towers at sunset
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6321193
My name is Jordi Rivera Prince and I’m excited to share about life during the Salinar, a time period from ~400-50 BCE on the North and Central coasts of modern-day Peru. I’m an archaeologist at the University of Florida and working on a project to understand the origins of social inequality in the region.
I got interested in archaeology pretty late—after I finished college! I never knew archaeology was a real subject I could study (I only saw it in movies). In college, I studied osteology, which I learned about in a TV show called Bones. I also did research with human skeletons in museums. After college, I worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. There, I was part of a team that analyzed human skeletons from historic sitesI learned a lot about archaeology and was interested in how we can learn about the past by researching human bones.
At the University of Florida, I specialize in bioarchaeology. That is,I study human bones found at archaeological sites to answer questions about past societies. For example, we can use bones to find out what someone ate in the past! Outside of school, I like reading, going for hikes, and listening to reggaeton.
In this kit, I am going to share with you about life during the Salinar Period. Salinar people lived mostly along the beaches, and in the valleys in the foothills of the Andes Mountains. Although they lived over 2000 years ago, Salinar people were really creative, resourceful, and artistic. I’ll tell you a bit about how the Salinar made solar towers at Chankillo, and about the site where I do work, called La Iglesia. (You can find these sites on the map, above).
One final note: since my research talks about bioarchaeology, I do talk about a burial in one of the sections below. However, there are no photos of human remains.
Hope you enjoy!
Jordi Rivera Prince
Salinar: the name archaeologists give to a group of people who lived in coastal Peru from about 400 - 50 BCE.
social inequality: differences in social organization based on different access to goods, power, or even certain information.
osteology: the study of the human skeleton, how human bones grow and function together in the human body.
bioarchaeology: the study of bones from archaeological sites to find out about human life or the environment in the past. Most bioarchaeologists study human bones. Others study animal bones, but that specialty is usually called Zooarchaeology.
Jordi Rivera Prince excavating at the Huacas de Sicán in the La Leche Valley of Peru, a site that was once the capital for the Sicán culture (850-1375 CE).
Peru is part of the Andes, a large region that spans from Ecuador to the north to Chile to the South. The Andes have one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, and most scientists recognize at least 8 different ecological zones in the region. However, these can be broadly grouped into three settings:
- a coastal desert zone with river valleys that run perpendicular to the Pacific Ocean,
- east of the coast is Andean mountain range with high elevation and dry conditions, and
- on the eastern side of the Andes is the Amazon tropical forest zone.
These changes in ecological zones happen very quickly—Peru is about as wide as California.
Coastal desert in Perú
A view of the highlands in the Andes Mountains
Amazon tropical forest zone on the eastern side of the Andes
Prior to the Salinar, people all over the Andes were practicing (or at least co-existing with) a religious tradition called Chavín (800 - 500/400 BCE). Chavín is identified in the archaeological record by its distinct decoration designs, especially the iconography that looks like a feline or a cat. People also traveled from all over the Andes and made a pilgrimage to the monumental site Chavín de Huántar in the central highlands of Peru. During Chavín times, society was highly stratified. This means that at important monumental sites there were a few very powerful elite people that likely controlled art, rituals, and other aspects of life. People devoted a lot of time to construct these very large monuments, but they did not yet build any sites that resembled a city.
However, around 500/400 BCE, life in the Andes changed pretty dramatically when people abandoned the Chavín religious tradition. Communities even abandoned monumental sites, sometimes even in the middle of construction! All over the Central Andes, people moved closer to the mountains and began building the first major urban areas, but, unlike Chavín, they did not build monuments. They also started trading new foods and other objects across very long distances, like cacao (chocolate) which comes from the Amazon region! People also started building a lot of defensive sites like fortresses in high-up places. Archaeologists believe this time period was filled with a lot of violence and fighting. This is the beginning of the Salinar culture
The Salinar Period is often described as a time of social reorganization, experimentation, and new ways of living life. In comparison to the Chavín culture, the Salinar began living in bigger communities with perhaps hundreds of families all together. These families built bigger houses located next to each other much like a neighborhood—like at Cerro Arena located in the lower Moche Valley (see map, above). In order to live in bigger groups, families and community members at Cerro Arena also participated in intensive farming, usually growing crops like maize (corn), and tubers like potatoes Although people farmed before the Salinar, growing food became a more important and intense job at places like Cerro Arena.
Lower Moche Valley, one of many coastal valleys in the foothills of the Andes. The green shows where the Moche river flows from the highlands to the Pacific Ocean, bringing fresh water that made intensive farming possible in the valleys.
Examples of modern agricultural fields where farmers use terrace farming to maximize the use of their water and even influence temperature.
The Salinar is an important transitional time period in the Andes. For one, they rejected Chavín culture, which was one of the most powerful and influential cultures at that time. Instead, the Salinar began organizing their communities, trading, and exchanging in many ways that are similar to the later Moche society. The Moche Society (~100 - 800 CE) was very different from Chavín. Moche people organized in five different social classes ranging from poor laborers to elite priests and priestesses. They lived in small villages, cities, as well as large religious centers. The elite Moche also required commoner people to perform labor, whether making adobe clay bricks, constructing water canals for irrigation, or growing food, as a form of tax payment. The Moche are believed to have created the first state-based society in the Andes.
In between the Chavín and the Moche was the Salinar, which means the Salinar people are important to understanding this long-term change in the Andes. Though the Salinar have much to reveal, they are not studied very much in archaeology when compared to other cultures like the Inca. As you can imagine, understanding a time period with lots of major changes is very difficult! But recently, archaeologists like myself have begun to shift our focus to this time period.
The Salinar were first described by Peruvian archaeologist Rafael Larco Hoyle in 1944. Larco Hoyle was from a very wealthy family on the North Coast of Peru that owned many sugarcane fields. His father, Rafael Larco Herrera, liked to collect ceramics taken from archaeological sites by collectors and huaqueros (looters). Based on their Larco Collection, Larco Hoyle noticed a similar style of ceramics he calls the “white-on-red” style. He saw these ceramics during excavations in burials dating earlier than the Moche, but later than Chavín. So, he proposed the coastal Chavín culture turned into the Salinar culture, which then turned into the Moche society.
Example of a white-on-red style Salinar ceramic excavated by the Programa Arqueológico Huanchaco at the La Iglesia Site. White-on-red style was very different from the ceramics of the previous culture on the coast, which were often dark or black. Ceramics turn black because when they were fired they were exposed to the smoke of burning wood.
Around the same time Rafael Larco Hoyle did his work on the North Coast, another famous Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello was beginning his career in Lima. Tello was from the highlands of Peru, where many Indigenous communities are located today. Tello did not agree with Larco Hoyle about the Salinar. He believed the Salinar came from the highlands, and then later transitioned into the Moche. The two men were at odds: Larco Hoyle, who was from the coast, believed the impressive Moche had coastal beginnings. Tello, who was from the highlands, believed the Moche came from highland beginnings. This is a debate that continues today!
The Salinar were originally defined by a shared ceramic style. Prior to the 1960s, many archaeologists would define past cultures in that way. This would be like saying everyone in your state who has white plates is part of the same culture. While that is sometimes true, it is often better to research and understand a culture by looking for shared traditions like language, similar ways of making food, or even shared holidays. All these parts of life are not necessarily ceramics. Just because someone shares the same type of ceramics, it does not always mean they are part of the same culture.
This change in how archaeologists think about culture has also transformed how archaeologists think about the Salinar. In the early 2000s and 2010s, a new group of archaeologists started working in the Nepeña Valley, in Central Peru. Their goal was to understand the Salinar beyond just a shared style of ceramics, and look for other practices that the Salinar had in common. Perhaps starting with the Salinar, coastal communities in the Andes came to use camelids for wool, meat, and as pack animals, much like their neighbors in the highlands. The Salinar built camelid corrals and bred small groups of them, an early experiment in camelid herding (a practice that later became important in Moche society) . Llamas and alpacas are important for their wool, and are strong pack-animals that carry heavy loads for long distances. The Salinar were also very good at trading with their neighbors to help one another. In the Nepeña Valley, for example, there was a strong connection between three sites, Samanco on the coast, Caylán in the middle valley, and Huambacho in the upper valley. (You can zoom in to see these locations on the map at the top of the page). The men and women at the urban site of Caylán traded the food they grew for fish from the fisher people of Samanco. Trading food helped form a larger community, and the Salinar could also eat all different kinds of food like avocado, manioc (like yucca), maize, peppers, as well as functional crops like cotton, that may not have been easy to catch or grow close to their home.
Left: purple maize (corn), and two types of Peruvian peppers (inside the red circles).
Right: Peruvian cotton. Cotton has many uses including making textiles, fishing nets, and fishing lines.
Today, the Salinar people are understood as a large diversity of people who ate many kinds of foods and traveled and traded with their neighbors near and far. The Salinar were experimenting with making new tools, new rituals, and even new larger, interconnected communities that looked like small cities.
While a defining feature of the Salinar was the abandonment of monumental architecture, there are the remains of a few large buildings along the coast of Peru. Archaeologists originally called them “fortresses”. One of these sites is called Chankillo (see map, above), located in the Casma Valley just north of the modern-day city of Lima. Chankillo is close to the Pacific Ocean, so while the surrounding environment is a desert, the people that lived there could access seafood as well as land resources like the algarrobo tree that was used for fuel (burning) or construction.
Example of a desert zone between the mountains and the ocean. The trees that you can see in all the photos are algarrobo trees. They are commonly used for burning fuel and construction. Their pods are used to make a thick syrup called algarrobina that is considered a “superfood” that is naturally sweet and high in good vitamins and minerals like iron.
Chankillo has a structure that, from above, looks like circles nested within larger circles—like a target. This building is called the Temple of the Pillars. Outside of the Temple of the Pillars is a large plaza. While the plaza may not have been used everyday, people would come there from near and far to be together and feast during significant times of the year related to the sun. But how do we know the sun was important for the Salinar?
If you were standing in the Temple of the Pillars back in 300 BCE, and you looked in the distance towards the mountains, you would have seen thirteen tall mounds in an orderly row. These mounds are called the Chankillo Towers. Archaeologists were able to use computers to simulate the position of the sun during the Salinar times when Chankillo was being used. They noticed that each of the towers at Chankillo roughly matched the position of the sun at one-month intervals. During the winter solstice, the sun rose behind the first tower on the left. On the summer solstice, the sun rose behind the last tower on the right. In effect, the whole site is a giant calendar. People likely came to Chankillo during the winter and summer solstices, as well as other important solar events, and gathered in the plaza to have large feasts and drink lots of chicha
Aerial view of the Chankillo site, screenshot from Google maps
Aerial view of the Temple of the Pillars, on the right. On the left, you can see the Chankillo Towers running along the ridge of a hill in the distance.
So was this place a fortress? Most recent excavations at the Temple of the Pillars were done by a Peruvian archaeologist named Dr. Iván Ghezzi. He believes that the Temple of the Pillars was not necessarily used to defend from attack. Rather, the Temple of the Pillars likely protected special objects or even calendrical knowledge inside. If only certain women and men could enter the Temple and see the Chankillo Towers, then they would be the only people with detailed knowledge about the sun and the seasons. Unlike other people, they would know exactly when to begin growing and harvesting food. Therefore, the people who could enter the Temple of the Pillars likely had a lot of respect within the Salinar community.
The Chankillo Towers are believed to be the oldest solar observatory in the Americas, and were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2021.
This diagram shows where the sun would set throughout a full year, as viewed from the area of the Temple of the Pillars. The sun would set behind the tower on the far right on December 21/22. As the earth moves around the sun, sunsets would slowly move to the left and the sun would set behind the far left tower on the June solstice (June 20/21). Then, for the second half of the year the process runs in reverse. In this way the towers work as a calendar.
A view of the Chankillo towers at sunset. Based on the explanation above, what month do you think it might be? (Hint: there are two correct answers).
During Chavín times, power was very much separated into two groups, the elites and the commoners. However, in larger communities, like Salinar communities, it is difficult to keep such a strong divide. Eventually communities will develop social inequality, or differences in social organization based on different access to goods, power, or even certain information. The beginning of social inequality in the Andes likely began during the Salinar.
Archaeologists see this clearly at the site La Iglesia (see map, above), the cemetery of a small fishing community that lived in what is now Huanchaco in the Moche Valley of Peru. My own work at La Iglesia has used human burials as a way to understand social inequality during the Salinar. Generally in the Andes, fisher people were thought of as being poorer because their life revolved around fishing and gathering shellfish, instead of producing prestigious materials like gold. However, while some of the people at La Iglesia were buried with nothing or maybe one or two ceramic vessels, some of the people were buried with rare objects, and some burials had wealth that was in between those two ends of the spectrum. . It was unexpected to find objects of power and status in a small fishing community. These burials, with different amounts of valuable objects, shows there was social inequality along a spectrum. Some people in the community were wealthy, some were poor, and some were in-between.
Another example of a fancy Salinar ceramic vessel (fineware) found in the burial of an elderly woman. The ceramic vessel has a sitting person at the base of the handle, and depicts a hairstyle with a bun on the top of the head. This is the first time we have found representations of people on ceramic vessels in the Moche Valley from the Salinar time period.
Photo on the right courtesy of Programa Arqueológico Huanchaco (PAHUAN)
Archaeologists now believe that instead of power being held by just a few people at very important Salinar sites—like a king or royal family and their castle—power to a lesser degree could be held even at small sites, like mayors or local well-known families. One example of a person considered a “local elite” at La Iglesia is burial IG433, belonging to a woman who was over 45 years old when she died. This was normal. People who survived the dangers of childhood often lived until they were 40 - 50 years old. She was buried with six fineware vessels, a dog, and two pieces of gold. The first was a small square placed in her mouth, perhaps as a pago for her journey to the afterlife. The second piece is one of the most impressive objects found in the entire cemetery, and perhaps the coolest object I’ve ever found during my excavations. In the Andes, burials of powerful people often have narigueras. Narigueras were a type of nose ring and usually hung down to cover the person’s mouth. They are understood to be markers of powerful people. The woman in burial IG433 had a nariguera decorated with a delicate wave pattern along the border to represent the Pacific Ocean which would have been a source of food and important in the beliefs of her community.
Nariguera (top) and gold square (bottom) right after taking them out of Burial IG433
We do not know why the woman in burial IG433 was considered important by her community, but based on the nariguera maybe she was respected for her knowledge about the ocean. Given her older age, it is also possible she was an elder in the community. Therefore, in the Salinar, or at least Salinar fishing communities, people likely earned power and respect from a lifetime of wisdom and giving guidance to their community.
Peru has a very long history of traditional fishing. Today, in the town of Huanchaco where the La Iglesia is, there are fishermen that use a traditional reed fishing boat called the caballito de totora The caballito de totora has a half-moon shape. Archaeologists believe fishermen have been using boats like the caballito de totora for over 3,500 years! There are ceramic vessels that are shaped like a person riding on top of a half-moon shaped boat, which is very similar to the shape of the modern-day reed boats. It’s very likely the people of Huanchaco have passed their knowledge through their family for thousands of years.
Huanchaco Bay, looking to the north. The boats are lined up as the men had come back from their fishing trip for the day. The green piles in front of the caballitos are fishing nets. Today they are made of nylon, but in the past the nets would have been made with Peruvian cotton.
This sculpture shows a person on a boat very similar to the modern caballito do totoro. It was created by the Wari, a society that emerged around 500 CE.
Image source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Figure in Boat, 6th - 9th century, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)
It takes a long time and a lot of special training to become an artisanal fisherman. Knowledge about fishing is passed down from grandfather to grandson. About fifty men use the caballito boats today in order to fish, but only about twenty of those men are full-time fishermen—fewer men than even 50 years ago. Women and children also help with gathering shellfish like clams and oysters which are either cooked at home or sold in the markets.
Women play a very important role in the modern-day fishing economy. The fishermen believe the ocean is feminine, “la mar.” She provides them with the fish that they catch and eat. When the fishermen return to shore, they give their fish to their wives or other women in their family—the fishermen are passing fish from one “woman” (the sea) to another (the modern women). Women sell the fish to restaurants, in markets, or prepare the fish to eat at home. Women, therefore, are central to providing for the family fishing communities.
Cart belonging to a woman in the local market selling crabs, clams, and other seafood.
Huanchaco is a world-famous surfing town. It has one of the longest left-leaning waves in the world, and famous surfers like Piccolo Clemente have come from Huanchaco. There is a large number of surfing tourists that visit and help sustain the economy of this small town. As a result, many of the current grandsons of fishermen are no longer learning the traditional craft of artisanal fishing. Instead, some are opening surfing schools and teaching tourists how to surf. Others are leaving Huanchaco to go to university and move to the cities. Unfortunately, this means that caballito de totora traditional fishing may not survive much longer. But for now, it’s impossible to visit Huanchaco without admiring the shoreline filled with caballito de totora boats, or even see them represented in graffiti!
Street art located in Huanchaco, showing how modern art (this graffiti-influenced wall mural) and ancient art (Moche iconography) can blend. All the images in the squares in the background are from Moche culture. The squares on the second row from the top depict Ai Apaec, a Moche god also called the “decapitator god” as he’s often depicted standing with decapitated heads in both hands. Artist unknown (tag was covered).
A mural located in a mall in Trujillo. Notice on the left-hand panel, “la mar” painted as a woman with her hair turning into waves. On the far left are the caballitos de totora as seen today in Huanchaco. On the left part of the right-hand panel, you can see the caballito de totora as depicted in Moche art. Ai Apaec is present to the far right. In the middle you see the ruins of the Huacas de Moche, which were pyramid-shaped temple complexes. Art by @ana.ctb.
Learn more about Chavín de Huantar and the period that preceded the Salinar period.
Learn more about the Moche, the society that emerged at the end of the Salinar period.
You can watch more about the fishing community of Huanchaco in this National Geographic short film.