Opening Hidden Gateways.

• Author: Church, Warren
• Position: Archaeology in the Andes

In the last decade, the study of pre-Hispanic archaeology in South America seems to have become the science of the unexpected. Surprising discoveries and counterintuitive explanations have become commonplace. Long-cherished interpretations of major prehistoric events and ancient cultures have been overturned. Ten years ago, few among us would have predicted the discovery of Clovis-age foraging cultures in the Amazon Basin, or the hemisphere's earliest pottery in the Amazon's "green hell." Likewise, the recent rescue of mummies and artifacts from looted cliff tombs at the Lake of the Condors in the Andean cloud forests of northern Peru yielded the kinds of wood and cloth artifacts that most of us assumed had rotted away centuries ago in the wet jungle soils of Chachapoyas. As finds like these are unearthed our western twentieth-century preconceptions fall victim. The forest-cloaked eastern slopes of the central Andes, I have long believed, are especially pregnant with surprises.

Discoveries that have revolutionized our view of human Occupation and prehistoric societies on the eastern Andean slopes have been made both in the cloud forests of Rio Abiseo National Park and in the laboratory, and often under odd circumstances. The first of these came in 1964 when headlines circled the world announcing the discovery of a spectacular mountaintop "lost city" belonging to a "lost civilization." The lost city became known as Gran Pajaten, and its discovery triggered one of many such media events that characterize archaeology on the eastern slopes of the Central Andean cordillera. The most famous of these was, of course, Hiram Bingham's 1911 unveiling of the Inca citadel at Machu Picchu.

These discoveries capture the public imagination like few other scientific events. That the remains of high civilization could exist in such a setting and elude detection for centuries, hidden only by a forest, seems astonishing. After all, Peru's Spanish conquerors left few stones unturned in their zeal to possess native gold and silver and to extirpate "pagan" idols throughout the Andes. In the Moche Valley the Spaniards diverted an entire river to help "mine" the Pyramid of the Sun, while thousands of conquistadors and their native porters died searching the eastern slopes for the mythical treasures of El Dorado. How could such a vibrant and cosmopolitan pre-Hispanic center as Gran Pajaten escape notice and remain lost for centuries?

The eastern Andes is a precipitous, rain-soaked world marked by the constant cycling of exuberant tropical vegetation, catastrophic river erosion, and sudden landslides. So, where did Gran Pajaten's builders come from, and why did they choose to build such an elaborate, even ostentatious, settlement at 9,350 feet, within one of the earth's most remote and forbidding environments? Before the 1960s, most archaeologists perceived of the dense eastern slope forests as a barrier to interregional communication, virtually empty of of pre-Columbian population. Their conclusions were reinforced by contemporary government assessments of the high cloud forests as useless for agricultural purposes.

It...