NIU professor's icon discovery pushes back
emergence of Andean religion by a millennium

by Tom Parisi

The god on the gourd has a story to tell.

Searching through a looted, unmarked burial ground on a sandy terrace near the Peruvian coastline last summer, NIU's Winifred Creamer and her fellow archaeologists retrieved a fragment of a gourd bowl, made by drying and hollowing out the fruit's shell. A simple image of a god scratched or burned on the gourd may end up rewriting the archaeological textbooks.

"This god on the gourd is telling us about the history of religion in South America," said Creamer, a professor of anthropology. "This discovery pushes back the emergence of the oldest known Andean religion by more than 1,000 years."

Previously, the earliest depiction of the deity, well-known to archaeologists and dubbed the "staff god," dated to about 1000 B.C. Carbon dating of the gourd determined the fragment was more than 4,000 years old, dating to 2250 B.C.

The discovery made headlines today in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Daily Herald and newspapers across the country. Creamer, her husband Jonathan Haas of Chicago's Field Museum and Peruvian archaeologist Alvaro Ruiz also describe their find in the latest edition of Archaeology magazine. Ruiz is co-director of the Norte Chico Archaeological Project, named after the region of four valleys being explored by scientists.

The burial ground where the gourd fragment was discovered is located about 120 miles north of Lima, in the Pativilca River Valley of Norte Chico. A second, undated gourd fragment found at a nearby burial ground depicts a similar image of the staff god.

"This image is pervasive throughout the region's Andean cultures," Creamer said. "What the find demonstrates is that Andean religion shared basic principles for a much longer time than we had known. The staff god was worshipped until the Europeans showed up in 1532."

Densely populated between 2600 B.C. and 2000 B.C., the Norte Chico region appears to have been the ancestral home of Andean civilization that culminated 3,500 years later in the Inca.

"Like the cross, the staff god is a clearly recognizable religious icon," said Haas, MacArthur curator of North American anthropology at The Field Museum. "This appears to be the oldest identifiable religious icon found in the Americas."

According to Ruiz, "the staff god, also known as Dios de los Baculos, is an iconic motif with a long and broad history throughout several Andean cultures. This deity figure is commonly shown in a frontal view, with a fanged mouth and splayed and clawed feet. Snakes are often part of the figure's headdress or integrated into its garments. Most commonly, the deity is depicted holding a staff in one or both hands, hence the name."

In another news-making find two years ago, Creamer and Haas were part of a research team that found the ancient Peruvians were building a complex city and platform mounds, or pyramids, in the region some 4,600 years ago - at about the same time as the ancient Egyptians. The archaeology team plans to continue its exploration of the region.

"To date, 26 major centers have been recorded in the Norte Chico region, all with monumental architecture, large-scale ceremonial structures, and complex residential and administrative architecture," Creamer said. "It is a truly unique concentration of settlements anywhere in the Americas at such an early date."

All the sites lack pottery, which was introduced on the Peruvian coast about 1900 B.C.

As part of a long-term project focused on the Norte Chico preceramic, the 2002 fieldwork was designed to extract radiocarbon dates, gain information on the construction of the various platform mounds and make preliminary collections at two burial grounds east of the modern town of Barranca. Both gourd fragments were found at these ancient cemeteries.

4-15-03