The face staring back at the team of Stanford archaeologists was ghastly and wonderful. It bore fangs, a serpent tongue and an exaggerated smile with a hint of malevolence. A rectangle of granite carved some 2,500 years ago, it had been excavated after weeks of effort by the Stanford team, who now planned to remove it for study and safekeeping.
But first, seven Peruvian workmen wanted to pay homage.
With an appropriate flourish, one of the workers produced a bottle of rum and sprinkled droplets into the dirt. Another pulled out a pack of Nacional cigarettes, tore open a few and spread the tobacco on the ground. Green coca leaves were distributed to the cluster of men gathered around the stone slab.
As the workers wrapped the 500-pound artifact in a burlap bag, a 54-year-old man in a floppy hat, red flannel shirt, dirty blue jeans and scuffed tennis shoes joined the ceremony. Stanford associate professor of anthropological sciences John Rick began to blow on a replica of a Strombus trumpet, a traditional instrument fashioned from a conch shell like one Rick’s dig team had excavated earlier. The workers grunted as they lugged the stone away, accompanied by the eerie moan of Rick’s trumpet.
Were the gods pacified? “I like to cover all of my bases,” Rick explained, as the men disappeared behind a hill in the distance. “I’m not much of a believer, but on the other hand, maybe playing the Strombus will do some good.” He paused and spit out his wad of coca leaves. “You can’t be immune to this,” he said, sweeping his arms as if to embrace the setting.
He was standing on a sacred site in a remote mountain valley in the Andes, where priests with seemingly magical powers presided long before the births of Christ or Confucius. Located at 10,500 feet, Chavín de Huántar lies about 250 kilometers north of Lima. Discovered in the late 1800s and mostly buried again by a mudslide in 1945, it is a temple complex built by one of the oldest known civilizations in South America, the Chavín. Rick has been coming here since 1995 to uncover its mysteries. He often brings along Stanford undergraduate and graduate students, including 15 last summer.
They have discovered burial platforms and ceremonial plazas and expanded the excavation of an intriguing maze of underground galleries. Their analysis has helped solidify understanding of Chavín de Huántar’s role as a cultural and religious center of influence that predates the Incas by more than two millennia. This site is at least 2,500 years older than Peru’s most famous archaeological wonder, Machu Picchu, built by the Incas in the 1400s. Some archaeologists compare Chavín to Sumer in Mesopotamia because of its profound influence on later civilizations. Indeed, says Rick, the Chavín were instrumental in the development of complex societies in South America.
The village with which the Chavín site shares its name is home to about 1,000 people, mostly farmers. A single paved street runs through the middle. Horses and donkeys are frequently tethered on the main drag, and pigs shuffle about on the dirt side streets.
The town abuts the site of the ruins, which attract slow but steady tourist traffic. Middle-aged women and young girls sell soft drinks and snacks outside the main gate. Admission is 10 soles, or about $3.
A short walk over a small hill brings you within sight of the ruins—though there isn’t a lot to see at first glance. In the distance is the grassy Square Plaza. Closer to the entrance are the seven massive mounds that have been found at Chavín, including old and newer temple arrangements built over a span of 500 to 1,000 years. Impressive, crumbling walls are visible, along with what’s left of a staircase that led up to what was originally a four-story-high structure. Beneath the temples lies a labyrinth of dim, narrow and exotically named passageways—Gallery of the Madman, Gallery of the Bats, Gallery of the Offerings.
When Rick began working at Chavín 10 years ago, much was unknown about the site. Mapping and dating Chavín’s various structures had proven challenging because later inhabitants had built on top of the original Chavín architecture, often using similar materials. Previous researchers had used tape measures and rulers to determine the size and shape of the buildings and underground galleries, but the results were incomplete and speculative. Silvia Kembel, one of Rick’s archaeology graduate students, had identified “construction seams” within individual galleries—points where newer stones had been placed next to older ones. But she and Rick had no way to relate the seams inside the galleries with evidence from the exterior, which was necessary to comprehend the site’s expansion over time. Were galleries parallel? Were some built above others? Were they built in a sequence that would explain what went on at Chavín?
Rick had a good team to answer those questions. He had worked in Peru for years, and Kembel, now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh whose work is funded in part by the National Geographic Society, was writing her doctoral dissertation on Chavín. Silvia’s husband, John Kembel, was a mechanical engineering student at Stanford working toward a master’s degree in product design. The three of them designed a surveying tool small enough and versatile enough to work in the cramped underground spaces at Chavín, some so narrow they had to crawl into them. They pieced together a prototype using Legos, and had the final product made at a Palo Alto machine shop. Their device served as a theodolite—a surveyor’s telescope that acts as the “ruler” to measure distances. Their instrument used visible light lasers to point to and measure the positions of walls and galleries. It was the first time anyone had combined laser/theodolite technology to map the interior of an archaeological treasure.
In 1995, 1996 and again in 1998, Rick and the Kembels spent hundreds of hours methodically and painstakingly measuring every inch of Chavín. John Kembel, ’94, MS ’97, analyzed the data on a high-powered computer, and Rick and Silvia Kembel, ’94, MA ’95, PhD ’01, spent three years building a computer model that plotted the coordinates of each wall and tunnel of the site. When completed, they had a 3-D computer map of Chavín that allowed archaeologists for the first time to get a full appreciation of its layout. The computer map allows Rick to conduct virtual fieldwork from his campus office in Building 360, an unheard-of luxury in the field of archaeology. With a few clicks of the mouse, he can arrange and rearrange Chavín’s structures for clues about how they were used.
The research has yielded important findings. Earlier archaeologists had pegged Chavín’s beginnings between 800 B.C. and 200 B.C. Thanks also to radiocarbon dating conducted at Chavín, Rick’s team determined that construction at the site actually ended shortly after 800 B.C. They now believe it was built over several hundred years in 15 stages, beginning in 1,200 B.C. or earlier.
The subterranean hallways hold the key to understanding what happened at Chavín, says Rick. “The galleries are a fascinating mystery—complex and costly construction with no obvious function,” he says. But they are beginning to give up their secrets.
Excavations have yielded massive offerings in some of the chambers, and ceremonial objects like the Strombus trumpets in others. The Lanzon, a five-meter monolith of white granite depicting the Chavín god—a feline head with a human body—sits at the crossing of passages in one gallery system. “The Lanzon was certainly an object of worship, and perhaps even an oracle that spoke with the help of priests,” Rick says.
Just as revealing are the presence of shined coal “mirrors” commonly found in the excavations and the positioning of drainage canals that maximized the auditory impact of rushing water. Taken together, the evidence convinces Rick that Chavín de Huántar was designed for an evangelical purpose: to convert the uninitiated. During a mind-blowing ritual in which sights and sounds were manipulated to powerful effect, the priests at Chavín were giving religious ceremony—and themselves—a position of influence. The significance of this goes beyond worship. Rick says it suggests a new model of human organization.
Imagine a society in which there was no governing force over a village or settlement—no hierarchical management, no division of labor, and no assumption of privilege or power. That was what existed among Andean people—and much of the rest of the world—before Chavín de Huántar was built, Rick says. “We just assume because of the way our world works that leadership and authority are built into society. [Most of] the archaeological record shows no haves or have-nots.
“Chavín is a monument to the idea that certain people have greater access to power than others,” he adds. “If you want to create the idea of authority you have to develop the belief that people who are similar in appearance and ability are actually different. This requires convincing. You’re altering the basic idea of human organization. You have to create a different world.”
To do that, the priest-elite at Chavín engineered an underground marvel. Using the maze of passageways as a disorienting venue, they constructed elaborate systems to manipulate light and sound, and introduced this to novitiates they hoped to impress. Would-be followers from the surrounding area would have come to Chavín on a pilgrimage, “paying” in materials or labor. The ritual would have begun, most likely, by ingesting a hallucinogenic powder or a liquid extracted from the San Pedro cactus. As the Chavín subjects walked through the dark, cramped halls, the sound of Strombus trumpets echoed around them from some unseen source. Water roared through canals beneath their feet (or, strangely, overhead), producing a heavy percussion amplified by the drugs. Mirrors placed in ventilation ducts to reflect the sun poured brilliant shafts of light into the subterranean hallways, only to be “turned off,” thrusting the occupant into blackness as dark as obsidian. By the time the subjects emerged from the chambers, staggering and stunned, their perspective had been altered forever. The unmistakable impression: somebody powerful was in charge.
“The summed evidence of sensory manipulation could hardly be coincidence,” Rick says. “The priest-elite of Chavín seem to have been creating a new sensory environment in which belief in the normal world is suspended, and assertions of otherworldliness, especially of these religious authorities, would have been made credible.”
The priests would have been held in awe, Rick notes, and their powers emulated to the degree possible. “The best way to be like them would have been to join the cult, and learn their secrets.”
It’s the beginning of a society predicated on authority—in essence, a ruling class, says Rick. And an important precursor to what came later: the Incan empire.
Last summer, Rick spent most of his time excavating the Circular Plaza, which seems to have served a yet-to-be-understood ceremonial role. One day he was gazing at a knee-high hole encircled by rocks. “If this is a tomb, it will be the first we’ve found in the Circular Plaza,” he told Rainer Castillo, a Stanford sophomore working the site. Rick bent over, pulled out a trowel and scraped away some dirt.
“Tombs are beautiful time capsules,” he said, straightening up. “The bodies are rarely put in alone. [The other objects in the grave] give insight into what other people thought about that person.”
But “a tomb can lie through its teeth,” he noted. If you want the truth about how people lived, look at what they threw away. “A lot of what we dig is garbage. With garbage, you get a lack of intention. It tells us a true tale of the way people lived; their economy, their diet.”
Castillo was inspired to come to Peru after hearing Rick lecture on Chavín at Stanford. “I wanted to be part of the action,” he recalls, but then he discovered working on hands and knees could be monotonous. Until that day, that is. He had uncovered a large stone tablet in the Circular Plaza that Rick said might have special significance. “I found a lot of pottery,” Castillo says, “but you get numb to that after a while.” He points to the stone tablet proudly. “I hadn’t found anything like this.”
Few of the students Rick brings along have any experience in archaeology. Rick says he chooses them based on their ability to speak Spanish, and their interest in ancient civilizations and in Peru in particular. Outdoor travel experience is a plus. “If I have three out of those four qualities in any student, I know they’ll survive and benefit from the experience,” he says.
When the students arrive, Rick gives them trowels and sets them to work. He and several graduate students supervise. The students don’t work with picks and shovels, so any mistakes they make can be easily reversed.
Rick oversees the project with a gentle touch, befitting his days as an often-barefoot student at UC-Santa Cruz in the late 1960s. One summer morning in Peru he learned that one of his students failed to show up for work, complaining of illness. “He drank too much last night,” a fellow student reported.
The news visibly distressed Rick. “I’ve never had that before,” he said. “You can’t have that and run a successful excavation. But I think we can work this out. It’s not going to continue this way.”
That evening, during his daily post-dinner roundup, he expressed his disappointment without naming the offending student. “I’d like to avoid things that keep people from going to work,” he told the team. “Keep in mind that Stanford is paying your way. You’re the only undergrads working on an archaeological site in Peru who are not paying the bill to do so. That’s a pretty exceptional experience.” (Student expenses are subsidized through Undergraduate Research Programs.)
He ended on a lighter note. “How is everybody doing? What can I do to improve your experience?”
“People work hard for him because they don’t want to disappoint him,” Amanda Marusich, a senior from Eugene, Ore., says of Rick. “I regard him as a leader and a friend.”
The next day, Rick was crouched in a 600-foot subterranean drainage canal that several students were excavating. “I got hit in the back by a bat,” he said after emerging. Bat encounters are common in the underground ruins, and Rick figures he needs at least one a season to show students he’s willing to endure the same hardships they do. “I didn’t get hit in the face or hair so it doesn’t really count,” he says. “I did get photos of bats threatening me with their mouths open.”
Rick’s ties to Peru date to early childhood. His father, a UC-Davis agriculture professor who specialized in wild tomatoes, took his family to Peru in 1956 when John was 6 years old. The boy was enchanted with the ruins he saw throughout the country. The first word he learned in Spanish was ruinas.
One day they were collecting tomatoes north of Lima, along the coast, when his mother spotted a piece of cloth partially buried in the sand. She knelt and brushed away more sand. Then she and her young son gasped. They had uncovered the face of a 1,500-year-old mummified Peruvian woman. “That was the moment,” Rick remembers. “I gazed into the face of that ancient human, and I wanted to know everything about that person. That was the past becoming real to me.”
This story has an unexpected sequel. In 1973, when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Rick had completed his first season working in the highlands of Peru when he drove north from Lima in search of ruins. Following a whim, he turned off the highway, drove into a small valley and stopped at an adobe compound with a looted hillside cemetery. When he returned home, he showed photographs of the site to his parents. “That’s the Culebras Cemetery!” his father said. Rick had returned to the site he had visited at age 6. “It was one of hundreds of thousands of sites in Peru, but it was almost as if I had homed in on it.”
Rick married a Peruvian archaeologist—his wife, Rosa, has been a lecturer at Stanford—and began spending his summers excavating an ancient hunter-gatherer society 13,000 feet above sea level in central Peru. He might have spent his entire career studying the site but for a terrifying night in 1987 when Shining Path guerrillas visited the compound where he and eight Stanford graduate students were staying. He told the guerrilla leader that they were Canadian, and he expressed some sympathy for the rebels’ aims. The ruse probably saved their lives. Later that night, a local Peruvian leader was shot dead steps from Rick’s door. At sunrise, Rick and the students filled in the excavation and hightailed it out of the mountains, never to return.
In 1994, with the Shining Path defeated, a Peruvian archaeologist friend invited Rick to spend a week at Chavín de Huántar. Rick had visited only once, in 1976. “He said there was no reliable map of the site,” Rick recalls. “I asked if it would be a good idea to map Chavín, and he said yes. That started the project.”
Rick feels a sense of urgency. Some of the evidence that could yield additional clues to Chavín may never be found because of reckless construction that damages ancient sites. The Peruvian agency that oversees Chavín gets high marks for protecting the site and the artifacts found there, says Rick, but local leaders often pay little heed. In 2001, across a small river from the Chavín ruins, a government-contracted road-building crew tore out most of a tomb with a backhoe. “Human bones were popping out,” says John Wolf, PhD ’05, Rick’s chief assistant. “It makes you sick to your stomach.”
Rick is as enthusiastic now as he was when he first began delving into Peru’s ancient past. On the final day of the excavation at the site last August, two workers crawled underneath the Circular Plaza in search of a drainage canal. They found a gallery unseen by humans for 2,000 years. It was all Rick could do to keep from dropping his travel plans and burrowing in there to have a look. “It’s a rule of archaeology,” he says, and sighs. “Discoveries on the last day.”
Come summer, he’ll be back to learn its secrets.
TYLER BRIDGES, '82, is a reporter for the Miami Herald. He lives in Peru.
