I have spent the week examining the photographs on my laptop, looking for patterns, looking for meaning. I have found out what I can about rock art in Peru, in South America, in Mexico and Easter Island. I have researched the history of coastal Peru, the iconography of Chavin, the Moche, the Wari and the Inca. Finally I check out what studies have already been made at Cochineros, and ask Milagros over for a summit meeting.
She arrives with a bagful of makis and picarones to follow, and I open a bottle of Montesierpe. We take them onto the patio.
The sun is sinking into the sea off Barranco, leaving a trail of gold across the waters. To the left spotlights pick out the Statue of Christ on a hilltop over looking the bay, a gift from a corrupt Brazilian construction company to a Peruvian President who signed off on their Lima train systems, their irrigation projects still unfinished thirty years later, and the adendas, the changes of contract, that authorised the 20% budget overruns.
Milagros settles into a chair and takes out her laptop.
“So, what have you got?”
“The same images reappear on rock after rock. So I created a layered plan of the main rocks and began to map their distribution ..”
Her screen shows eight major rocks, and the concentration of figures on each.
“This is not close to mapping everything – just six or seven common images that seem to be repeated. For example, the lines of animals, the concentric circles.”
“The spirals, T-shapes…”
“And the wavy lines…”
The serpents..”
“No, the streams and rivers.”
“Really?”
“The long serpentine lines here nearly always run down vertical faces, or at least down slopes,” she explains, “they are water flows rather than snakes. Or, of course, both.”
“How can they be both?”
“In the Andean world, things have multiple identities. We talk about anthropomorphs, figures or beings that are partly human in form. The decapitator god of the Moche was half-man half crab. The sculptures of Chavin appear to show priests transforming into jaguars. Think superhero characters with special powers. Those were their gods, and they are returning today, at least to the cinema.”
“So if a serpent is a river, what is the man leading llamas…?”
“Just as the water-serpents flows down steep faces of the rock, so the lines of llamas run horizontally. Many of them are drawn along ledges or folds in the rock face, as if they were on tracks across the mountain.”
“So they are llamas.”
“The neck length, the size relative to the human figures, suggest they are llamas. Mostly they are stereotypical llama images drawn with six or seven straight lines, identical to similar images on ceramics and textiles. And they are with human figures, men or women. But to say the man is leading the llamas is going too far.”
“So what else could they depict?”
“Some sort of ritual, a ceremony, or a representation of a bigger concept like fertility. The llama could be leading the woman. We need to research that.”
She grabbed a maki and added wasabi sauce.
“What have you found out?”
“This site is just one of hundreds of rock art sites in Peru, or better to say, on the western flanks of the Andes. There are plenty in Chile too. A lot of them have a similar position, part way up a river valley. Peru has over thirty rivers running down to the Pacific coast, and almost every river valley has a site with engraved rocks, not on the coast, not in the highlands, but somewhere in between.”
“And do people have any idea why?”
“There are a lot of theories. Guffroy wrote a book about the Rock Art of Peru that manages to advance several theories – closeness to coca growing lands, rivers, dry areas, river junctions, ancient travel routes, political or ethnic boundaries, environmental transition zones – without fully supporting any.”
“That`s quite a choice!”
“Indeed. Cochineros is on a river bank near a valley junction beside a track way, in a coca growing area midway between the highlands and the lowlands, in the Chaupi Yunga, a transition zone from desert coast to rainy highlands.“
“So, no conclusions there.”
“There are a lot of options. But there is something special about this site. Something, dare I say, unique?”
“Well, tell me!”
“Sure. But first you need to pour yourself a glass of wine!”
Milagros poured herself a glass of Montesierpe, took a mouthful, and grimaced.
“Why do you buy this?”
“Two reasons. Firstly, its cheap. Almost as cheap as a good French wine in Europe. Secondly, I like the label.”
Milagros studied the bottle.
“Montesierpe. A drawing of a snake curved round a mountain.”
Montesierpe, Monteserpiente, the name of the vineyard is something like Serpent Mountain. And if you take a look on Google Earth, you can see this long scaly serpent rising up the flanks of the mountain above the hacienda.”
Milagros raised an eyebrow.
“A real serpent?”
Well, it is fifteen metres wide and fifteen hundred metres long. Perhaps it is a river or a waterway, in Andean cosmovision? Perhaps it is a peanut or a crab. But when I visited and asked a woman in the village where was the band of pits in the hillside she said “Ah ya, el serpiente”, “the serpent”, and pointed up the hill.
“So it is a band of pits?”
“About 5000 pits, each a metre square, with neat walls of unmortared stone, in a ribbon rising up the mountain side. From Google Earth they look like the scales of a snake. Curious, no?”
“It seems an unnecessarily complex explanation for drinking a cheap white wine. Tell me about the unique properties of our rock art site.”
“Did you notice the T-shapes, like a rash that spreads across the site?”
“I plotted their distribution. They are a few on almost every stone, but mostly on the downstream side of the stones.”
“That`s right. They are drawn in many different styles;, some are rounded, others square. Some have ornate handles, others plain; many are roughly scratched on the rock, others are clearly outlined.”
“And a large number are on one or two panels, where there are the dominant image. Whereas, on the other side of those same rocks, there is a complex panel of images, with very few of the Ts!”
“Exactly. It suggests a phase in the history of the site, where people came and drew these T-shapes, more than a hundred of them. They chose to mainly use the panels that had not already been drawn on.”
“The shapes resemble the curved knives that were used for sacrifice,” Says Milagros. “The Inca used them, and so did the Moche, the Chimu, the Wari. They are called tumis.”
If they are knives, why are they shaped like an anchor or a T?”
“With iron you can make a single straight blade, like our modern knives But they were working with softer metals like copper, so they had a central shaft to strengthen the pressure point. Like a miniature spade. Hence the T-shape.”
“Ok, lets call them tumis. Many people visit and draw these tumis in great numbers, in different shapes and styles. But they do not cover the serpents or the spirals. It is as if they respect the older images.”
“Why do you say the older images?”
“Did you notice how some of the images are whiter, brighter? And these are drawn on top of greyer, darker images? Generally the knives, the tumis, are bright, and so are the lines of llamas.”
“You mean…”
“Exactly. We can try to correlate the brightness to the age of these drawings.”
“Many people have tried to date rock art and embarrassed themselves.”
“For now, I am just suggesting the patina of the image, together with superposition, could give us some idea of the age. The beauty of it is, I just have to take photographs, and measure the brightness of the llama or the tumis with software. It is non-invasive, non-destructive. I already have data on hundreds, maybe thousands of images, stored in my camera.”
“But you will need some images of known date to correlate the readings against.”
Yes. And that is what makes this site so special.”
I poured myself a glass of Montesierpe.
We are sitting on the patio looking out towards the sea and the sky. There are no stars, in this city forever under the garua, the low cloud, the belly of the donkey. But along the coast are the brightly lit tower blocks of Miraflores, perched above the sea cliffs, and beyond is the distant port of Callao, while the red-tail lights of night traffic move slowly along the coastal road below.
Milagros takes a sip of Montesierpe and says “So, you were telling me how this rock art site is unique?”
“On the first rock panel we saw, above the patio of vines, I noticed three brooches or shawl pins.”
“Tupus,” Milagros interrupts. “They are shown in engravings of the Inca queens and princesses.”
“Exactly. Long pins with a flat disk at one end, and two opposing curlicues. I counted nine pairs of tupus on the different stones.”
“They were worn in pairs to fasten on the cloak or shawl. They are commonly shown on ceramic figures from Chancay, just north of Lima, and they were also used by the Wari.”
“Which means they can`t give us a date, because they were used by different peoples for a thousand years without a change in design. But these three are drawn over a llama figure – not the stick drawn llama we see in lines, but a solitary, four legged, full bodied beast.”
“So the llama is older than the tupus?”
“It has been overdrawn, and it is also a darker image. On the same panel there is a line of dots running from top to bottom. When I examined the photographs I saw that it crosses over a human figure.”
Milagros looked at my laptop screen as I opened up the enhanced contrast image, of a standing man, holding to his face a tube, longer than he was tall, with a bulbous end, like a giant trumpet.
“I don`t know what this figure signifies, but it is almost as dark as the unmarked rock, while the dots running over it a a bright white. And then, a little further to the right, is the heart. It crosses over a spiral, a wavy line and several other dark images. And it is dated!”
“Of course! 1964! So that gives you a correlation of brightness with age. But it will only fix one end of the graph. You need a second point of known date.”
“I think I have one. Listen to this.”
“The valley was so populous, that many Spaniards say, that when the Marquis conquered it, it contained more than 25,000 men. At present, I believe, there there are barely 5000, such have been the strifes and misfortunes they have gone through… …There are scarcely any sheep of the country, because the wars between the Christians have caused their destruction….the large population of this great valley has been reduced by the long civil wars in Peru, and because many natives have been taken away to carry burdens for the Spaniards.”
“That was written by a Spanish soldier, Pedro de Cieza de Leon, in 1550. He was describing the valley of Chincha, a little south of here. He describes similar scenes wherever he travelled. Like the rest of the country, like this valley, it was devastated by the invading Spanish. They brought disease, and added murderous brutality. 80% of the native people were killed.“
“You are saying no-one drew on the rocks after 1550?”
“We can`t put an exact date on it. But within fifty or a hundred years of the invasion, the fields here would have been deserted, the villages empty, as they still are today. Desolation. It is unlikely that whatever went on here, a religious ritual or a social activity, or children doodling, would have continued long after the conquest.”
“So the most recent historic markings are perhaps 1530 to 1630?”
“There`s more. One of the researchers who studied the rocks suggested that the tumis, the knives, were an expression of violence, either by a threatened local population or by those who were threatening. He posited that it might be dated to the presence of the Inca, from 1470 to 1530.”
“Which gives you another possible date against which to calibrate.”
“And then we have our modern vandal. He has written his name, JUAN, in dominant capitals, on one panel, and then JNJR, enormous, on a second, and then the giant heart dated 1964, cutting across a much older faint spiral. The style and the brightness of these three are the same.”
“I like it! So what next?”
“What if we can identify some images as belonging to a particular time period from textiles or ceramics? That would give us another calibration point. Or if we can discover the mechanism for the fading or darkening, we might be able to understand how the images change with time?”
“Interesting questions!”
“I am going to measure the brightness of the images and draw some graphs. If I am making too many assumptions, we will soon know.”
“And I am going to research into tupus and tumis,” said Milagros, “after another sip of Montesierpe!”
“ you like it then?”
“Lets just say its getting better!”