10 – Desert signposts across the Atacama
In the northern-most area of Chile, stretching six hundred miles down the coast of South America and expanding into Bolivia, Peru and Argentina, lies the Atacama Desert. This barren landscape consists of coastal sand and stone, and low hills rising inland to expansive salt flats, out of which towering volcanoes reach 5000 metres into the sky. The Atacama is said to be the driest desert in the world. Despite this extreme environment, there is evidence of people travelling through as early as 10,000 years ago. Sometime around 1000 AD, possibly earlier, people began marking the hillsides over and past which they travelled, moving surface stones to reveal the lighter shades beneath. These markers remain today. The meaning or purpose of the largely abstract designs are unknown, though the paths on which the people walked are still clear to see.
The network of tracks goes across the desert from the coast, from waterhole to waterhole, up to the highlands. Here in the Atacama, there is no vegetation, no moisture, and no human settlement. What would elsewhere be obliterated remains visible – campsites, scattered with ancient llama dung.
In 2005 a team of archaeologists examined sites along a 150 km route from the coast to the Pica oasis and beyond. The area studied was just a small part of the complete network, a web of routes covering over 400 km of coastline and highlands south to north. The routes continue up into Southern Peru and Bolivia, and down towards present day Santiago, into areas where vegetation and settlement make the ancient tracks more difficult to trace.
These routes followed by historic people and their llama caravans are marked by giant geoglyphs on the surrounding hills, where moving surface stones on the red hillsides creates designs in a way similar to the Nazca lines. Here we have geometric figures, groups of llamas, a giant shark, and deities with rayed heads.
Where the path descends to the lowlands it is marked by cairns, apachetas, and casitas – little houses, like the little houses with flowers in front that are mark the car crash deaths on the bends and drops of Peruvian roads. The highland peoples who still travel these roads, the Quechuas and Aymaras, stop here to make offerings and ask the mother earth to look after their houses and their livestock.
Pica is half way from the coast to the mountains, and at least six travellers’ routes converge here. The 4000 metre high Coastal Cordillera, 60 km from the coast, cuts through the pampa or plains of Tamarugal and has a few wells and springs where underground water surfaces. 100 km beyond Pica, Google Earth shows what appears to be a vast snowfield – but is an inland salt lake, 100 km across, bigger than Lake Titicaca to the North.
Several vast prehistoric lakes, with islands formed by volcanic cones, were formed here by the uplift of the Andes. The rocks around, at 3600 metres above sea level, have fossils of corals and shells. The lakes remain, but they have no exit to the sea. Titicaca drains, in the rainy season, into the neighbouring Bolivian Poopo and Uru Uru, which in turns feed the two great salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Salar de Uyuni.
A crust of salt, from tens of centimetres to several metres thick, overlies salt saturated mud. It is possible that the salt was a valuable item of trade, taken by llama caravans across the desert. It is still valuable today – up to 70% of the world´s lithium is here, being extracted for specialist ceramics and rechargeable batteries.
Pica, a midpoint on the route from coast to salt lakes, is a flash of dark green in the desert with a few thousand houses on Google Earth. At the eastern end, hot springs feed the Municipal Baths – a natural pool formed in a fissure in the bedrock.
Six kilometres south east of Pica, at El Salto, there is a narrow rocky valley, and an amphitheatre of low cliffs where water trickles out to sustain a few bushes. Marked out by removing the surface stones on sandy foothills are a series of rhomboid figures, some circles, and other geometric figures, on low flat ground. There are more on the low hills rising to the East. There are rock paintings here too, faint figures on the cliffs, including a group of twelve llamas, with a man following behind.
Tracks lead out from the oasis of Pica east, inland and uphill to Salar de Huasco, a salt lake at 3800 metres. They go west towards the coast to Cerro Pintado, the painted hill, 38 kilometres away, two days journey for a llama caravan. They head north by north west, to Tarapaca, a town in a river valley, or southwards to the oasis of Calama.
On the opposite side of Pica, 15 km to the north west, where one broad track contours a low hill, several hundreds of parallel paths can be seen in the sands. They display the characteristic extended roadway or fan of footpaths created by herds and flocks of animals crossing a flat landscape. They are known as rastrillo, or raked, pathways by Spanish-speaking archaeologists. In places the multiple tracks are a kilometre wide. The pathways approach a low rise and split, passing to either side of three of giant drawings in the gravel, all pointing in the direction of the travellers. There are two great lizards, one fifty metres long. Like the Nazca lines they are much more visible from above than from the flat sandy desert.
To the west of the lizards, something like a three pointed crown has a 110 metre long pointer, on a bearing of 315 degrees, parallel to the two lizards’ axes to within a few degrees.
There is much more on the hillsides here. To the east of the paths are rectangles, circles of stones, grids, big enough to stand out clearly on Google Earth. Beyond the lizards is a group of circles. While the pathways over the hillsides largely avoid the geoglyphs, the crowns and the circles, the modern tracks left by four by four SUVs do not. One passes directly over a lizard.
The lizard pointers indicate a direct route to Pica, going backwards, and the historic route to La Calera heading North. 240 metres south west of the lizards is a low hill, from where a fan of eight lines spreads out, towards a group of circles. These point more westerly, between 300 and 280 degrees. The longest of the lines reaches 300 metres to touch the largest of the circles. The lines points toward the coast, to Iquique, but there is no sign of any trails heading in that direction.
The straight lines, which could have been directional pointers, have been walked across without compunction by the travellers and their livestock. It suggests that the indicators served a purpose unknown to and unrespected by the later travellers, who nevertheless did understand, and perhaps create, the lizards, crowns and circles marked in the desert sands. There are layers of meaning here.
A bearing of 290 degrees, the average direction of the fan of lines, would take the traveller to present day Pozo Almonte. The name, Almonte’s well, suggests it might have been an oasis in the desert. But the oldest building dates to 1901, and the Municipal swimming pool is not fed by hot springs. This was a centre of the salitre or saltpetre trade, sending the first shipments of potassium and sodium nitrate fertilisers to Europe in 1820. Before the colonial presence, it could have been a stopover point on the route to the coast.
The lines may also have had have an astronomical purpose. 295 degrees would be the approximate bearing for summer solstice sunset in this part of Chile, and the lines look towards the coast.
To the south, the route to Calama will pass by over 400 geoglyphs on the hills of Chug Chug, whilst to the west they reach Cerros Pintados, another major geoglyph site. Here the traveller coming from inland sees facing him a line of hills, part of the coastal mountain range. For a length of 3 km, the slopes of the hillsides are covered with over 400 figures made up of 60 panels.
Half of the designs are geometric – circles, rhomboids, ladders, One of the most common is patterns of rhomboids in a characteristic staircase pattern, recalling the Inca Chakana or stepped cross. There is rhombus after rhombus, forty stepped rhombus patterns, crosses or their derivatives, in different forms and sizes.
The displays are primarily abstract, but they alsoinclude birds, fish, unidentifiable quadrupeds, a shark, and a man steering a totora reed raft. There are, too, figures with rayed heads, human and humanoid, mythic, godlike figures.
The stepped rhombus figure is interpreted by archaeologists as an abstract anthropomorphic figure, a deity. In its most common form it has three squares on each side, arranged in steps. There figures on the hillsides of Cerro Pintados, are facing east, inland. Like a cross, it has a head, a base and arms. Other figures are rectangles, squares and circles.
Many of the anthropomorphic figures are similarly rectilinear, composed of rectangles and lines. There is a group of a dozen concave sided figures, like two lenses placed back to back, with a half circle indicating a head, which are assumed to represent humans.
A quarter of the figures are animal-like, with the most common being camelids. Both two and four legged forms are displayed. But there are also possible eagles, foxes, and felines. In contrast to many sites there are not lizards or snakes at Cerro Pintado.
For the archaeologists, Cerros Pintados represents a ritual change of the landscape from the highlands to the pampa, the plains. It offers a safe stopping point for travellers with water reserves, forage and sheltered space, both for those heading up into or down from the Andes, and those travelling north to south. It is the point of the innermost penetration of the Cordillera de la Costa, as a peninsula that penetrates the pampas.
From here you can sense the nearness of the sea: standing on the hills above the you feel a fresh and humid breeze very different from the salty and dry environment of the Pampas del Tamarugal and the salar that has been left behind. The branching “rake” trails, suggest Cerros Pintados was a convergent centre for many routes linking points on the coast with the oases of Pica in the interior.
Two hundred metres east of the geoglyphs by the trails there are traces of water. Here too there are the remains of camp sites, with a fine view of the figures on the hillside. The camps included enclosures and fire places. The stone flakes and ceramics found there date to the late Horizon, 500 to 1000 years ago, the time of the Chimu and the Chincha in Peru. Lower, and older, are sea shells and ceramics, with organic material dated to 6000 years ago.
At a second campsite there was an apparently ceremonial pit with fish bones and maize together with parrot feathers. Another sealed underground pit was found with deposits of fish bones and corn cobs, pre-Inca ceramics, and preserved llama dung, and the corn cobs could be dated to 1000 AD.
The inland route continues to be marked by campsites with fireplaces, geoglyphs and occasional cemeteries or individual burials. The ceramics along the route show that it was used many peoples from diverse regions and groups. By the well of Santa Rosita, close to Pica, there is a looted cemetery, where excavations suggested a late pre-Inca date, perhaps 900 to 1400 AD.
So up to 1000 years ago, travellers with llama caravans crossed the Atacama desert. They went from the coast to the highlands, and they also travelled parallel to the coast. They met and mixed with other peoples and marked their routes with big public signs. These signs are located at visible points, primarily small hills rising above the pampa, in a strip across the desert, midway between the coast and the highlands, over a distance of 500 kilometres. Meanwhile in Peru, we find many, perhaps most river valleys, the inland travel routes, marked by groups of engraved stones, petroglyphs, midway between the coast and the highlands, for 1500 kilometres from north to south. It has been proposed that they marked fertile and profitable coca growing areas, territorial boundaries. Perhaps, like the hillside images in the Atacama desert, they are marking not boundaries but meeting points. Rather than claiming possession of territory, they are offering to share, to trade – technologies, foods, skills. They are advertising boards, announcements, or just statements. We were here. Hello!