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| Teachable Moments: Rick,
right, has regularly taken Stanford
students to the ruins since his
excavation began in 1995. |
What Lies Beneath
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.
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| Tunnel Vision : Silvia and John
Kembel (right) helped design
the surveying tool to measure
the ruins and made it small
enough to fit in Chavín’s narrow
spaces (left). The team’s finds
include a Strombus trumpet
(inset right). |
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 millenia. 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.
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True Picture : By plotting the coordinates
of each wall and corridor at Chavín,
Rick’s team assembled a computer model
that accurately depicted the site for the
first time.
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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-beunderstood
ceremonial role. One day he was gazing at a kneehigh
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.”
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| Born to Rock: Expert stonemasons,
the Chavín created elaborate
carved idols like the Lanzon (above) and
built a temple complex, as shown in a
computer rendering (below). |
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| Ground Zero: The Circular Plaza
prior to excavation (above) and after
(below). Rick’s team discovered a
gallery beneath the plaza on the final
day of the dig last summer. |
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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.”
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| Call to Worship: Chavín
was a pilgrimage site. Its
underground chambers
housed rituals designed to
win converts and strengthen
priests’ influence. |
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Marketing History Alum’s nonprofit pushes preservation of endangered cultural sites.
When Jeff Morgan visited Chavín de Huántar last August, he didn’t go to use a trowel or analyze artifacts. He was there to check on his investment.
Morgan, MBA ’98, is founder and executive director of the Global Heritage Fund, a nonprofit that seeks to preserve endangered cultural sites in developing countries by supplying money for restoration and tourism development. GHF hopes to eventually contribute $100,000 to John Rick’s excavation at Chavín.
Morgan calls upon his experience in international sales and marketing—he worked at Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems as well as several high-tech start-ups—to entice investors. “I basically have the same job as before because it’s just sales and marketing,” he says. “I’m selling projects to donors, building a good board of directors, an advisory board, getting the mission straight.” His interest in conservation was encouraged by Stanford archaeology professor Ian Hodder, who put him in touch with Rick. Morgan, who studied city planning as an undergraduate at Cornell, says his current work allows him to see “city planning of ancient cities.”
UNESCO has identified about 200 one-of-a-kind cities or ancient settlements in developing countries threatened by neglect or abuse. Conservation training is limited and money for preservation often nonexistent, says Morgan. “These sites are vastly important, not only for their archaeological value, but also for the tourism they bring. There’s a really important need for poor countries to generate jobs and income. If tourists don’t come, nobody gets a job, the sites are looted and the whole thing gets ruined.”
GHF currently supports projects in China, Russia, Vietnam, Kenya and Guatemala in addition to Chavín. “Jeff helps raise consciousness not only of donors but of investigators like myself to prioritize the conservation issues,” says Rick. “We want to discover stuff and come to flashy academic conclusions, but if the site doesn’t continue to exist, that’s all for nothing.” — Michael Endler, ’05 |
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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 roadbuilding
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.
Please direct media inquiries to:
GHF Press press@globalheritagefund.org
or (650) 325 7520
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