Archaeology: The Lima Bean People of 6,000 Years Ago

New World civilizations were once considered juvenile compared with the ancient cultures of the Old World, but recent discoveries are changing this view. On the dry Peruvian coast 40 miles south of Lima, French Archaeologist Frederic Engel of Lima’s La Molina University is excavating a primitive agricultural village that was apparently going strong 6,000 years ago. Though this is later than the appearance of the first forms of agriculture in the Middle East, about 9,000 years ago, it is still a respectable age.

The Chilca people, as Professor Engel calls them, lived on a desert flat near the mouth of a river that is now dry. In those days it must have carried plenty of water during part of the year, for it supported the Chilcas in some style. They lived in conical houses a dozen feet in diameter, made of reeds, straw and willow branches. Many of these houses still exist, covered with sand and preserved by the bone-dry climate. The carbon 14 test proves that at least 50 of them date from 3750 B.C., when the people of Egypt were not much above the same cultural level.

From the point of view of modern archaeologists, Chilca burial customs were ideal, since they helped to preserve the remains. When a man died, he was laid on reed mats in his house and covered with other mats. Then heavy stones were placed over his chest and abdomen, presumably to keep his ghost from rising to haunt the living. Women’s ghosts were considered more dangerous; sometimes five stakes were driven through female bodies.

Articles buried with the dead show what their lives must have been like.

Their staple crop, presumably grown on the river flats after the annual freshet, was lima beans, but they also ate reed shoots, berries and an unidentified tuber. They caught fish with hooks made by tying tender young thorns into a hook shape and letting them harden that way. They had no cotton or wool, but they wove cloth and fish nets of coarse fibers.

They ground their beans in stone mortars, and since they lacked pottery, boiled their food with hot stones in gourds. They made attractive ornaments of stone, shell and bone, and their flutes prove that they enjoyed music.

The lima bean people lived on their flat for more than 1,000 years. About 2700 B.C., 1,000 years before Moses, they disappeared. For 2,000 years the site went uninhabited; then the wholly different Chavin people, complete with cotton, pottery, and many other attributes of higher civilization, set up more advanced housekeeping on the flat where the Chilcas had lived.