The Prehistory of Home by Moore Jerry D

Author:Moore, Jerry D. [Moore, Jerry D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780520272217
Goodreads: 13224611
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Noble Houses

For a man’s house is his castle,

et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium.

—Sir Edward Coke, 1644

The Rio Tumbes curves down the western slopes of the northern Andes and flattens into a broad ox-bowed river as it nears the Pacific Ocean. The river’s delta was once a tangled swamp of mudflats and lagoons where black crocodiles floated in the thick brown waters. Since the 1970s, the swamplands have been dredged and drained for vast rice paddies and large lobster-raising ponds. In the equatorial spring, the rice fields stretch toward the coast in a broad emerald plain fringed by a narrow stand of mangroves that fences the beach strand.

A dry terrace rises on the southern bank of the Rio Tumbes. Vultures coil in the warm updrafts, circling over the thin scrub of thorn forest that covers the terrace. Modern houses crawl up the terrace, mostly modest houses of cane wattle and mud daub and a few more substantial dwellings of adobe brick. These houses were built beginning in the 1970s when major floods in El Niño years washed away villages and homes on the Tumbes floodplain below. Few families hold legal title to their house lots, building as squatters on unoccupied lands.

Their houses sit on the ruins of the Palace of Chilimassa.

When I first walked onto the site in July 1996, I didn’t realize it was a palace. I was taken there by my Peruvian archaeological colleagues, Bernardino Olaya and Wilson Puell Mendoza, both native tumbesinos. We walked through the thorn scrub and dry grasses onto the edge of the terrace. Bernardino and Wilson showed me the partially filled test-pit they had excavated two years before. In the profile you could see the rectangular outlines of adobes, large sun-dried bricks nearly sixty centimeters long and twice the size people make today. In a few places, lines of cobblestone foundations hinted at walls, but there was no standing architecture. It looked to me like just a natural landform with a few buildings on top. Nothing palatial.

But I had been working in Tumbes less than two weeks, and I was still learning how to see. I wasn’t a novice archaeologist, having spent years of fieldwork in the United States, Baja California, southern Mexico, and further south on the desert coast of Peru. But seeing an archaeological site involves more than opening one’s eyes: it involves discerning patterns at the intersection of two dimensions.

On the one hand, every region has distinctive sets of archaeological signatures depending on the types of prehistoric societies who lived there (for example, mobile hunters and gatherers or ancient urbanites), their activities (slaughtering reindeer or building temples), and the materials they used to accomplish those tasks (flint hand-axes or marble blocks).

On the other hand, different parts of the world transform the archaeological traces people leave behind in different ways. Not only are there no “Paleolithic Pompeiis” (as discussed in chapter 2), but all archaeological sites are reshaped by different sets of natural processes and most by later human activities. Each

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