9781422283554

The Birth of a Culture

Early Andean Cultures

T he main temple of Chavín de Huantar. The Spanish soldiers who came here in the sixteenth century thought that the city had been built by giants. Influential Cultures O f all the early cultures of Latin America one of the most fascinating is known as the Chavín. The Chavín were only discovered and explored in 1919 by the Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello. We don’t know much about the Chavín except that they built a religious center in a small valley near the village of Chavín de Huantar in Peru. This settlement consists of beautiful temples dating from the height of their power (850-200 bce ). Chavín culture mastered complicated farming and building techniques and made textiles, pottery and objects out of gold. This culture had a great influence on neighboring societies.

A map showing the territories of some early northern Andean, Colombian and Exuadorean cultures. Discoveries of some of the earliest remains of pottery, dating from 4000-3000 bce have been made in modern-day Colombia and Ecuador. The northern Andean cultures are famous for the objects they made out of gold. Other Andean people, such as the Paracas, specialized in depicting complicated stories in cloth.

T his is an artist’s reconstruction of the Nazca people making their great drawings in the desert.

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