“Our sun father, seeing the people in their condition, took pity on us and sent his son Manco Capac to found Cuzco” and long before he created the Inca Empire, the Andes mountain range was already a people’s hive. With great efforts he climbed mountains from one side to the other, connecting the Pacific coast with the Amazon jungle. The best example is Chavín de Huántar.

Located 450 km northwest of Lima and 3,200 meters above sea level, this dense network of pathways and stone galleries was an administrative and religious center between one side of the mountain range and the other since at least 1500 years ago. Christian era. Declared a World Heritage Site in 1985, we have now discovered that it is something much more complex than we imagined.

Discovery that took the pandemic (almost). Now a team of archaeologists from Stanford University has discovered a secret network of passageways and other objects beneath one of the most important prehistoric temples in South America. A few years ago the team decided to use small devices (like cameras) to “map” channels they couldn’t explore in a traditional way.

The approach promised a lot, but the truth is that the research didn’t yield much in the first months of 2019 until archaeologists found something interesting. The expectation was high, but quickly (before new evidence could be examined) the pandemic closed in, threatening to bury the discovery again in the heart of the mountain. They forgot everything until a few weeks ago.

A labyrinth in the heart of the mountain. Thanks to a small handful of images from 2019, researchers have discovered at least 35 interconnected gateways built between 1,200 and 200 BC. In fact, these passages may have preceded the temple’s labyrinthine galleries, according to the investigation’s director, John Rick.

That same May, Rick and his team managed to enter a narrow passage about 40 centimeters in diameter and found two sculptural vessels (one of them had the figure of a vulture and weighed 17 kilograms). It is precisely these ceramics that preserve “characteristics of ancient times never seen before”.

America is a very unknown place after all.. If we had found an entire civilization hidden under the jungle a few weeks ago, we now see that the earliest peoples were much more complex than expected. Our understanding of the Andean world owes in many ways to Inca culture. But we quickly forget that the Inca Empire was a very new phenomenon that ate everything that came before it: now we are starting to learn to listen to all the secrets still hidden in the mountains.