Icon Adds Centuries to Andes History

Archeologists have discovered a 4,000-year-old image of the ancient South American Staff God, significantly pushing back the earliest known date of Andean religion.

The image was carved and painted on a gourd fragment dated to 2250 BC, according to a report in the latest issue of the magazine Archaeology by Jonathan Haas of Chicago’s Field Museum, Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University and Alvaro Ruiz, co-director of Peru’s Proyecto Arqueologico Norte Chico.

The fragment is 1,000 years older than any other known image of the Staff God, an important deity worshiped in South America for thousands of years. Originally part of a small bowl, the piece was found by a team examining a looted cemetery 120 miles north of Lima, on the coast of Peru.

The primitive image depicts a being with fierce fangs and splayed feet. A snake’s head tops the end of one arm, and a staff is held in the other. A similarly decorated gourd fragment was found at another old cemetery nearby.

Similar Staff God images appear on ancient artifacts, including pottery and textiles from many periods and cultures in South America.

The cemetery exploration was part of a larger study of the Patavilca River Valley in the Norte Chico region, in northern Peru. This region was densely populated between 2600 and 2000 BC. The civilization that thrived there is believed to have given rise to the Incas thousands of years later.