Guitarrero Cave, Peru

Earliest agriculture in South America in a river side cave (10,500 years old)

(originally posted 7/27/2020)

I’ve been spending the last few days virtually rummaging through a 10,000 year old pantry in a cave in Peru called Guitarrero Cave.  Hmm, what do we have here?  10,000 year old common beans and Lima beans?  Some Aji and Habanero peppers?  Some Lacuma fruit?  Oh and here’s the oldest texttile work, made from an Agave plant.    Since the cave is named “The Guitarist’s Cave” in Spanish, it’s a shame I don’t see any 10,000 year old guitar picks in here.  I’m sure they made music somehow.

Guitarrero Cave is located in a cave cut into the the side of a steep valley above the Rio Santa river.  It’s thought that it was a seasonal shelter where hunters would go after hunting season, where they would attend to pioneering agricultural pursuits.  The valley has a relatively low elevation, and it is thought that from there they would explore higher ground and the people would later settle at higher altitudes as they aclimated to them.  The cave was occupied by humans right when the last ice age ended (human bones date from 12,600 years ago) at a time when big game was still around (mastadon bones were found in the cave, though i’m not sure how old they were).  I surmise that once the mastadons and other large game went extinct, they started experimenting with agriculture to supplement their smaller game.  The first signs of vegetables in the cave were 10,500 years ago, the same time the mastadon went extinct.  You could probably debate if these were early domestic vegetables or from the wild, but many suggest they were.

So, what was in their pantry?  The oldest vegetables were some chili peppers, including 10,500 year old Aji Peppers and maybe some Habanero peppers (I haven’s seen a reliable scientific source for this information, but several cooking websites mention it).  Yellow Aji peppers  are commonly used in modern Peruvian cuisine.  I ordered some Aji Paste on Amazon to get an idea of what they taste like.  Hope I can handle it haha, they’re quite hot.  They’re not as hot as the infamous Habanero pepper, whose name refers to the fact that it shipped from “from Havana”, Cuba’s capitol.

Beans were the next oldest veggies found, up to about 10,000 years old.  Wonder if they’re still good.  One type of bean was the “common bean”.  Lots of modern beans derive from this species, including Pinto Beans, Black Beans, Navy Beans, Kidney Beans.  Also green beans, french beans, and wax beans are also the same thing, just picked when they’re a little less developed.  Those are just the kinds I’m likely to have in my own pantry, ha.  The other type of bean they found that isn’t derived from the common bean is the Lima Bean (named for Peru’s capitol, aka Pallar Bean).  I am rather fond of that kind of bean and tend to mix it with tuna from a can, though I’m probably the only one who does that.

They also had several tubers that are still popular in Peruvian cuisine and are sometimes exported to other parts of the world as an alternative to the standard potato.  These include 9,500 year old Oca (Oxalis) and 7,500 year old Ulluca.  8,000 year old Ulluca was found in the Tres Ventanas caves further south.  I tried to find some chips made from these tubers on Amazon, but had no luck, oh well.  

They also had a Calabasa (Zapallo), which is a type of squash that seems as big as a pumpkin today.  I’ve seen pictures of them used as Jack O’ Lanters.

They had 8,200 year old Maize (corn), which was thought to have been domesticated in Mexico.  The fact that it’s here suggests that Peru and Mexico were connected via trade and perhaps travel back then.  It’s possible they had similar roots as well.  I’ll explore those possibilities later.

They found 7,500 year old Lucuma fruit.  Apparently, Lucuma powder is a common sugar alternative, with some health benefits, at least when compared to pure cane sugar.  I ordered some to see what it tastes like.  It’s weird to think that they didn’t have most of the fruit’s we’re used to today (apples, oranges, bananas), but that they had their own different types of fruits.  There was a later Moche civilization (100-700AD) along the coast of Peru that would include Lucuma and other foods in their artwork.

Old food isn’t the only thing Guitarrero Cave is known for.  The oldest textiles in the Americas was found here.  In more recent times, textiles are usually done with Llamas and Alpacas in Peru.  What they found back was 10,000 year old textile netting made from Agave, a thorny desert plant family sometimes mistaken for a cactus.  They surmise it could have been used for bags, baskets, wall or flooe coverings, or a mattress.  Later on, textiles would be used in a unique form of record keeping called Quipu that I first learned about playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider haha.  It came pretty close to a symbolic writing system and involved strings with symbolic knots.  Textiles had been around in the old world for a while before then though, a 30,000 year old flax fiber example was found in a cave in Georgia.

They also found 9,600 year old Echinopsis pachanoi cactus needles in the cave.  This type of cactus is known for its hallucigenic effects and is used today in rituals.  Apparently a lot of tourists stop by hoping to get their hands on it to experiment.  I wonder how much of the Andes’ people’s view of the cosmos was dreamt up while under the influence of this cactus all those millenia ago.

This cave is in close proximiry to a pretty cool temple of the first undisputed civilization of the Andes, the Chavin Civilization (900-200BC).  It is speculated that the people of this civilization were descendants of the peoples who occupied this cave.   The temple I’m thinking of is the Chavín de Huantar.  This is a huge temple with a huge hidden underground area and has been called the birthplace of South America.