For Immediate Release Media contacts: The Field Museum Greg Borzo 312/665-7106 gborzo@fieldmuseum.org Remote, formidable site Cerro Baúl is a mesa more than 8,000 feet above sea level that is dominated by an intimidating summit rising 2,000 feet above the mesa. In 600 A.D., the Wari chose this natural bastion as a base for an imperial settlement, but it was not been occupied before or since because it is so difficult to carry water and supplies up the treacherously steep inclines of the summit. In fact, the Wari settled here precisely because it is such a formidable, impractical location. The tough living conditions there made a colony easy to defend and sure to impress the neighbors, according to the authors. Those neighbors were the rival Tiwanaku, who reigned to the south in what is now Bolivia. These two major contemporaneous empires usually kept their distance. Elsewhere, they were separated by a buffer zone of at least 60 miles. At Cerro Baúl, however, the Wari apparently decided to establish a foothold deep inside the territory controlled by the Tiwanaku to serve as a point of contact for political relations. That makes this the oldest known diplomatic outpost between any Andean states. It survived four centuries. “These were frontier outposts, facing off, but with very little contact,” Moseley said. “The Wari and the Tiwanaku are not borrowing anything from each other, even though we find artifacts brought in from other cultures thousands of miles away.” The politics of international relations in South America began at Cerro Baúl 1,500 years ago, Williams said. “There is a lot we can learn from this site about how expansive states interact with each other and about the nature of human diplomacy,” said Williams, who specializes in the anthropology of South America and the use of chemical and geophysical science in archaeology. Class-conscious culture Cerro Baúl, with a population of less than 1,000, was the Wari’s southern most colony. It also extended over two neighboring hills, Cerro Mejia and Cerro Petroglifo, and relied on an impressive system of irrigation canals to bring water from the neighboring Torata River. The colony, which survived 400 years, was inhabited by three classes of people: commoners, mostly farmers and herders; supporting artisans, technicians and religious specialists; and a hierarchical class of governing nobles. The quality and quantity of material possessions, housing, food, dining ware and other items – including chicha – varied by the class and rank of the people. By studying what was found where among the site’s extensive ruins, archaeologists have been able to reconstruct what life must have been like for these people more than 1,000 years ago. For example, only nobles and leaders drank chicha from pottery vessels decorated with an image of the culture’s paramount deity, the “Front-Facing God.” Although these vessels were smashed on “moving day,” some of them have been reconstructed from the broken pieces. In addition to the brewery, an opulent palace was burned to the ground – but only after an opulent banquet of deer, llama or alpaca, and seven types of ocean fish. Condor, pygmy owls and flycatchers were probably sacrificed at the banquet. Smashed serving and dining ware litter this site, too. Temples around the base of Cerro Baúl suggest that the Wari viewed the mountaintop as a sacred place. Continue>>