STAIRCASE FARMS OF THE ANCIENTS 



Astounding Farming Skill of Ancient Peruvians, Who Were 



Among the Most Industrious and Highly 



Organized People in History 



By O. F. Cook 



Botanist of the National Geographic Society- Yale University Expedition 



to Peru in 191 5. and of the Bureau of Plant Industry 



of the Department of Agriculture 



AGRICULTURE is not a lost art, 

 but must be reckoned as one of 

 L those that reached a high develop- 

 ment in the remote past and afterward 

 declined, and has not yet recovered its an- 

 cient prestige. The system of agriculture 

 developed by the ancient Peruvians en- 

 abled them to support large populations 

 in places where modern farmers would be 

 helpless. 



The most specialized development of 

 agriculture in the Western Hemisphere 

 was attained, unquestionably, in Peru, 

 and the culmination was reached cen- 

 turies ago, before Columbus discovered 

 America. Still farther back there must 

 have been a period of slow and gradual 

 development — a period to be expressed in 

 millenniums rather than in centuries. At 

 a time when our ancestors in northern 

 Europe were still utter savages, clothed 

 only in skins, and living by hunting and 

 fishing, settled agricultural communities 

 must have existed in the Peruvian region, 

 perhaps in the same valleys that contain 

 the marvelous remnants of the prehis 

 toric art. 



The people who did the finest of the 

 ancient work are not only gone and for- 

 gotten, but lack even the distinction of a 

 name. Written records like those of 

 Egypt and Assyria are lacking in Peru, 

 and even tradition has failed to attach 

 names of kings or nations to many of the 

 ancient monuments. Some writers refer 

 to the builders as Megalithic or Big-Stone 

 people, because they used very large 

 stones, like the fabled Cyclopes of the 

 ancient Greeks, who built massive walls 

 and worked in metals. Other writers re- 

 fer to the ancient Peruvians simply as 



pre-Incas, because their work evidently 

 belongs to an age farther back than the 

 Inca empire conquered by the Spaniards. 



As a race, it may be assumed that the 

 Megalithic people were ancestors of the 

 modern Quichuas, or at least of the same 

 stock, for there is nothing to show that the 

 human type was different in ancient times. 

 In Peru, as in ancient Egypt, it was the 

 custom to mummify the dead and to bury 

 with the mummies the clothing, food, 

 household utensils, weapons, and other 

 objects and articles used by the living. 



This regard of the ancients for their 

 dead, together with the dry, equable cli- 

 mate, have made Peru a veritable treas- 

 ure-house of archaeological material. Not 

 only the skeletons and the other physical 

 features of the ancient people are known, 

 but also the nature and degree of devel- 

 opment of all of the arts that could be 

 preserved by burial. The general result 

 of such studies tends to show that the 

 modern Quichuas, the Incas conquered 

 by the Spaniards, and the pre-Inca or 

 Megalithic people were all of the same 

 race and practiced the same arts, includ- 

 ing the art of agriculture. 



The Incas had a very specialized agri- 

 culture, but their predecessors had some 

 of the agricultural arts still more highly 

 developed. They built larger terraces 

 and faced them with larger stones, fitted 

 with wonderful accuracy. The Incas also 

 built extensively, but generally with less 

 skill, or at least with less labor, bedding 

 their stones and plastering their walls 

 with clay, instead of taking the trouble to 

 work down and fit together the huge ir- 

 regular blocks that characterize the Meg- 

 alithic period. 



