And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Romans 1:23
"When archaeologist Quirino Olivera began excavating Montegrande
(“big
hill”) in 2010, he discovered that it was not only bigger, but also much
older, than anyone had imagined.
.... just a few feet down, the ceramics disappeared, and Olivera began
seeing evidence of architecture on an enormous scale.
He uncovered
sections of a long, semicircular wall, nine feet tall and coated in
beige plaster, that was reached by a staircase made of boulders and
packed earth. Later digging seasons, in 2012 and 2016, revealed a wide
platform on the mound’s eastern side that would have faced the rising
sun.
The depth and form of the structure and the absence of ceramics
signaled that the mound dates from the late preceramic era,....It could only have been built by an organized, complex
society with hierarchies of workers and an agricultural scheme robust
enough to feed them.
---It would have to have been the kind of society
that, according to standing theories, had not yet spread from the cool
Pacific coast—where the first known cities of the Americas were already
thriving—over the Andes and into the Amazon. And yet, only eight miles
from the Marañón River, a large Amazon tributary, the mound conveyed a
sense of permanence.
Nothing this big, this old, had ever been excavated
in Peru’s Amazon region. “It showed that complex worship, monumental
architecture, and fixed societies had spread to the Amazon centuries
earlier than once believed,” says Olivera. “The structure is saying:
‘We’re here. We live in a settled society.’” But was it the only one of
its kind?
Olivera’s first instinct, as the Montegrande coil emerged, was to
interpret the feature as a giant astronomical instrument. The spiral
could be seen as resembling the paths of heavenly bodies. And he noticed
that the stones end in a manner that positions the tip of the coil at
the spot where the sun rises from behind a distant hill at certain times
of year. “The logical inference is that it was built according to an
astronomical observation,” says Olivera, though determining exactly how
it worked and what it measured will take more study.
Only one other such
spiral design has been identified in the Amazon. A few years earlier,
Valdéz had found similar, but smaller, spirals at a site he named Santa
Ana-La Florida, over the border in Ecuador, about 100 miles north of
Jaén. He believes the spirals were part of an ancient altar.
A mile up a dirt road from Montegrande stands an
even bigger and, judging from Olivera’s first excavations, potentially
even older mound. Occupied today by an elderly man with chickens and
barking dogs, the mound, which is known as San Isidro, was excavated by
Olivera in 2010 and 2012.
It held the remains of 22 children and
newborns buried over a period 
of several centuries in the first
millennium B.C. If Montegrande was the local center for shamanic ritual,
San Isidro may have been where parents took sick or dying children to
be cured—or sacrificed. Bones unearthed at San Isidro show signs of
trauma and deformation. A newborn dating from about 800 B.C., who had
been decapitated, was found entwined in the arms of a young woman, who
had also been decapitated. The remains of a boy aged about six, his
teeth showing signs of severe iron deficiency, were buried with guinea
pigs, river crabs, and a shell necklace still around his tiny neck.
A few feet away, Olivera uncovered the remains of the mound’s
resident healer or priest, his face turned toward the east, as if
awaiting the rising sun. His body was adorned with some 180 snail
shells, whose shapes echo that of the Montegrande spiral. Peruvian
archaeologists often give names to the charismatic dead, and Olivera
calls this man “The Lord of Snails.”
Archaeology