Wait a Sec! Pre-Columbian Warriors Had No Iron or Steel

I have been reading (and enjoying) Hugh Thomson’s A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru. In it, he discusses the nature of warfare during the Sechin culture (1800-1300 BC).

Before coming to Sechin I had talked to Henning Bischof, the distinguished German archaeologist now in his late sixties who had done pioneering work at Cerro Sechin between 1979 and 1984. Together with Peruvian colleagues, he had been the first to establish an accurate radiocarbon figure for the site, when they had found a wooden post supporting one wall and dated it around 1500 BC. I asked him about the intense debate on the meaning of the frieze [depicting human sacrifice].

What you have to remember,” said Henning in slightly accented but perfectly grammatical English, “is what was happening to Peru when all these different interpretations were being made.” He argued that Peruvian archaeology reflected political events far more than has ever been acknowledged. While the military governments of the sixties and seventies held sway, they welcomed a purely military interpretation of the frieze—Peru’s great military past, so to speak, which they were inheriting—“and that interpretation is precisely what the archaeologists gave them.”

But as Henning pointed out, there was a real problem with any interpretation of the frieze as military: without iron, the weapons available for actual warfare to the people of Sechin would never have been able to achieve such clean-cut savagery, Speaking in his precise German accent, Henning said: “It would have been impossible to cut off limbs in combat. You must remember that it is time-consuming work to disassemble a human body.” Any warfare would have been a far cruder process of slings and battering stones.