Chavín de Huántar

Chavín de Huántar is a monumental religious centre in the northern highlands of Peru. It lies in the Conchucos valley, on the eastern side of the snow-capped Cordillera Blanca, where the Mosna and Huachecsa rivers meet, at roughly 3,150 m above sea level. The modern town of Chavín stands beside it.

The site consists of massive stone platform buildings, sunken plazas and, inside the buildings, a network of narrow stone-lined galleries (passages), with an intricate system of vents and drains that UNESCO calls unprecedented in South America. Rick and colleagues date temple-related activity from probably about 1200 BC and place the end of temple use around 500 BC. It was above all a ceremonial and pilgrimage centre that, in UNESCO’s words, hosted people “from different latitudes, distances and languages”, but it was not empty: Burger estimates that at its height the surrounding settlement was a proto-urban centre of two to three thousand people.

Chavín is also the name archaeologists give to a whole culture and art style. Objects decorated in the Chavín style, including carved stone, pottery, textiles and gold work, have been found far from the site itself, from the northern coast to the southern coast of Peru. This makes Chavín one of the earliest art styles shared across a large part of the Andes.

The Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello, who first came here in 1919 and excavated in 1934, saw Chavín the source of Andean civilization, an idea often summed up as the “mother culture”. We now know that complex societies such as Caral existed on the coast much earlier, but Chavín remains one of the great turning points in Andean history. UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage List in 1985.

Archaeologists traditionally speak of an “Old Temple” and a “New Temple”, but these conventional labels do not describe a simple two-stage sequence. Work by John Rick’s team shows a longer and more complex series of building episodes, and places the visible Circular Plaza, its atrium and the galleries built into it in the final major building stage, rather than in an early “Old Temple”. The U-shaped platform complex that frames the Circular Plaza follows a plan common to ceremonial centres in the Andes at the time. The plaza, about 20 m across, was carefully paved, and its stone panels were carved in relief with jaguars and human figures, one of them holding what is often identified as a San Pedro cactus.

The largest platform, usually called the New Temple or El Castillo (“the castle”), is a huge stone building. Its main entrance, the Portal of the Falcons (Portada de las Falcónidas), also known as the Black and White Portal, is made of stone in two colours: one side black limestone, the other white granite. Its columns are carved with a pair of bird-human beings, one with male and the other with female features, which some scholars read as an expression of complementary opposites.

In front of this platform lies a large square sunken plaza, the Plaza Mayor, big enough for large crowds. A visitor’s path would lead from these bright open spaces, where many people gathered, into the dark, narrow galleries inside the platforms, where only a few could enter.

The galleries form a maze of passages, small rooms and staircases, lit only by small shafts. Some held offerings of pottery and other objects. Deep inside the oldest surviving part of the complex, in a cross-shaped chamber where passages meet, the Lanzón still stands in the place where it was set up nearly three thousand years ago.

The Lanzón is a stone monolith about 4.5 m tall, carved in shallow relief. It shows an anthropomorphic figure with a fanged face, long pointed nails on the hands and feet, hair represented as snakes, and a belt formed by a chain of linked faces. One arm, the right, is raised and the other lowered. The stone runs from the floor of the gallery up through the ceiling, as if joining the underworld, the earth and the sky. Following Donald Lathrap, some scholars see it as an axis mundi, the centre of the world, and as the main deity of the Old Temple. Tello was probably the first to see the whole carving, after he excavated its lower part, until then buried.

The Tello Obelisk, a tall carved stone pillar, was found in 1908 by a local man, Trinidad Alfaro; neighbours led by the local governor stopped him taking it home, and it was kept in the town church until Tello had it sent to Lima in 1919. It is carved with two great caymans (a kind of crocodilian of the tropical lowlands). Their bodies are filled with other creatures and plants, which Donald Lathrap and others identified as tropical-forest crops such as manioc and chilli peppers. It may express a myth about the origins of cultivated plants or a vision of the cosmos linking sky, earth and water. After about ninety years in Lima it arrived back in Chavín on 12 July 2008, six days before the new National Chavín Museum opened, and it is displayed there.

The Raimondi Stela, a polished stone slab nearly 2 m tall, shows a standing figure with a fanged face holding a staff in each hand, one of the earliest well-known versions of the “Staff God” who reappears in Andean art for many centuries. A local landowner, Timoteo Espinosa, found it in the 1850s; the naturalist Antonio Raimondi saw it on his visit in 1869, and in 1874 he persuaded President Manuel Pardo to order its transfer to Lima. Turned upside down, the image changes: the towering headdress becomes a stack of grinning faces. It is now in the national archaeology museum in Lima.

The outer walls of the temple were once decorated with tenon heads (cabezas clavas): large stone heads with a long stone peg at the back, set into the masonry so the faces projected from the walls. Dozens are known, but almost all have fallen or been removed from the walls; in 1919 Tello had some taken down from a bridge in the town, where they had been set as decoration. They range from nearly human faces to fanged, snarling feline ones.

The temples were built of cut and fitted stone, including granite, sandstone and limestone. John Rick, the Stanford archaeologist who has led excavations at Chavín since 1995, and his team have mapped the buildings in detail; they argue that the builders repeatedly rebuilt and expanded the platforms while preserving older galleries inside.

Water was essential to the design. A network of stone-lined canals runs beneath the temples and plazas, draining heavy highland rain. In the 1970s the Peruvian archaeologist Luis Lumbreras proposed that the galleries worked as resonance chambers linked by sound-carrying corridors, and some researchers have suggested that rushing water in the canals could add roaring sounds. How deliberate such effects were is debated.

Sound was certainly part of Chavín ritual. In 2001 Rick’s team found twenty decorated trumpets made from large conch shells (pututus) in a small gallery beside the circular plaza; one more has been found since. The shells are a tropical species brought from warm waters at least 800 km to the north, and some are so worn by handling that they were probably used for generations. Acoustic studies led by Miriam Kolar at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) have found that tones in the range of the trumpets and of human voices resonate strongly in the galleries, where echoes become diffuse and hard to locate.

The architecture also shaped light and visibility. The galleries are mostly dark, reached by narrow shafts that let in light and air, and Rick has argued that lighting could be manipulated. Moving from bright sunlight into near darkness, perhaps under the influence of psychoactive substances, with strange sounds all around, could have been a powerful, disorienting experience before reaching the Lanzón.

Chavín was above all a religious centre. Its imagery is dominated by powerful animals from different environments: the jaguar from the forest, the harpy eagle and other birds of prey from the sky, the cayman from the rivers of the Amazon, and serpents. These animals are combined with human features to create composite supernatural beings.

Psychoactive plants were part of Chavín ritual. A relief from the Circular Plaza shows a figure holding what is usually identified as a San Pedro cactus, which contains mescaline, and some tenon heads show mucus running from the nose, a reaction to snuff blown into the nostrils. In 2025 Rick and colleagues reported direct evidence: bone tubes and other implements from sealed deposits in Gallery 3 carried microbotanical and chemical traces of vilca (Anadenanthera colubrina) and wild tobacco (Nicotiana), plants taken as snuff. This shows that psychoactive plants were used in institutionalized ritual, but it does not show who used them, and it is not direct evidence for San Pedro. The tenon heads, which range from human to animal faces, have often been read as showing priests transforming into jaguar-like spirit beings; this remains an interpretation.

The Lanzón, deep inside the temple, may have been an oracle, a god who answered questions through priests. Much later Andean oracles such as Pachacamac on the central coast, described by Spanish chroniclers, worked this way, drawing pilgrims from great distances. Chavín may have been an early example of this tradition, with pilgrims bringing offerings such as pottery, shells and foods from many regions.

The art itself worked like a religious code. Many images can be read in more than one way: a mouth can also be an eye, hair can be snakes, and whole images can change when turned upside down. Such complexity may have privileged specialist knowledge and reinforced religious authority, although we cannot establish exactly who understood the imagery.

Duality runs through Chavín imagery. On the Lanzón, one arm points up and the other down, often read as the sky above and the earth below; the Portal of the Falcons pairs black stone with white; many figures combine human and animal, or creatures of forest, sky and river. Some scholars connect this to a long-lasting Andean idea that the world is made of complementary opposites whose meeting, called tinku in Quechua, creates something new. Using a much later Quechua word for a monument three thousand years old is an interpretive choice, and whether the idea really goes back so far is uncertain.

Chavín de Huántar lay at a crossroads. Its valley links the Pacific coast, over the Cordillera Blanca, with the eastern slopes of the Andes that lead to the Amazon lowlands. Goods found at the site, such as obsidian, tropical marine shells brought from far to the north, and images of tropical forest animals and plants, show that it was connected to all three zones.

Highland farmers grew potatoes, quinoa and maize, and herded llamas, which provided wool and meat and carried loads over mountain trails. Llama caravans may have helped move goods and ideas between Chavín and other regions.

In the first millennium BC, and especially between about 800 and 500 BC, Chavín-related styles spread widely. Rick’s team notes that stamped, polished black pottery of the kind called “Janabarroid” is dated to roughly 800–500 BC both at Chavín and at related sites, and similar imagery of fanged deities, feline creatures and staff-bearing figures appears on textiles, pottery, stone carving and gold objects along the coast and in the highlands. Archaeologists once treated this as the first unification of the Andes, the start of a period they call the Early Horizon. Today many see it not as an empire but as the spread of a religious cult and its art, perhaps through pilgrimage, trade and affiliated shrines; UNESCO likewise describes Chavín as a centre of convergence and dissemination for a cult spread over a wide territory of the Andes.

Chavín was not the only important centre of its time. Other large temples such as Kuntur Wasi and Pacopampa in the northern highlands, and, somewhat later, cultures such as Paracas on the south coast, shared elements of the style while keeping their own traditions.

Rick and colleagues place the end of temple use around 500 BC and find that major construction had already slowed markedly before then, while Burger’s dates from the town suggest the settlement was abandoned by about 400 BC. Many other ceremonial centres of the central Andes also declined in these centuries. Later, a village of ordinary houses grew over parts of the temple, and people continued to live around and on top of the ruins for centuries.

Travellers described the ruins from the colonial period onward. The Italian-born naturalist Antonio Raimondi visited in 1869, publicized the site in Lima newspapers and had the Raimondi Stela sent to the capital. The Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello came on four expeditions: the first, in 1919, mostly recorded the visible remains, and in 1934 he excavated in depth. Tello argued that Andean civilization had developed independently in the Andes, with roots he traced to the Amazonian lowlands, rather than being brought from outside. In 1940 he diverted a river that was undermining the temple and opened a small site museum.

On 17 January 1945 a flood of mud, stones and water (aluvión), caused by the overflow of high Andean lakes, swept through Chavín, partially burying the archaeological site, devastating much of the town and sweeping away Tello’s museum. Clearing and excavation over the following decades, with local collaborators such as Marino Gonzales, uncovered structures such as the Portal of the Falcons. A strong earthquake in 1970 caused further damage. Luis Lumbreras excavated the galleries in the 1960s and 1970s, and Richard Burger’s 1975 excavations in the town produced a ceramic sequence that became the standard chronology.

Since 1995 the Stanford-led project of John Rick, with Peruvian colleagues, has excavated and mapped the galleries in detail. In August 2018 Peru’s Ministry of Culture announced that the team, using small camera-carrying robots, had found three previously unknown galleries containing what it described as the first Chavín-period human burials found. On 18 July 2008 the National Chavín Museum, built with Peruvian government funds and major Japanese cooperation, opened near the site, six days after the Tello Obelisk arrived from Lima.

Chronology. Burger’s ceramic sequence, based on his 1975 excavations in the town, divided Chavín into the Urabarriu, Chakinani and Janabarriu phases; in his 1992 synthesis he placed the site’s florescence around 900–200 BC and linked the New Temple and the widest spread of the style to the late phase. Radiocarbon dates from Rick’s project then pushed the architecture earlier: in 2009 Rick and colleagues concluded that activity tied to the temples began probably around 1200 BC, that there was very little major construction after about 800–750 BC, and that the temple had ceased to function by about 500 BC. In 2019 Burger published new AMS dates from his town excavations (Urabarriu c. 950–800, Chakinani c. 800–700, Janabarriu c. 700–400 BC), concluding that the settlement was founded around 950 BC and abandoned by 400 BC, and questioning some current views of the site’s founding and apogee. The two schemes now overlap more than before, but they still imply different histories of when Chavín was built and when its influence peaked.

Mother culture or peer centre? Tello saw Chavín as the source of Andean civilization. The discovery of earlier monumental sites such as Caral, Sechín Bajo and Kotosh showed that many elements once thought to begin at Chavín, including platform mounds, sunken plazas and temple renewal, were already centuries or millennia old. Burger and others describe Chavín as a centre that synthesized older coastal and highland traditions and spread them in a new, powerful form.

How was power exercised? One influential view, developed by Rick in work such as his 2005 paper on the evolution of authority at Chavín, sees Chavín as a place where a religious elite gradually built authority by manipulating experience: controlling light, sound, water and access, and staging dramatic encounters with the divine. In this view the architecture itself was a tool for creating belief and social inequality. Researchers caution against reading too much intentionality into features such as acoustics (Rick himself calls acoustics “a gray area for skeptics”), and point out that the political organization behind Chavín, whether a theocracy, a set of competing lineages or a pilgrimage community, remains uncertain.

Reading the art. The archaeologist John H. Rowe, in his 1962 study Chavín Art, described Chavín art as using visual metaphors he called kennings, in which one body part is replaced by another form, such as hair drawn as snakes. Others have emphasized contour rivalry, images that can be read in different ways. These analyses show a deliberate visual language, but interpreting specific myths from them, for example readings of the Tello Obelisk’s caymans and plants, discussed by Rowe and by Donald Lathrap, as a myth about cultivated plants or the cosmos, remains speculative.

Architecture as archive. The overlapping phases of the platforms, and the galleries preserved within them, provide the core evidence for Chavín’s history. Detailed mapping and excavation of the galleries allow researchers to reconstruct the order of building and the original appearance of spaces hidden inside the later structures.

Offerings and artefacts. Pottery and other offerings found in the galleries, some in styles from other regions, suggest that visitors or affiliated communities brought gifts from far away. Chemical and stylistic analysis of such objects, of obsidian and of marine shells, helps trace exchange networks, and residue analysis of bone tubes has now identified the plants used in ritual. The 2001 pututu find, and the gallery acoustic measurements begun in 2008, show how archaeology can explore the ritual soundscape. Radiocarbon dating, read carefully against architecture and pottery, underlies the chronological debate.

Iconography. Because Chavín left no writing, interpretation of its religion rests heavily on iconography: the Lanzón, the Tello Obelisk, the Raimondi Stela, the reliefs of the circular plaza and the tenon heads. Comparisons with later Andean religion, recorded by Spanish chroniclers in the sixteenth century, are useful but risky across a gap of two thousand years.

Disturbance and conservation. The 1945 flood, the 1970 earthquake, centuries of later occupation, looting, and the removal of sculptures to museums complicate the record. UNESCO identifies floods from glacial lakes and strong earthquakes as the main threats, along with landslides inside the galleries, drains and vents, and notes that resources for conservation are insufficient; Rick’s project has worked to put the ancient drainage system back into service.