Posted on Thursday 17 April 2003

A four-thousand-year-old gourd fragment found on the Peruvian coast may push back the appearance of ancient Andean religion by a thousand years. Archaeological teams from the Proyecto Arqueológico Norte Chico were conducting surface collections of looted cemeteries in Norte Chico, a region some 120 miles north of Lima, when they found the painted and incised fragment, once part of a gourd bowl. It features a fanged creature with splayed feet whose left arm appears to end in a snake's head and whose right hand holds a staff.

This figure appears to be the earliest depiction of the Staff God, interpreted as the principle deity of the Formative Period Chavín culture (ca. 1000-200 B.C.). Over the course of the following millennium, the Staff God appears in various manifestations in many Andean cultures, and reappears during the Wari and Tiwanaku empires of A.D. 600 to 1000.


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Gourd vessels were very important in ancient Peruvian society. Long before they invented ceramics (around 3600 BC) they grew and used gourds for everything from carrying water in them to eating dinner out of them. Finding fragments of these gourd receptacles (even ones from a later period such as this one) is a relatively rare thing.