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feasts, which they likely attended along
with upper-class people. “Yes, there are
definitely going to be haves and have-nots,”
Vogel says. But through feasting, the govern-
ment “can help make sure that everybody gets
fed.” Chicha and shellfish were probably the main
offerings. Vogel thinks the Casma government used
state-sponsored feasts as a way to collect and redis-
tribute these resources, making sure everyone got what
they needed even as the drought dragged on for centuries.
Compared to the Moche, Vogel believes “the Casma’s way of
ruling was far more centered on economics.” Their strategy
seems to have kept inequality in check as well. Although high-
status and low-status people lived in different neighborhoods,
symbols of wealth were more muted than they had been in the
extravagant Moche society. Even Casma jewelry was practical.
Some women were buried wearing necklaces decorated with
copper ornaments that Vogel initially thought were beads. But
upon closer inspection, she realized they were actually spindle
whorls, tools used to spin cotton into thread for textiles.The Casma survived for 700 years, enduring centuries of
drought along the way. “That’s a long time for a culture that
we knew so little about,” Vogel says. “They weren’t just a
flash in the pan.” Around 1400 , El Purgatorio was conquered
by the Chimú, a northern people known for their extensive
bureaucracy—which perhaps made them even more effec-
tive at brokering trade and redistributing resources than the
Casma. Maybe, says Pacifico, the improved system appealed to
the practically minded citizens of El Purgatorio. He and Vogel
did not find signs of violence at the city’s end. Instead, they
saw that some of El Purgatorio’s plazas were ritually closed off,
suggesting that residents had time to leave peacefully, Vogel
says. Even the Casma’s decline was orderly, a fitting end to a
state dedicated to warding off hard times. nLizzie Wade is a journalist based in Mexico City.Vogel says. “People start to say, ‘You’re
not doing your job. You told us you
could take care of us.’”
Vogel thinks the people living in the
Casma Valley saw the need to do things
differently. “They’re taking their lives
back,” she says. Rather than constructing
enormous pyramids for rituals, the Casma
structured the center of El Purgatorio around
walled plazas, each with a raised platform and
a labyrinth of rooms surrounding it. In front of
the platform, the biggest plazas had enough space for
hundreds of people. The Casma rarely practiced human
sacrifice, and their religion doesn’t appear to have invoked
fantastical or monstrous gods. “It’s not about how they can
terrify the populous into submission,” Vogel says. Casma rituals
weren’t gory spectacles. They were feasts, designed to provide
for the entire populace.
The whole of El Purgatorio seems to have been dedicated
to throwing these frequent feasts. Vogel found the remains of
serving plates and bowls in the public plazas, as well as mol-
lusk shells and one large trash deposit of maize—an unusual
find, because these ceremonial spaces were kept clean between
events. The animal and plant remains Vogel sifted from the
soil in both plazas and houses showed that the residents of El
Purgatorio were eating mostly shellfish. The remains of maize
and a tropical fruit called guanabana were also particularly
abundant. But Vogel found no farming or fishing tools in the
city, not even in the lower-status neighborhood where small
houses were jammed together on a steep hillside. That meant
the city’s food was being produced elsewhere and brought in.
El Purgatorio’s rulers must have commanded a trade network
extending from tip to toe of their valley, and possibly in adja-
cent valleys also occupied by the Casma, Vogel says.
The lower-status people in El Purgatorio didn’t have to grow
corn or catch fish because they had a different job to worry
about. David Pacifico, an archaeologist at Cardinal Stritch Uni-
versity who led the excavation of their hillside neighborhood as
a graduate student, found hundreds of grinding stones, heavy
anvils with a smooth flat top, and an accompanying roller, to
break down tough maize kernels. In some houses, there was
just one grinding stone. In others, two, three, or four were
lined up in a row. And in a neighborhood’s central patio—a
more humble version of the plazas downtown—Pacifico found
11 grinding stones lined up in a row. “The fact that they’re
aligned suggests that you’re not in a circle all talking to each
other while working,” he says. “They are doing some massive
surplus production of food there.”
These workers were likely making chicha, a beer made from
maize that played a central role in many Peruvian cultures and
was especially important for feasts. Chicha spoils quickly, so
such intensive production would only have made sense if the
city required large quantities to be consumed at once. Pacifico
concluded that El Purgatorio’s lower classes must have spent
much of their days grinding and fermenting corn for the
enormous quantities of chicha required for the city’s frequent
Necklaces made out of copper spindle whorls were
discovered in the burials of some women in El Purgatorio.A broken piece of a ceramic bowl
unearthed at El Purgatorio bears the
quick sketch of a smiling human face
and is thought to be an indication of the
Casma sense of humor.