While investigating looters’ holes at the site of La Otra Banda in northern Peru’s Zaña Valley, archaeologist Luis A. Muro Ynoñán of the Field Museum and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru spotted carved blocks around seven feet below the surface. He and his team opened a trench and discovered that the blocks were part of the walls of a large adobe temple built as much as 4,000 years ago. “This is when the first decorated temples were being constructed along the coast,” Muro says. He notes that the temple was built centuries before the people of Chavín, a culture that flourished from around 1000 to 400 b.c., built temple complexes in the Andes. “Until now, no culture from this period was known in the Zaña Valley,” says Muro. The researchers also uncovered murals featuring geometric designs that were painted during a renovation of the temple begun shortly after its original building phase had been completed.
The structure appears to have been laid out like a theater, Muro explains, with a stagelike platform and a staircase leading down to what was likely an open plaza. On either side of the staircase, the team found carved reliefs depicting a creature with a human body, the head of a bird, and reptilian limbs. “This hybrid creature on the facade of the temple seems to be a predecessor of figures in Chavín iconography,” Muro says. “Despite the fact that these two peoples are very distant chronologically, the images seem to be an expression of the same religion.”
