Norte Chico building: Stepped platform at Caral (ca. 2200 BC) When did people first reach Peru? People probably first arrived in Peru about 13,000 BC. They were following the Pacific coast south from North America. More about Native Americans More South America articles Like the people who settled Brazil, on the other side of South America, around [...]
Nazca lines - a giant monkey drawn on the desert floor Nazca replace the Chavin After the Chavin state collapsed about 250 BC, two new states formed in Peru - the Moche in the north and the Nazca in the south. What were the Chavin like? More about the Moche South America articles So by about 100 BC, [...]
Macchu Picchu Until the 1400s AD, the Pacific coast of South America was made up of a lot of small independent kingdoms: first the Valdivia and Norte Chico people, then the Moche, the Chavin and the Mapuche. These kingdoms often raided each other, but then they went home again and made peace. This was like the city-states of ancient Greece, or the Etruscan period in Italy. Then one [...]
A Chavin carving By around 900 BC, the Norte Chico people of northern Peru developed into the Chavin culture. Like the earlier Norte Chico people, the Chavin people used irrigation to farm potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, and hot chili peppers. They also farmed corn, but they really ate mostly potatoes and quinoa, which grow better high in the Andes mountains. They hunted deer with spears [...]
Aztec men sharing a meal When people first came to Central and South America, perhaps about 15,000 BC, they hunted and gathered all of their food. They picked wild potatoes, wild teosinte (the ancestor of corn), wild beans and wild tomatoes and avocados. They hunted rabbits and llamas and turkeys, and fished in the rivers and the ocean. For fun, they probably fermented teosinte and other plants into [...]
Potato latkes cooked in oil are a traditional Hanukkah food Hanukkah is first and foremost a holiday about olive oil, so a good way to get to know Hanukkah better is to fry some kind of food in olive oil. Usually people make latkes, or grated vegetable pancakes. Here's a super-healthy recipe for latkes that [...]
A Chinook woman Because the Chinook lived so far north and west, they didn't have any contact with European invaders in the 1500s or 1600s AD. So we don't know much about what the Chinook were doing during these two centuries. But in 1792, the Chinook who lived along the Pacific coast met the American sea captain Robert [...]
People eating in Virginia, about 1550 AD (from the British Museum) Native American food In 1500 AD, most of the people living in North America, like the Pueblo, the Cherokee, the Iroquois, and the Mississippians, ate mainly beans and corn and squash. Sometimes people ate their corn baked into tacos or tortillas; other times people boiled corn into mush or soup. To go with [...]
European food history: An early chocolate house Trade brings new foods During the 1500s and 1600s AD, European traders brought back all kinds of new foods from places they sailed to around the world. Rich people began to eat sugar and ginger from India. (Combining these two new foods together gave us the gingerbread man). Chocolate, coffee, and tea They [...]
The Andes mountains run down the Pacific side of South America When did the Andes form? About 199 million years ago, near the beginning of the Jurassic period, was the time of the dinosaurs. That's when the supercontinent of Pangaea broke up and the pieces began to float away from each other. The [...]
