The breeze blew over the desiccated hills, brown against the iron gray of the cloudy sky.

The wind propelled thick banks of fog inland from the Pacific, slowly rolling through

the valleys, cool and moist, but never stopping to share their bounty with the parched ground.

This ought to have been dead space, this narrow strip of coast, highlands and barren valleys

leading up toward the peaks of the Andes Mountains, but it wasn't.

Boyant reed boats plied the shockingly cruel waters just offshore, their cotton nets rising

to the surface full of sardines and anchovies.

Collectors walked the coves and inlets around the mouth of the river, snagging shellfish

by the desert, setting traps for unlucky seabirds.

As they worked, the fishermen and beach comers snacked on Guava, looking forward to a meal

made from ground maize when they finished their work in return home.

The Guava and the maize came to the big settlements just inland, the places with the enormous

mounds rising to the sky, surrounded by plazas, houses and irrigated fields full of crops.

When the time came, the fishermen and collectors would leave their villages and towns by the

coast and go to the bigger places, trekking over the hills or through the valleys, paddling

their reed boats upstream to take them into the shadows of the great mounds.

There they would feast and work, carrying heavy bags called chikra made from reeds and

cotton filled with earth and dirt to build ceremonial platforms.

They would gather with their neighbors, reaffirming the ideas and reforging the bonds that tied

them together.

This was how things were more than 4,000 years ago in the valleys we now call the Norte

Chico region.

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