Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. My name is Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host.

In this episode, I’m speaking with Dr. Jacob Bongers. He’s currently based at the University of Sydney, where he’s the Tom Austen Brown Postdoctoral Research Associate and a member of the Vere Gordon Childe Center.

He’s also a visiting research fellow at the Australian Museum Research Institute. However, his recent paper focuses on a site that is far from Australia. Jacob and I dive into his team’s new work at Monte Sierpe, also known as the Band of Holes, and this site is located in the Andes Mountains in Peru. Now this site has garnered a lot of attention over the decades.

In our conversation, we discuss the various theories surrounding this site’s purpose and the new hypothesis that his team is proposing. He starts us off by sharing what makes this site so intriguing.

Jacob Bongers: This is one of the most unique sites in the Andes, so it is in the Pisco Valley of Southern Peru. Monte Sierpe means Serpent Mountain in Spanish, and it’s also known as the band of Holes, and it is a one and a half kilometer long line of over 5,200 holes in the ground and the first aerial photos of the site were published in the 1930s and it has baffled archaeologists, the public, for decades, and we’ve carried out some new work at the site that has shed some new light on purpose behind this site.

Smiti: Often when I hear that archaeologists were baffled by something, a part of me is like, well, you know, we’re trying to figure things out.

Yeah. Like we might be baffled for a moment, but then we’re going to lean in and figure out what something could have been used for or how it function now with Monte Sierpe. This is a place that sparked a lot of theories. So could you start us off by telling us some of those theories surrounding the site?

Jacob Bongers: A lot of people subscribed to the theory that the Band of Holes was a series of gardens, that it served a sort of agricultural function, and there just isn’t a lot of evidence to s support this. The first point is that it doesn’t rain that much there. So the site was built in a in between area known as the Chaupiyunga.

So it’s in between the coastal lowlands and the Highlands. It rarely rains there. There’s no groundwater at the site, and the site is on a slope. It’s sort of, it’s been built into a hillside and it’s near the Pisco River, and that has abundant water flow and fertile farmland is right on the valley floor by the river.

And so it just doesn’t make a ton of sense why you would pour in so much time, so, so much labor into digging over 5,000 holes to create a sort of supplemental tract of land when you already have a very, very strong agricultural base. I mean, this is one of the most agriculturally productive areas in pre-Hispanic, Peru. Water capture.

A lot of people think this looks like water capturing devices that you see in deserts, but again. It doesn’t rain that much there. And even if they were capturing water, it’s not enough to actually grow plants. And then fog capture, there it, there are fog oasis there. My co-author and partner, Ioana Dumitru plotted on a map of where these oases are, and it is in an area where there is fog, but it’s ephermeral fog, so it there would be fog there that wouldn’t last more than a week.

So it may have captured fog, but again, it wouldn’t have been enough to support growing plants in. It’s not an alien landing pad. I can, I can say that with 100% certainty. It was not used for defense. There are, there are some people that that feel like, oh, this, this is something that could have impeded, invading armies.

And what’s important to point out here is that the edges of the holes are trible. You can move across this site easily. Right? So. There are no weapons that were found at the site. There’s no evidence of defensive architecture or fortifications, so that doesn’t quite work. Was it a geoglyph, like the famous Nasca lines, right?

Yes, it could have been. And again, the name means Serpent Mountain and it looks like a snake, so that’s possible. We cannot rule that out.

Smiti: Thank you for going over those theories, and there’s a lot of them, especially agricultural related ones, some pseudoscience ones, which I wanna talk about later. But you are providing a new interpretation or an additional interpretation.

So can you tell us a bit about that?

Jacob Bongers: Absolutely. So we think that this site served as a pre Inca barter marketplace, that was then turned into a large scale accounting device under the Inca Empire. Um, I feel like it’s important to talk about what is supporting this, this new theory. And I wanna start by talking about the drone mapping.

So we were able to drone map the entire site, and what’s fascinating here is that this site is not one continuous line. It’s actually approximately 60 sections of holes, and with some of these, there are empty spaces in between. So this is very important. Also, based on that aerial imagery, found that there are mathematical patterns in layout.

So you have sections. There’s at least one that has. Multiple rows of eight holes. 8, 8, 8, 8, 8. Very, very interesting. Okay, and then a separate section has alternating counts of holes. 8, 7, 8, 7, 8, 7. We don’t know what these patterns mean. No idea. But they hint at an underlying intention in the layout of this site.

This is not random. Something is going on here. Then we collected sediment samples from several holes across the entire site, and we identified pollen from crops such as maize. Maize is one of the most I important staple crops in the Andes, and we also found pollen from certain wild plants such as reeds and willow that have been used for thousands of of years to make baskets and mats.

And this is extremely important because it supports the idea that goods were brought to the site and placed in the holes. And then on top of that, the layout of this site is similar to a khipu. What is a khipu? A khipu is a system of knotted strings that the Inca used for accounting. It was the Excel spreadsheet of the Inca Empire, and there was one khipu that was found in the same valley as this site.

The structure of that khipu, which is very unique, is similar. To the 60 sections of holes at the site, and there are mathematical interrelationships between the counts that are encoded in the knots on that khipu might actually speak to some of the working accounting operations that may have characterized the function of this site.

Smiti: Wow, that’s really incredible. So could you tell us a bit more about what a barter marketplace is, especially within the context of the Incan Empire?

Jacob Bongers: Absolutely, yes. So a barter marketplace is a place where people meet and exchange goods. But how did that work? So what’s important here is that Pre-Hispanic, Peru, there is no strong evidence for the use of currency.

Barter marketplaces are not built around currency. What are they built around? They’re built around shared understandings of value. They’re built around shared understandings, agreed upon understandings about the equivalency between different types of goods. If this site functioned as a barter marketplace.

We envision that the holes were units of exchange and that there was an understanding that a certain amount of a type of good, so let’s say maize corn was equal. To a certain amount of, another type of good, let’s say cotton. So we think that the holes were used as a way of publicly displaying information about available goods. I have 20 holes of maize and I want 15 holes of cotton, and I want you to put it right there. And then when the Inca come along and they conquered this area, we think that they may have seen this and thought, whoa, this is an interesting place, but. We don’t want y’all to be exchanging resources.

We want the resources, right? We wanna channel those resources, those goods, into our empire, into our coffers. So we think that they took over this site and turned it into a large scale accounting device. And we know from the sources, when they exerted control over an area, they reorganized local communities into different administrative groups and they installed a new a system called, “mit’a”, that entails these different groups taking turns, paying taxes in the form of either labor or tribute. In this model, we think that the sections of holes, right? It’s not one continuous line, but it’s actually approximately 60 sections of these holes.

We think that each section corresponded to distinct administrative groups that the Inca imposed and that those groups were in charge of digging their own holes, creating their own section, and that they would then bring tribute goods and maize was definitely one of those goods that, that they would’ve taxed.

And so people would bring those goods to the holes. The Inca are again saying, we want wey holes of maize. We want 30 holes of cotton and so forth. And they would bring those goods to their section, and then the Inca would come over, elect it, and then move it.

Smiti: Thank you for giving us that overview and just diving deep a little bit there.

Now to go back to something that I promised I talk about earlier, when you have a lot of theories, when you are initially not sure about what something might be, and then if there’s math involved, especially math patterning. All these things tend to attract pseudoscientific theories. How did that impact how you approached this research, especially the dissemination of this research?

Jacob Bongers: Up until our work there, there just hadn’t been a lot of systematic work, and so you’ve got these theories, but they aren’t really supported by scientific data, so we wanted to come along, do some work. At the site and collect data and evaluate these high hypotheses as opposed to just proposing them with no basis while we were there, this was in 2023, we spoke to.

Some of the local people there about this site, and they also commented on, it’s an interesting site, but not a lot of information about what was the function. And we definitely wanna do more engagement, but we really wanted this paper to represent and effort to combat pseudo Archaeology or just unfounded theories that cloud the purpose of this site. And so we are, again, we are proposing a hypothesis. This is still a hypothesis that needs to be further tested, but at the very least, the main difference here is that it’s based on sound, archaeological practice, and data.

Smiti: I really appreciate you stating that delineation because it is important ethically for us to disseminate our research, but it’s also important to state what state the research is in and what phase you’re in.

And I also wanna add, after reading your paper, it’s very clear that you are in community with the people you’re working with in Peru. Do you mind talking a bit more about that?

Jacob Bongers: Absolutely. Yeah. So if you run a project in Peru, you have to have a Peruvian co-director. And I wanna give a shout out to Jorge Rodriguez who helped me map this site.

And we had several lively discussions about this site. And so it was really lovely to have him there. And I’m really, really, really looking forward to future work and engage with the community who, who is based in the town of Humay. I really would love to engage more with them and hear more of their perspectives on this incredible site.

Smiti: So that leads us into my next question, which is what’s next? Because this is an exploratory study. What are the next research phases for your project?

Jacob Bongers: We wanna do several more things. So first point is C 14 dates. We have only one C 14 date from inside one of the hole. It’s early 13 hundreds to like early 14 hundreds.

And we know that the Inca Empire was in this area. So we know based on that C 14 day based on surface pottery found at the site and at a site that is nearby that it’s late pre-Hispanic, so late intermediate period and Inga period. So we’re fairly confident about that. But over what period of time was the site built in five years?

Was it built in 25 years? Was it built in a a hundred years? Right. We can’t answer that yet. And that’s very important. So how do we do that? Well. We have to excavate this site. So we definitely want to carry out in the future systematic excavations and we want to bring in a geo archaeologist. We wanna understand the geology, uh, of this site and what is a hole actually look like.

Is there any stratigraphy? There are these empty spaces that are. I in between these sections. Are they empty? Are they, we don’t know. Right? On top of that, we want to run more sediment analyses. We, we wanna be looking at more sediment samples and carrying out micro botanical analyses and seeing is there any more pollen?

And I can say right now that we have done some more work and there are more plants that are coming out now. And then on top of that, we also wanna be looking at more khipus that were found in this area. And as, as my coauthor, Manny Medrano says, he’s the khipu expert that was on this paper. And, and, and he, he was fantastic.

He has described the, this Pisco area and the south coast of Peru in general is a hotspot for Inca accounting for khipus. There are a lot of khipus that are found in this region, and so we would love to look at all of these khipus and see are there any mathematical relationships? Between these khipus, in terms of their structure, in terms of their counts and the layout of the site, and it could be very, very interesting.

I know that AI is a very hot topic right, right now, but AI could be really useful here to uncover potentially war mathematical patterns in this site. I can assure you, there’s definitely other patterns that we have not uncovered yet. This is an incredibly complicated site, so I think it would be really interesting to leverage AI in this way and try and see are there any more patterns, and then compare that to the khipus that we are looking at.

So we have all of that planned. Um, it’s exciting.

Smiti: Yeah, it’s absolutely exciting and you have a lot of work ahead of you, but honestly, it also feels like one of those dream projects that, you know, if you ask almost any archaeologist, like if you had all the time and resources, what would you do? This seems like one of those projects for you, and I’m curious, what has it meant to you personally to work on Monte Sierpe?

Jacob Bongers: I’ve worked in this. Area for over 10 years, and I recall seeing this site around 20, I think it was 2013, maybe 2014, but it was around that, that time. And you know, I see this site and I’m just, I’m just astounded by it. I’m just absolutely astounded by it not having a, any answers and for a long time. When I was a grad student, I was very focused on if I am going to do this.

Our main goal is to reconstruct the past. We need to find the truth. We need to find answers, answers, answers, answers. And I took a few theory courses and I realized right away, uh. That that’s not necessarily what we do. That we, I was uncomfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. I craved certainty and I learned through those courses that we’re not always gonna get certainty.

We can see the puzzle. We’re only gonna have a few of the puzzle pieces. It’s very hard to have the entire puzzle. And years ago, personally, that would’ve driven me nuts. You know, just, oh, what’s the answer? We don’t have the answer yet. We don’t have the answer yet. It’s not about the answers, it’s about the questions that you raise.

It’s raised new questions, exciting questions that pave the way for new work to be done and to engage more Indigenous communities about this, bring them here. We’d love to hear more of their perspectives. It paves the way for that. So it’s just fantastic to work on a site that is hard to understand. And when I say hard to understand, I mean from the western perspective where I’m from. I’m born and raised in San Jose, California. Right? So I’m a westerner and it’s hard for me to, but it may not be for other people. And that’s what makes this so interesting.

Smiti: I hear you and I do appreciate what you said about certainty and uncertainty and the archaeological record and what type of answer feels like an answer because you are getting at some answers, but it depends on the question and what can we comfortably say based on a scientific evidence, but also valuing different ways of meaning making throughout the world.

Jacob Bongers: Yes.

Smiti: And how we engage with sites and people and what they mean to us. And so I am so happy to hear that working on this site has also been a bit of a personal transformation. And you know, honestly throughout our conversation, I love that this highlighted how we evaluate and test different theories about the past and what we honestly can say and what we can’t say. And I’m wondering, what do you hope listeners take away from this conversation about how archaeologists approach a site, especially one that garners a lot of fascination.

Jacob Bongers: So there, there are many sites that many people label as enigmatic or mysterious or inexplicable.

Um, and. This is definitely one of those sites. Again, from a Western perspective, it’s baffling, right? But it may not be for non-Western peoples, for other communities. But the important point here is that we tell stories. Archaeology tells stories. That, ideally, are backed by data and by Indigenous perspectives, and if that’s not done, then you run the risk of unfounded theories clouding what are really important sites of local heritage that are meaningful for a lot of people. Pseudo Archaeology does harm. And it’s very important to carry out sound archaeological practice, excavation, survey, and engage with local communities, hear what they have to say. And fundamentally though, I do see this site as a social technology that brought people together.

It may have been used as a barter marketplace, may have been used as an accounting device. We may be completely wrong, but fundamentally, one thing that I’m fairly confident about is that at a certain point in time, this site brought people together to interact, and I think we need more of that during this time.

Smiti: One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that sites like Monte Sierpe remind us how important it is to carefully evaluate theories and to be both mindful and transparent about what’s informing our interpretations.

If you’d like to learn more about Jacob and his team’s work, you can check out their new open access publication, which is free to download and access.

If you wanna follow Jacob, you can check out his website, which links all his socials. You’ll find everything we mentioned in the show notes along with the link to a full transcript of this episode. And if you’re curious to dig deeper and learn a bit more about drones and archaeology, Jacob discusses that in a Patreon exclusive video, our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our bonus content.

And if you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Jacob Bongers: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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