The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

nothing in Chavín’s monumental landscape really seems concerned with secular government at all. There are no obvious military fortifications or administrative quarters. Almost everything, on the other hand, seems to have something to do with ritual performance and the revelation or concealment of esoteric knowledge.54 Intriguingly, this is exactly what indigenous informants were still telling Spanish soldiers and chroniclers who arrived at the site in the seventeenth century. For as long as anyone could remember, they said, Chavín had been a place of pilgrimage but also one of supernatural danger, on which the heads of important families converged from different parts of the country to seek visions and oracles: the ‘speech of the stones’. Despite initial scepticism, archaeologists have gradually come round to accepting that they were right.55