Montegrande (archaeological site)

Montegrande is an exciting old place in Peru where people found a big, special building made a very long time ago, around 3000 BC. It is in a place called the Cajamarca department, in Jaén province, and in the Jaén District of Peru. This special building looks like a spiral and was made by people who lived near where Peru and Ecuador meet today.

The Montegrande site is very important because it is about 5,000 years old, which makes it older than another famous old place called Caral. You can find Montegrande just outside a town named Jaén in Peru. Learning about places like Montegrande helps us understand how people lived many, many years ago.

Excavations

Excavations at Montegrande started in 2009, with help from the Andean Community. A team of Ecuadorian and Peruvian archaeologists worked together there. Before this, people thought the hills were just natural land with some old remains from the Bracamoros culture. But they did not know such ancient buildings were hidden.

At Montegrande, workers removed trash and modern buildings. They found yellow steps and floors. Under a layer of clay and pebbles, they discovered the remains of a large spiral-shaped building. At other nearby sites, they found more things, like special murals and signs that people were growing cocoa thousands of years ago, earlier than people thought. This ancient culture is called the Mayo-Chinchipe, and it lived from Podocarpus National Park in Ecuador to near Bagua, Peru.

Spiral construction

The spiral enclosure of Montegrande was built using adobe and rounded stones. People think it may have been a special place for ceremonies. There might have been a tomb underneath for someone important, like a healer or a priest.

Spirals were very meaningful to people in the Andean world. They might have stood for a coiled snake, an idea seen in other nearby places. The spiral shape is also found in the famous Nazca Lines, like the monkey geoglyph. This shape matches that of a special shell called Spondylus, from the coast of Ecuador, showing that people traded with those areas.