Today’s fishermen at Cerro Azul identify three environmental zones: the sea cliff (peña), the sandy beach (playa), and the cobble beach (costa). They use nylon fishing nets and modern watercraft. Joyce Marcus and Ramiro Matos interviewed fishermen to record their fishing strategies and walked with them to see where they went to procure different species of fish and molluscs.
On the first day that Marcus and Matos began their interviews, the fishermen went to the sea cliffs to cast nets. The fishermen said that boats were of no use here, because the waves would dash them to pieces against the cliff. Instead, the fishermen said they had to scramble down the sheer rock face until they found a ledge they could stand on. From that location they threw an atarraya, or circular cast net, into the sea below. This net closes around the fish that approach the cliff, either to graze on algae or to pick mussels off the rock. One common peña species is the chita or grunt.
Today’s fishermen decide where they want to go each day and which net to take along. Among the factors affecting their decisions are the weather that day, how well fishing went the previous day, and the time of day they plan to leave. Fishermen emphasized that the type of net they take to the peña is different from that taken to other environmental zones.
Some men own four different types of nets, and the burials of Late Intermediate men at Cerro Azul suggest that each man could also own several kinds of nets.
In addition to the data collected during interviews with living fishermen, the 16th-century and 17th-century documents provided important information about prehispanic fishermen and their technology. The documents refer to at least three kinds of watercraft: (1) wooden rafts made of large tree trunks (balsas); (2) kayak-like boats made of bulrushes (caballitos de totora); and (3) inflated rafts made of sea lion skins sewn together (cueros de lobomarino). Of these three kinds of watercraft, the only one that Marcus saw with her own eyes at Cerro Azul was a 20th-century caballito de totora, which was nostalgically displayed at the home of a retired fisherman.
The Cerro Azul Project unfortunately found no ancient watercraft. However, since clay models and painted depictions of caballitos de totora are known from Nasca, Moche, and Chimu pottery (and since elderly fishermen of Cerro Azul say they remember seeing such boats), it seems likely that Late Intermediate fishermen also were familiar with them. There is also reason to think that Cerro Azul fishermen turned sea lion skins into watercraft. For example, there is empirical evidence that the occupants of Structure D spent time trimming the flippers off such skins, perhaps preparing the hides for drying and sewing into waterproof rafts.
To assess some of the differences between today’s fishing and Late Intermediate fishing, the project expected to rely on ancient fishing gear and fish bones.
Late Intermediate Nets from Cerro Azul
More than 100 fragments of nets were recovered at Cerro Azul, often found in the burials of men or in storage bins.
One burial of a man, salvaged by the Michigan project, yielded an atarraya or cast net.
Shown in the illustration are the central starting point and the retrieval line. When the retrieval line was pulled, the bottom row of mesh came together to convert the net into a closed, bell-shaped bag that prevented the trapped fish from escaping. Upon seeing the Late Intermediate net, today’s fishermen said that the mesh of this net was appropriate for catching grunt, morwong, or scaled blenny.
Another salvaged burial produced the lower border of a curtain net made from cotton fiber. At the bottom of the net are five pairs of dangling cords. Each pair of cords would have been attached to one of the weights that held the curtain net to the ocean floor and kept it taut, like a tennis net.
Like today’s fishermen, Late Intermediate fishermen owned more than one type of net, which allowed them to fish in the habitat they chose that day. One man was buried with two nets; another was buried with several, including the remains of both cast nets and curtain nets.
Creating Evenly-Spaced Mesh in Nets at Cerro Azul
Although Late Intermediate fishing nets displayed mesh of different sizes, all nets featured uniform spacing between knots. This uniformity was achieved by the use of a mallero, or wooden template.
One wooden template (9 x 2.5 cm) was found near a burial that contained many fishing nets. Today’s fishermen said that this mallero was used for making nets to catch lisa or mullet. A second mallero (7 x 5 cm) was found in another burial, and this template was said to be suitable for creating large mesh, either for a carrying net or a net for catching róbalo.
Within Marcus’ sample of more than 100 net fragments from Cerro Azul, elderly fishermen believed that they could recognize mesh sizes suitable for anchoveta and sardine, mullet, grunt and drum, and larger fish such as bonito and róbalo.
Significantly, the site of Cerro Azul has so far yielded no fishhooks; instead, the prehispanic fishermen relied on an array of fishing nets.
Drying Fish for Export to Inland Communities
Catching fish was the first step in Cerro Azul’s economic specialization. The second step was drying massive amounts of fish. It appears that the noble families at Cerro Azul were the ones directing this economic activity, although the actual harvesting of small fish was presumably done by commoner fishermen. Intervening between the nobles and fishermen was a group of overseers who supervised the filling and emptying of fish storage rooms.
It is unlikely that ordinary fishermen, unsupervised by nobles, would have harvested thousands of anchovetas on their own. The site’s extensive commoner middens produced only small numbers of anchovetas and sardines; instead, commoner households seem to have concentrated on medium-sized fish such as grunt, drum, mullet, and mackerel. In other words, it was the nobles who were most involved in the production of dried fish for export.
The highest concentrations of anchovetas were found in specialized, sand-filled storage rooms. Such rooms occurred either in the large elite residential compounds (e.g., Structure D) or in smaller storage facilities adjacent to them (e.g., Structure 9).
The technique of fish drying appears to have been as follows. First, thousands of anchovetas and sardines would be dried in the sun. Then a layer of clean sand would be laid on the floor of a storage room. Over this went a single layer of dried anchovetas and sardines. A second layer of sand would be placed over the fish; then came a second layer of dried fish; then a third layer of sand. The hygroscopic qualities of the sand drew the last of the moisture out of the fish, completing the drying process.
Not only were Cerro Azul’s elite involved in the export of fish, the site’s capacity for fish storage increased over time. Of Structure 9’s thirteen rooms, roughly half either began as fish storage units or were converted to them. The fact that both Structure D and Structure 9 saw more and more of their rooms filled with sand during their occupation suggests that Cerro Azul felt pressure to increase its capacity for fish storage over time.
Copyright © 2021 University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA)