A pray carved on the rock

Did the petroglyphs traced at Malingas Area some millennia ago seem to praise the water never to lack, but not to harm neither?

 

 

By Jaime Gallo Montero

 

 

    TAMBOGRANDE, Peru – It is difficult to understand what the History wants to teach us but much more difficult is trying to understand the few evidences it leaves us, like the drawings on the rock at Malingas Area, about 10 miles to the southeast of Tambogrande City. What did the ancestors perform through the petroglyphs and what meaning did the places where they decided to make them keep?This generation’s people know them as The Devils of Guaraguaos, but no one has an explanation about their authors and their performance.

 

 

Those ones are located amid a farm surrounded by carob trees, about 25 minutes by foot on the way between Guaraguaos Bajo and Guaraguaos Alto, and about 5 minutes from this last town. The drawings consist in anthropomorphous performances, in worshiping position, and in some cases they seem Suns with eyes and bolts connected by a sort of cord.

 

 

    The Devils of Guaraguaos appeared once upon a day in 1960s decade, when the machinery opened up the soil to set up the lands of San Lorenzo Colonization. While they removed, they found many basalt monoliths spread in a 1000-feet radius. As they could not take them out the place, because they thought they could find gold burials, they decided to leave right there.

 

 

What called their attention was the drawings of persons in frontal position, separated legs, squatting. Also traces of heads surrounded by bolts and the intriguing  connector cords between both. No one could explain them, and the people called them The Devils because of their strange form, what due to corrosion caused by the rain and the predation caused by the locals, are vanishing despite the local authorities consider them a touristic attraction.

 

 

    If there is not an explanation for those drawings, it is maybe more intriguing to know the traces repeat much sharp 3.5 miles away the west of Guaraguaos Bajo, at Manco Cápac Town, very near San Francisco Creek, a Piura River’s tributary.

 

 

Standing at an isolated place, depending on the surrounding dry forest to advance or retreat, they almost have not visited by the local people, so they have no predation clues, despite they are made on the same basaltic rock. But unlike the Guaraguaos Alto’s Petroglyphs, those ones are on the top of a hill which we named Mirador (oriel) because there is a full view of Malingas Sector up there from the Andean Range to Piura River. The drawings on the rock, like Guaraguaos Alto’s, seem to orientate to the south.

 

 

    Praise for control

Based upon the data by my partner Mario Tabra, who did studies on those type of vestiges at Ayabaca’s Andes, it is possible to determine it was about Amazonian origin’s people who populated the zone during the Formative Period, 20,000 to 2000 years B.C., after they learned to domesticate plants and animals.

 

 

It remains to determine the exact date of the petroglyphs we found. The inmediate reference is Samanga, Ayabaca District, near the Peru-Ecuador border (circa 2000 B.C. according to the anthropologist Mario Polía). Mr Tabra talked to Raúl Zevallos, who studied the shapes – he states the ancestors did their life submitted to the water existence.

 

 

    According to him, they praised for water but they also looked for controlling it. A constant praise for the resource never to lack but its abundance to be harmful either, what makes to suppose the people had been affected by some event related to El Niño (Malingas is the rainiest zone in Piura Coast). Perhaps that’s why it is nearby the creek. The two heads connected by a cord could be referred to the double-headed snake, a so common icon in Latin America, that performed the duality of the universe.

 

 

But there is still more. Those ones are not the only existent petroglyphs in the zone. In culqui and Huaca Larga, Ayabaca, there is also a rock with similar designs. As it blocked the asphalting of the Sullana-Ayabaca Road, it was removed of its site some years ago and relocated beside the local chapel. In Suyo District, Ayabaca, there is petroglyphs too. There are no studies in both cases.

 

 

The location of the rocks are not casual. The most concentration of Formative’s rests are at Upper Piura Valley, as it was studied by the archeologist Anne Marie Hocquenghem. In FACTORTIERRA, we believe those shrines sign the paths of water. As long as the ancestors populated this zone, they looked for places where they could settle and develop the agriculture, so they followed down the courses of Quiroz, Macará, and Chipillico Rivers. In other words, they depended on the water existence and they were dedicated to look for it and take it advantage for developing their activities

 

 

    Because the wáter was not another element but a member of their family. In fact, they learned to live with the natural phenomena and they knew they depended on the vital liquid at the most. It is necessary to do an in-depth study. What we discovered is just the point of the whole thread. The petroglyphs are right there. The time of specialists is right now.

 

 

Liliana Alzamora in Tambogrande and Nelson Peñaherrera in Sullana contributed to this sstory. With collaborations of Luis Ginocchio in Piura.

© 2006, 2020 Asociación Civil Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved.