AT ITS HEIGHT DURING the fifteenth century, the vast Inca Empire spanned some 2,500 miles along the western coast of South America. Its kings were called “Son of the Sun” and were believed to be descendants and earthly representations of the sun god, Inti. In major centers across the realm, rulers commissioned temples dedicated to sun worship modeled after the Golden Enclosure, a sacred building in the Inca capital of Cuzco, reinforcing the connection between their royal lineage and their divine ancestor. The Inca kings, however, were far from the first South American rulers to claim a divine right to rule. More than 1,000 years before the Inca state began to take shape, leaders from elite families throughout the Peruvian Andes established their authority by explicitly linking themselves to a divine genealogy. “They saw themselves as sharing in the cosmological power of divinities,” says archaeologist George Lau of the University of East Anglia. “Although we typically associate this kind of leadership with the later archaeology of Peru, Andean societies much earlier in prehistory were already beginning to take up the idea of divine lordship and adopt it as a practice regionally.”
This form of social organization seems to have emerged by the early first millennium A.D. at, among other places, two sites in the Peruvian region of Ancash: Pashash, in the Cabana Valley of the northern highlands, and Cerro San Isidro, closer to the coast in the Nepeña Valley. While both sites have long been known from standing architecture and were the subject of limited surveys in the 1960s and 1970s, neither had been systematically explored or excavated. More recent surveys in the 2010s revealed that, by the first centuries A.D., Pashash and Cerro San Isidro had grown into important regional centers whose leaders were part of elite family groups living in large walled compounds that served as both residences and locations for ritual activity and burials. From 2019 to 2022,
