“Why did this happen here of all places? It's not a particularly easy environment, but the big moment may have been when someone discovered that irrigation wasn't that difficult,”
“The people who built the first of these structures had no model to go by, no precedent to use in building a monument. It's a bit like deciding to build a functioning spaceship in your back yard, and succeeding.”
“You can use irrigation to explain both the rise and fall of the Norte Chico region. By 1,800 B.C., when this civilization is in decline, we begin to find extensive canals farther north. People were moving to more fertile ground and taking their knowledge of irrigation with them. The Norte Chico ultimately became something of a frontier zone between northern and southern centers of influence and political development.”
“This wasn't a single site where people were doing something really unusual, but a whole region, a whole culture, where people were organized to produce large pyramids and sunken plazas -- something the Americas hadn't seen before,”
