Chavín de Huántar

High in the Andes of Peru, a temple of stone galleries drew pilgrims from far away. Its carvings of jaguars, snakes and fanged gods, and its maze of dark passages, shaped Andean art for centuries.

Date: About 1200 to 500 BCV · The Iron Age and growing statesVI · The classical world
Place: Chavín de Huántar, PeruThe Americas
Laid out as: A beliefA faith or a way of thinking, from its central idea outwards to its practice and its spread.
Lessons: 5 planned, none written yet
Image: The Met Open Access, CC0
Themes: Religion, belief and myth
Art, architecture and design
Transport, towns and building works

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

IA temple in the mountains
IIThe Lanzón
IIIGalleries, water and sound
IVShell trumpets
VPilgrims from afar

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Julio C. Tello
John Rick

Objects

The Lanzón stone
The Raimondi Stela
Pututu shell trumpets

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

1200 BC to 500 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?