Chiribaya

The Chiribaya were a people of the desert coast of far southern Peru and northern Chile, their heartland the Osmore valley behind the port of Ilo. Their culture took shape around 700 to 900, after Wari and Tiwanaku colonists linked these valleys to the highlands, and its classic phase lasted to about 1360.

Never a unified state, they formed a señorío, a loose network of villages under caciques following the Andean principle of verticality: coastal fishermen and inland farmers of maize and chili peppers at one thousand to two thousand metres, while llamas and alpacas grazed the lomas fog oases, where they even bred a special shepherd dog.

The two zones exchanged food and supplied highland peoples such as the Colla with maize, dried fish and guano. Mid-fifteenth-century Inca expansion absorbed them into the Tawantinsuyu, though coastal villages kept their mixed farming-and-fishing life into the early Spanish decades.