The road to civilization may be the same as the road to riches, suggest findings from a UCLA archaeological team active in the Peruvian highlands.

Over the past 15 years, the team led by UCLA archaeologist Charles Stanish has uncovered a circuit of almost 100 pre-Inca settlements, some dating back more than 4,000 years, along a trade route that is still used today for commercial purposes.

“These settlements reveal the role of trade in the origins of civilization in this part of the world, perhaps elsewhere as well,” said Charles Stanish, a professor in UCLA’s anthropology department and the director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. “A number of archaeologists believe that trade is a key factor in the development of complex societies, or ‘civilization,’ as it is commonly called. This certainly appears to be a case where civilization developed in an area where trade was a central factor.”

Stanish compares the 150-mile-long circuit through the highlands of the Lake Titicaca Basin to a small version of the Silk Road, the ancient trade route through Asia that dates back millennia. Instead of silk and other goods that flowed between China and the West, such predecessors of the Inca as the Qaluyu and Pucara peoples appear to have traded gold, feathers, pelts, honey, hardwoods and herbal medicines. Also unlike the Silk Road, which has been known to Westerners since the Middle Ages, the high-plains trade route remains unexplored because the area is so remote and difficult to navigate and because it has been terrorized for years by the infamous revolutionary group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path.

Stanish’s discoveries, most of which have yet to be excavated, dot an area that is about the size of the country Belize and are located in the high Andes, or “altiplano.” Religious temples with stone foundations are the most common prehistoric remains that the UCLA team has found along what is today a dirt road that leads into Amazonian forest through mountain passes. Pottery shards and other remains suggest that houses and small towns or villages once surrounded the temples, but have since decayed.

Stanish’s team has found stylistically similar pottery shards at the sites along the circuit, suggesting that the settlements traded among each other.

The team has also found shards of fancy pottery known to have been produced at Pucara, a large pre-Inca settlement that archaeologists had previously dated to 1300 B.C. The shards suggest a history of trade between Pucara and the other settlements along the high-plains trade route.

“For generations, archaeologists and historians have debated why people stopped wandering and what caused them to form the first civilizations,” Stanish said. “These findings join mounting evidence pointing to the importance of trade.”

Stanish’s most recent discoveries — two temples in the northern Titicaca Basin — were made in November, and they have been tentatively dated as between 1300 B.C. and A.D. 200. These temples correspond to the Qaluyu and Pucara cultures.

“When people think of temples, they think of something like classical Greek structures with columns,” Stanish said. “But these sites are just mounds on hilltops. They’re not visually compelling, but they are some of the earliest temples ever found in the highlands and they reveal origins of civilization in this part of the world.”

“Roads follow the paths of least resistance, and in this case they followed older roads that linked together these older settlements,” Stanish said. “The new discoveries help us determine the extent of Pucara and earlier trade into the forested eastern Andean slopes down into the Amazon basin. Little by little, we are piecing together a scientific puzzle that will give us answers to the origins of human civilization. This is one of the great goals of modern archaeology.”

Stanish is the co-author — with Brian Bauer, a University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor of anthropology — of the 2001 book, “Ritual and Pilgrimage in the Ancient Andes: The Islands of the Sun and the Moon” (University of Texas Press). In addition, Stanish is the author of a forthcoming book, “Ancient Titicaca” (University of California Press).

Stanish also is the moderator for “Empire Builders of Ancient Peru,” a Saturday, Feb. 9, daylong program presented by UCLA Extension and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. The event, which assembles leading experts on the foundations of the great Peruvian civilizations, runs from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in UCLA’s Lenart Auditorium, Fowler Museum of Cultural History. For more information, call (310) 825-2272.