Archaeological Peru (Part 2 of 2)

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Transcript

                                        Archaeological Peru (Part 2 of 2)

A few days later I was 300 miles north of Lima and looking out of a hotel window in Trujillo.  I was about two miles south of the old, gridded colonial town, and in this new neighborhood every house and every apartment building was protected by gates or electric fences or both. 

Fears about security are nothing new in Trujillo.  I visited one house, now a museum, in the city’s colonial core.  The front door was massive and led to a receding line of courtyards, but even the bedrooms in the deepest courtyard were heavily barred.  The bars made the rooms feel uncomfortable, but I’m not going to worry about the psychic stress suffered by the elites.   

Walking around the hotel neighborhood, I kept hearing the clank of metal gates, sometimes swung manually, sometimes electric.  I thought at one point that I might even get in trouble because I passed one property with a twenty-foot-high wall.  I’m not exaggerating.  I knew from my hotel window that the wall surrounded several houses that would have been at home in Palm Springs.  I took a picture of the wall as I walked past the main gate, then noticed that a guard behind heavy glass was watching me.  

Trujillo today has a million people, up from 100,000 in 1960.  I can’t think of any American city that’s grown nearly that much in the same period. I’m not sure if that much growth is exciting or unsettling, but Trujillo now sprawls from its colonial core southwesterly three miles to the ocean and northeasterly about five miles to mountains.   It tries sprawling northwesterly, too, but land developers in that direction are frustrated by the government’s fencing off the 14 square miles of mostly lumpy desert that are the archaeological site of Chan Chan.  The fences aren’t there to keep the developers out; they’re mostly there, to  to keep huaqueros out.  Treasure hunters, that is, or maybe grave robbers.

Huaqueros have been at work a long time just south of town.  The Moche River borders the city here.  Beyond a bit of irrigated land, two stepped pyramids rise from the desert. The original names of the pyramids are unknown–as is the language of the people who built them–but today they’re called the Temples of the Sun and Moon.  (They’re actually not called temples but huacas, a Quechua word signifying a sacred object or place.  So we have in Spanish the Huaca del Sol and the Huaca de la Luna.  It’s from that word huaca that we get huaquero.

Both of the huacas are built of adobe blocks.  The larger one, that of the Sun, incorporated about 130 million of them.  The smaller one made do with only 50 million, a number equally incomprehensible to me, but big enough to prove to my satisfaction that lots of people spent an insane amount of time molding, carrying, and stacking mud.    

 Whether I intend the word “insane” to be taken literally depends on your definition of sanity.  I don’t mean that the builders were raving lunatics, only that they followed orders without question, even if the people giving the orders didn’t know or had forgotten why they were giving them.  It’s like someone who makes a billion dollars and doesn’t know what to do next except make a second billion.  The funny thing in this case is that the two stepped pyramids are at the foot of a naturally pyramidal mountain, Cerro Blanco, which at a thousand feet dwarfs both of them.  

To get to the pyramids you cross the Moche River, then drive a mile or so on a dirt road that passes at the southern foot of the Huaca del Sol.  Perhaps half of the pyramid is gone, thanks to huaqueros.  Most of them have been amateurs, but at least one group was apparently clever enough to get a mining lease to the site, then divert the Moche River to run against the side of the pyramid, gnaw at it, and spare the miners the trouble of digging.  All they had to do was screen the debris.

 I have no idea what treasures still lie within the Huaca del Sol, and anyway the site is closed to the public.  The best we can do is drive by the southern wall and look up at blocks stacked 40 feet high.  Parts present a finished face.  Other parts are crumbling.  

 I was impressed, but I was also impressed as a child by toothpick castles made from thousands of glued-together toothpicks.  Yes, I saw them in a museum in San Francisco, but I never asked myself what was going on in the mind of the gluer, who I assume was solitary and compulsive.  And are toothpick castles fundamentally different from these stacks of adobe blocks?  Well, sure, these pyramids are the work of thousands of people, but does that make them more admirable?  I suppose we like to be told that we work well in groups.

 The Huaca de la Luna, 500 meters to the east, has been looted too, but not so thoroughly, and it welcomes visitors.  I thought I’d be clever and arrive before the gate opened at nine o’clock.  

Dream on.  At 8:30 there were a dozen or more school buses in the parking lot and the gate already had a long line of 10-year-olds.  Come nine o’clock, the line began to advance sporadically, and after a few minutes I realized that visitors were admitted in groups of perhaps 20, always under the supervision of a guide.  There was no alternative, and I submitted.  It could have been a lot worse.  The kids were fun, and the guide, realizing that I didn’t understand a word she said, ignored me as I dawdled and drifted.  I wasn’t rude about it. 

 But here’s the thing.  I’ll bet that the guide didn’t ask the kids why the builders of this pyramid–they were the Moche, to give them their name, same as the river–why the Moche stacked up so many adobe blocks.  I’ll bet the kids didn’t ask, either.  They were just looking around, having fun, and possibly absorbing a few of the facts offered by the guide.  “The Moche,” I’m imagining the guide’s speech, “were here from the first through the eighth centuries.  They built these pyramids in stages, younger ones burying older ones.”

 Why didn’t the kids or the guide ask why the Moche stacked so many blocks.  OK, maybe the topic did come up and I just missed it because I’m a linguistic idiot, but people generally don’t ask that question.   

 This gets tricky.  I mean that since the 1940s we’ve talked, sometimes passionately, about human rights.  They are supposed to be universal.  There is even a United Nations declaration on the subject. Yet if I say that the Moche ceremonially paraded young men naked and roped together at the neck, tortured them, cut their throats, drank their blood, and then tossed their bodies into a pit to feed millions of flies, I’ll be scolded: “Don’t be judgmental.  That’s just what people did back then.”

 And the Moche did do exactly that.  The tour groups walk around the base of the pyramid and then into a courtyard big enough to hold 10,000 people.  The high walls of the courtyard carry a frieze showing lines of captives led by men carrying heavy clubs.  The prisoners are leashed together by a long rope that runs from one neck to the next, and their humiliation is highlighted by their being shown naked, with their penises and scrotums prominently displayed. The frieze is called the Frieze of the Prisoners or, more chillingly, the Frieze of the Presentation.

The tour groups climb the pyramid.  Up here they can look south over the flat space that was once the Moche city.  Up here, also, there are more courtyards, but they are smaller and–as advertisers today would say–more exclusive.  Apparently only the elite got to watch what happened next, but we have a pretty good of what that was because in 1990 an archaeologist named Steve Bourget found about 100 skeletons near a natural outcrop at the top of the huaca.  Some have called it a natural altar.  

 We read now that the builders of the Huaca de la Luna didn’t want to kill enemies on a battlefield.  They wanted to take them alive so they could kill them exquisitely.   Elizabeth Arkush, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, writes that, quote, “The energy and focus lavished on the sacrifice of captives at the Huaca de la Luna are astonishing.”  Two other American anthropologists, John Verano and Sara Phillips, sound like the authors of a coroner’s report when they write, quote, “The location of the cut marks, limited in the majority of cases to the anterior surfaces of the vertebrae, indicates that the objective was to slit the throat….” unquote.  By the way, we know about the feasting flies because Bourget found, along with bones, ancient larval skins, puparia.  

 Now 10-year-olds, if I remember rightly, are fascinated by torture.  They view it with the same, almost scientific detachment with which they use a magnifying glass to roast bugs.   Researchers today seem equally objective.  If in fact they’re appalled, they keep it to themselves.  This isn’t much help to visitors like me, who want to understand how people, or societies if you prefer, can get so perverted.  

 You can tell me that slashing throats is no worse than the young Julius Caesar crucifying some pirates who dared to kidnap him.  You might be right.  You can say that history is a pyramid of skulls so towering that talk of universal human rights is a socl joke, and you might be right again.  But even if you’re right, I’m still left asking why the Moche stacked gazillions of adobe blocks and ceremonially butchered young men.  

 I’m also grateful that Trujillo has a McDonalds.  And, no, I’m not changing the subject.  The McDonalds makes me feel that the world today is better than the world in the past.  No, I didn’t go in, didn’t order anything.  It’s just that we don’t do ritual sacrifices any more.  Don’t crucify bad guys.  There really is such a thing as progress, in the moral as well as the technical sense.  

 A day later I drove about 30 miles north of Trujillo along a good section of the Pan-American Highway.  “Good” here means a four-lane divided highway where drivers only have to stop now and then to pay a toll.  I got stopped near one of the toll plazas by a policeman because I was driving without my headlights on.  He understood that I didn’t know the rules, but ignorance of the law, etc. etc.  He was very friendly, and seeing that I was alone, he told me, with the help of some translation software on his phone, that I should get a Peruvian girlfriend.  He shook my hand, told me I was a gentleman, gave me no citation, filled out no forms, but took about $50 of my money.  Reminds me of a day in Dar es Salaam, but never mind.

I left the highway at the head of the delta of the Chicama River.  Coastal Peru is amazing this way: time and again you’ll be driving through absolute desert, then bang, you’ll be in the valley or delta of one of the twenty or more short rivers flowing west from the Andes.  The desert is replaced by citrus groves, or by passion-fruit vines, or by fields of blueberries or red peppers or the venerated staple, maize.  In the case of the Chicama delta, I drove a dozen miles through a sea of sugarcane, a crop that’s hard to like up close, even if you like sugar.  

 And there, half a mile from another ocean, the Pacific, was El Brujo, “the Wizard,” or, as it’s become known recently, the Huaca Cao Viejo, the Temple of the Old Lady of Cao.  Cao is the nearest village, and the Old Lady is the mummy of a woman who died about 1,500 years ago.  Judging from her elaborate burial, she ruled this neighborhood, but being a queen didn’t save her from dying in her early 20s, we’re told perhaps in childbirth.  Her desiccated body is displayed in a fine museum at the foot of the huaca.  

Now the excavated parts of the Huaca de la Luna are covered with a clunky roof made of sheet metal supported by a forest of iron posts, but the eastern slope of El Brujo is covered by a white sail tightly stretched into a swooping parabolic curve.  Think of a Ford Model T next to a 1950s Jaguar.

 It helps to be funded by a private foundation, but it’s also true that archaeologists have worked at the Temple of the Moon for a long time, but nobody except huaqueros had ever dug at El Brujo until 1990, when a Peruvian archaeologist, Regulo Franco, came by.  He saw a landscape that, he said, “looked like the moon.”  He was talking about the holes left by huaqueros.  Still, he was encouraged by an outcropping frieze.  He went to work, and the mummified corpse of the Old Lady of Cao emerged 16 years later.  Work was still in progress when I came by. 

 Apart from a guard, a work crew, and a ticket seller, I had the place to myself.  I walked up a gravel path straight to the white sail, which covered a courtyard with a wall portraying another line of naked and bound prisoners.  Yes, another Frieze of Presentation.  It’s terrible, but I’m reminded of Medinet Habu, west of Luxor, where a frieze shows baskets of penises dumped at the feet of Ramses III as proof of his army’s glorious victory.  As Russians say, things can always be worse.

The path continues to the top of the pyramid, where there’s a tremendous view of both the sugarcane ocean and the Pacific Ocean.  There are also several deep pits, with stairs descending into one of them.  The Lady of Cao was found up here, along with elegant clothing and jewelry now in the museum, but down these summit steps you can still see a long and colorful frieze.  It looks like a complex geometric pattern, but it’s called the Maritime Frieze because it portrays stylized images of sting rays and manta rays.   

There is also a repeated image of a god.   I had seen images of gods back at the Temple of the Moon, which has many nearly identical images of a face–just a face.  The eyes are wide-open, staring but lidless.  It’s amazing how the absence of eyelids creates the sense of a monster, but if that’s not enough, the skin is mostly bright red, the mouth has bared fangs, and locks of curly hair frame the head like black flames.  The figure is called Throatcutter or Decapitator.   Saint James, on horseback over the west entrance to the Compania church in Arequipa, is a gentleman in comparison.

El Brujo has a different god, or the same god in a different form.  Here he is full-length, still facing us.  He holds in one hand a staff with a condor’s head. In the other he holds a severed human head, which he grips by its long hair.  This god appears on pottery in several forms, including as a bird and a fish, but here at El Brujo, in addition to two arms and two legs he has a dozen additional, unjointed legs.  He is a spider, the so-called Spider Decapitator.  It’s not as though birds and fish are models of empathy, but if you seek a metaphor for a creature without mercy, it’s hard to top spiders.    

 I would like to believe that the Spider Decapitator was intended as entertainment, like some Marvel Comic figure, but I can’t square that with the probability that here, too, as at the Huaca de al Luna, men were roped together, tortured, and slashed to death.  Which brings me back to my question.  What’s wrong with us, not just gun-crazy Americans but all of us?

 My wife says that guys driving jacked-up trucks with oversized wheels are compensating.  She’s not joking, and there’s certainly something to the idea that guys want to be tough or at least appear tough.  The reason, as they will explain as though they’re talking to a child, is that the world is dangerous.  If you want to survive, you have to be tough, or at least look so tough that people leave you alone.  Failing that, men watch action movies that allow them to feel vicariously invincible.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to explain these stepped pyramids and these ritual sacrifices as a way of telling everybody, “Back off!  See how powerful we are.”  You could also argue that pyramids and sacrifices are a way for the rulers to convince themselves that they’re high and mighty.  Still, I should warn you that I’m heading in a different direction.  Meanwhile, I haven’t forgotten what set us off on this inspection tour.  Remember? I was looking for the roots of the mestizo style in the church at Pomata, on the shore of Lake Titicaca.  I’ll get back there.

 I returned to Lima, rented a car at the airport, and headed north a bit over 100 miles to the Supe River.  Google calls it a bit over three hours, but she drives fast.  I did it in about four, which is fast for me, but I knew that once I got to the river I still had to continue upstream for another hour or so on a poor road and then on a worse one.  It wasn’t until the next day that I appreciated the extreme contrast between the fantastically desolate, rugged mountains on both sides of the Supe Valley and the opulence of the valley floor.  I wound up staying at an old hacienda surrounded by groves of tangerines and avocados.  

Smallholders were juxtaposed in the valley with agribusiness operations that in peak periods bused in dozens of people to harvest and pack fruit for export.  Many of these workers came from Huacho, an hour away back on the Pan American highway.  

 These people didn’t have to pick fruit, of course, but the most obvious alternative was moving to Lima.  I’ve walked through slums in Bombay and Buenos Aires and Lagos, but until I got to Lima I had never seen slums on mountainsides so steep that to make a flat floor you have to build up a wedge of rocks four feet high on the downhill side.  Stand back and look at the hills on the northern fringe of Lima’s suburbs, and you might think that the residents had learned their craft by working on a stepped pyramid, because the natural slope of the hill has been converted into half a dozen or more tiers, riser and step, riser and step.  Live here and you’re still a two-hour bus ride from a job in Lima.  I don’t suppose there’s a connection between life in these slums and the gates and locks I had seen in Trujillo or the spike-topped and electric fencing I had seen in Lima.  

I had came to the Supe Valley to see Caral.  Well, Caral actually is a tiny village that attracts nobody, but it’s also the shorthand name of a nearby archaeological site associated with Ruth Shady Solis, a Peruvian archaeologist who began working here in 1996. In 2004 she wrote that Caral was, quote, “bound to become one of the most important tourist centers in the continent.”  Twenty years later, more or less, that hasn’t happened.  Rough roads will do that.

The best-known fact about Caral is that it was built about 3,000 B.C., not only at least three thousand years older than the huacas at Trujillo but older than any other site in the Americas.  Caral is as old as Egypt’s Old Kingdom.  Unlike Egypt, Caral is also pristine, emerging without contact with any other civilization.

Caral has other striking characteristics.  On a site of about 160 acres, Caral has 32 public buildings, including half a dozen stepped pyramids, one of them about 100 high high.  Unlike the pyramids around Trujillo, these pyramids are made of stone, not adobe.  Three of them have a sunken circular plaza attached to one side of the pyramid, presumably as a gathering place or amphitheater.   Solis stresses the fact that Caral apparently had no fortifications and no signs of violence.  The builders of Caral, in other words, formed and maintained their city through persuasion, not aggression.  Solis argues that the people of Caral had, quote, “a different world cosmo-vision,” unquote, than we do. 

 No tough guys here, no Friezes of the Presentation, no images of Decapitator gods.  The most intriguing bit of Caral’s history for me is that in about 1000 B.C. the city was not merely abandoned but deliberately, methodically, carefully, buried.  Solis has published photographs showing the pyramids as she had found them, when they looked like naturally rounded hills.  Where the residents had gone remains unknown.

 Again, the only way in was with a group, but I was late in the day, and the guide had only me and a young couple with a boy perhaps three but amazingly tough.  He just kept walking, long after I thought he would have pleaded with his parents to carry him.  We walked from the parking lot and ticket office across the site of the city to the edge of the terrace on which the city stood.  I should have made this clear earlier: I mean that the city stayed away from the precious valley floor and was built on a terrace about half a mile wide and standing perhaps seventy or eighty feet above the valley floor.  Solis points out that there were about 18 smaller settlements along a 20-mile section of the valley, and they all followed this sensible policy of not building on cropland.

Three comments.  It’s great that there’s no sign of armies and wars and humiliation and slaughter, but Caral is still, like all civilizations, an exercise in command and control.  You’re right, I’m not sure of the distinction between those two words.  Let me rephrase it: civilizations always have big people telling little people what to do–in this case, hauling rocks.

 Second, the site miraculously contains bits of surviving cotton, which was a critical part of the local economy, critical because people depended for protein on anchovies caught in the ocean some fifteen miles downstream.  Yes, the fish were caught in cotton nets.  The surviving bits are not from fishnets but from netted bags to carry rocks.

Third, Caral is, as the archaeologists say, pre-ceramic, so there’s none of the painted pottery common in Peru’s later history.  There’s no artwork at all, with the exception of a petroglyph discovered in 2018.  It’s on the coast about 15 miles from Caral and near a village called Vichama. I haven’t been there, but photographs of the petroglyph show several human heads loosely framed by snakes.  A lower level shows another head under a protective frog with a human face.  I have no idea what the images represent, but they seem benign.

The petroglyph is commonly described as being in the Sechín style, which I find a puzzle.  The Secíin style takes its name from the Sechín River, about 130 miles north of Caral.  The river has given its name to the Cerro Sechín, a temple whose celebrated wall reminds me of Picasso’s Guernica.  All you’d have to do is separate the figures in that painting, multiply them, etch them one at a time into granite blocks, and then assemble the blocks to form the walls around a temple.  The wall at Cerro Sechin is full of pain, unlike the mural near Caral.  That’s why I’m puzzled.

Hugh Thomson, a British travel writer with a lot of experience in Peru, writes of what he saw at the Cerro Sechin, quote, “Most of the bodies had been decapitated or mutilated in some way; there were intestines piling out of stomachs, blood pouring from cuts to the head in great viscous streams; neatly truncated and stripped human vertebrae; even a ‘skull rack’ stacked high with a neat pile of trophies.”  Cool, huh!  Thomson says a guide showed him a block with a warrior-priest with an exceptionally long fingernail grown purposefully to gouge eyes.

I found a large parking lot at the site, but no cars.  There was a newly remodeled museum, but no visitors.  And there was a hill about 300 meters square and about 50 meters high.  It’s called Sechin Alto, and I swear I never realized it was an ancient pyramid.  My excuse is that it was entirely off limits, but that’s not a very good excuse, because I saw bits that did look artificial.  I just figured it was archaeologists doing their thing.  The truth is that I’m not very observant.

 I did see what I had come to see, however, that temple wall composed of granite blocks inscribed with body parts.  The wall encloses a three-tiered temple at the foot of the mound that I thought was a hill.  The temple, too, was completely off limits, so all I could do was walk around its base, where a rope kept me at a respectful distance.

Serro Sechin had been excavated in 1937 by Julio Tello, the first native Andean archaeologist.  He discovered the site only because one stone had been carted off and was now part of the decor of a nearby hacienda.  It turned out that the entire temple, built about 2,000 B.C., had been buried by a flood in about 1300 B.C.  

I was disappointed in the Cerro Sechin.  Perhaps I’m the only person in the world who is drawn to look at pictures of atrocities, but if I had wanted gore I should have stuck to Tarantino or Scorsese.  If I hadn’t been told what I was looking at, I don’t think I would have understood what I was seeing here at Cerro Sechin.  Take the outline of a severed head, place it face up, and let several curved lines flow from the skull.  I think I’d interpret those lines as hair, not gushing blood.  Many eyes are shown as lines, which I’d see as eyes closed, not eyes removed.  One stone shows two hands severed above the wrist, but they’re arranged gracefully.  Bummer.  I’m unsure if I should conclude that the artists were very unimaginative or that my own culture is supremely perverse.

I had been in Peru now for about two weeks but had yet to see a beach.  I thought that while I was in Chimbote I should find one. 

I was staying at the southern edge of town, just a few blocks from a Plaza Vea hypermart and the Technological University of Peru.  If I drove south three or four miles along the Pan-American Highway, which here was dead straight, I’d get to a turnoff that in two miles reached the Playa Atahualpa, named for the Inca ruler garotted by Pizarro.  It didn’t seem a promising name for fun at the beach, but whatever.

 I don’t know if there’s a sanitary landfill in Chimbote, but I do know that informal garbage dumps line up along this stretch of the  Pan-American highway.  People stop their car and toss bags of trash onto what is already a thousand feet of garbage.  What’s another carload?  The branch road to the beach was rimmed by another impromptu dump.  Well, I’m sorry, but you know that I have to warn you now: don’t be judgmental.  Good luck with that.  The only thing that limited the dump was that the road was fringed by a reedy marsh.  Somebody was harvesting reeds, too, though they weren’t around at the moment.  In fact nobody was around anywhere, including at the beach.  

It was a little spooky.  There was a sandy parking lot, where I was careful not to get stuck.  There was a sandy football field and a wall that once perhaps had been part of a hotel or restaurant. And there was about a mile of clean sand.  Twenty cormorants were standing on the beach and waiting for me to bother them.  Well, call me a scientist.  I wanted to know how close I could get.  One after another, the birds packed up and left.

Now I was really alone.  Maybe it was the rough surf. Maybe it was the cool though not cold breeze.  The place just felt lonely, and I remembered a day when I was walking along a deserted beach on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka and thinking how far it was to Africa and how dependent I was on the keys in my pocket.  And then I remembered that old Ingmar Bergman movie, The Seventh Seal, which I hadn’t seen since high school.  Perhaps you recall the scene where a young woman is being burned as a witch.  She’s tied to a ladder and is terrified.  She’s observed by a knight and his squire, who have just returned home from the Crusades.  The squire asks the knight what the girl sees but answers his own question by saying she now understands that there is neither a god or a devil, just emptiness.  The knight replies in pain that it can’t be so, but the squire says that our fears and the girl’s are the same.  

Now I grew up in San Francisco and spent a lot of time on the beach there and on other beaches, some on rivers, others on lakes.  I’m reasonably sure that in a different context–there’s that word again–we could have a great time on the Playa Atahualpa.  But whether we blame the roads lined with garbage or the dismembered bodies at the Cerro Sechin, it seemed to me on the beach that day that, faced with an empty world without meaning, people will impose meaning, will force it onto what otherwise is a void. 

 And now you’re asking for your money back.  You think that all I’m doing is rehashing Karl.   He said that religion was the opiate of the masses, and I’m saying that the masses in prehistoric Peru were oppressed not by millowners but by existential dread.  How original is that?  And to make matters worse: I’m not explaining why the meaning created to give Peruvians an answer involved the absurdity of building mountains and the violence of ceremonial human sacrifices.  

Fair enough, but I’m not asking for a Nobel Prize, I’m just telling you what I saw and what I was thinking about.  And, yes, I know, I still haven’t gotten to the energy of the mestizo style.  Well, you know how it is with old prospectors.  They just keep looking.

The day after my inspection of Chimbote’s dumps, I drove back to Lima.  It’s a 250-mile drive, and Google calculates it at six and a half hours.  I took longer because Google warned me of a traffic jam on Lima’s northern fringe and sent me on a splendid tour of the slums of greater Callao.  I got lost at several points but did get to admire the do-it-yourself terracing for homesites on black-diamond slopes. I think now of the terrific contrast of those crowded hillsides and coastal Peru’s default landscape, which is lunar desolation.

The next morning I flew to Chiclayo, population half a million.  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to rent a car, but I got one and got to enjoy the worst traffic I would see on this trip.  My hotel was downtown, and every time I arrived I had to drive up onto a sidewalk, disrupt the pedestrian flow, and honk while hoping somebody from the hotel would hear me and come out to open the padlocked gate. 

Chiclayo has two excellent museums.  The first is the flashy and very popular Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum, opened in 2002 to house some of what the Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva found when, in 1987, he excavated a tomb at the Huaca Rajada, about 20 miles east of Chiclayo.  The National Geographic Society, which has been interested in Peru at least since it reported Hiram Bingham’s discovery of Macchu Pichu in 1911, ran an article in October, 1988, called simply “Discovering the New World’s Richest Unlooted Tomb.”

Among my shortcomings is a general lack of interest in pottery, but these museums got me to reconsider.  They actually made me an enthusiast.  I say “these museums,” plural, because the second museum is the comparatively neglected Bruning museum, named for Hans Heinrich Bruning, a private collector who died in 1928.  It’s laid out conventionally, unlike the Royal Tombs Museum where visitors enter on the top floor and work their way down just as the archaeologists did to find the tomb of the Lord of Sipan.

Both museums have spectacular pottery collections, where vessels are ornamented with reproductions of all the living things surrounding the people who made them.  I’m not waxing about production methods, of which I know nothing, but rather about the sensitivity of the potters to the things alive around them.  These were people who could hear an entire scale between C and C sharp. They were acutely aware of their environment, and I say that as someone who is often ridiculously unaware.  I should add that being unaware is a learned skill.  

Alas, there isn’t much left at the Huaca Rajada except a pyramid you can’t approach and a mound which you can climb to inspect the deep holes dug to reach the body of the Lord of Sipan, plus the bodies of the eight other people buried with him in about A.D. 350.  One other detail: Walter Alva and his crew needed police protection when they began digging.  Nearby villagers were angry not because they wanted the site kept intact but because they wanted to loot it themselves.  One group had already begun, and Alva arrived with his security detail only after the police alerted him to a spectacular mask about to be sold.

There’s more to see on the ground at Chituna and Tucume, two sites north of Chiclayo.  Both Chituna and Tucume are from about the year 1200.  Both have pyramids.  More importantly, for me, both had friezes on walls.  The first time I saw one at Chituna, I very nearly said “yes” out loud to myself.  Maybe I did say it.  

 I had followed Google’s directions and was convinced that she was crazy because I was on a one-lane dirt embankment that hugged a deep, unlined canal.  This cannot be the way to a major site, I said to myself.  But it was, or at least it was one of two ways, and the next day I had the same “you’ve got to be kidding” reaction to the road leading to Tucume.  Sure enough, I met an oncoming car.  There was no way to get by; somebody had to back up.  I was exceedingly reluctant to try, even though I had a much smaller vehicle.  The other driver saw my consternation and backed up several hundred yards without sliding into the water.  When he finally found a pullout, I got out of my car, shook his hand, and thanked him.

There were no other visitors at Chituna, which is about eight miles west of Chiclayo. I walked over to the pyramid and then up the ancient and grand earth ramp to the top.  I wasn’t able to make any sense of what I saw up there, where archaeologists say there are entrances to chambers within the pyramid, but I did see, down near the foot of the pyramid, a metal roof protecting what turned out to be a courtyard fronting the nearby and small Huaca Gloria.  It was the only time on this trip that I disregarded a fence, but I really wanted to approach one of the courtyard walls deeply incised with images.  There was a diving seabird about to attack a fish, but other images seemed to me to be purely geometric fantasies.

The UCLA archaeologist who directed the excavation here, has written that what I saw as fantasy is actually a corruption of an arched, two-headed serpent.  Christopher Donnan writes that there is a very clear image of this creature at a site in Trujillo called Dragón.  He speculates that pictures of this serpent may have been painted on fabric and carried north to Chituna, where the craftsmen copied an image that they did not understand.  Hence, he writes, the image at Chituna is “amorphous” and “garbled.”  Those are his words.  

He may of course be right, but I’m thinking of popular singers who are asked to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” and who start out straight but depart from the written score.  You may like the result or not, but the artists are exercising their freedom.  That’s what I think is happening at Chituna, and although the lines are mostly straight, not curved like those of the mestizo style, the fundamental celebration is the same.  “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate,” as computer punch cards used to say. 

Ditto Tucume.  It’s a big site, with dozens of pyramids, but by accident I looked most closely at one called the Huaca Las Balsas, excavated in 1992 by Alfredo Narvaez Vargas.  Again, there’s a large metal roof now protecting the remains of a building, of which only the lower walls remain, but some of those walls are covered with images, here including balsas, or rafts.  Nothing amorphous and garbled here: there’s a raft with a sail; two sailors stand on the raft and hold two divers who are scouring the seafloor for spiny oysters, used here as a decorative element for jewelry and clothing.  

Did I make these details out for myself?  No, I read about them on a sign.  Did the people who made these walls think it was important to understand the components of the image?  That’s like asking if Michelangelo wanted viewers of his David to realize that David’s hands are slightly oversized.  I don’t think he did; I think he just wanted viewers to sense strength.  Similarly, here at Tucume I think the artists wanted me to understand that the world is alive or, if you’re going to get picky, is brimming with life.  That’s the Compania church all over again, and the church at Pomata.  We could run around the planet and see this from Bushmen cave paintings to the ballsticks used by Indians on the American Great Plains.  I remember being told that those pieces of wood are not beautiful.  Instead, I was told, they have a spirit.  I’m still processing that, and I guess I’m still skeptical.

On my fourth and final Saturday in Peru, I went down to the main plaza in Chiclayo. There were beggars on the surrounding streets, some singing to a recorded accompaniment, others selling penny candies.  I didn’t see any interesting buildings, but I couldn’t sit down either.  There was no special activity, no focus of attention, but the benches were all occupied, and so were the fairly uncomfortable rims of concrete planters.  I’m looking now at a dictionary discussion of the word “community,” and I find there the words: sharing, fellowship, shared nature, kinship, and obligingness.  

The next day I returned to Lima and this time stayed at Miraflores, the place modestly famous as the rich part of Lima.  OK: let’s replace “rich” once again with upscale.  I’m prepping for my real-estate broker’s license.  Anyway, I came in at night but a few minutes later went for a walk.   Miraflores felt strange because it felt normal.  The streets were wide.  The pavements were unbroken.  There were no speed bumps.  Traffic flowed normally, and nobody was honking.  Perhaps they didn’t have to, because the streets were wide enough that cars weren’t forced to pass within six inches of each other.  I didn’t see litter scattered or piled up.  There were lots of trees and lots of small parks.  

The next morning I realized that I was less than a mile from the ocean but couldn’t see it even from the coffee shop on the 13th floor of my hotel.  I thought I was in Sao Paulo.  I found some single-family residences, and although they were in good shape they also had electric fencing or at least tall iron fences with wicked spikes.  At eight o’clock on a weekday morning the streets were crowded, and people did honk more than they do where I live in Oklahoma.  

Still, there are degrees.  There was so little trash on the streets that street sweepers spent their time picking up leaves. I walked into a supermarket, part of a chain that would be high-end in Houston or Seattle, and I thought of the Russian women I once read about who in Soviet times would enter an American supermarket for the first time and start screaming.   The main difference between this supermarket and a Whole Foods was that here people talked more and smiled more.  It’s weird, because Americans spend so much money on their teeth but don’t smile much, except when they’re looking at a camera. This sociability shouldn’t have surprised me after the plaza in Chiclayo, but it did.

A day later I was gazing down at subdivision after subdivision in the suburbs around Miami and Dallas.  I could isolate single homes, and I could imagine happy families and unhappy families or, to use a more statistically precise word, households.  From 10,000 feet or more, what I really thought of, once again, was social insects.  Yes, that’s an affront to the mythology of the home of the brave and the land of the free, but be real.   No wonder we don’t smile much.