Nine years ago, a discovery was made about a place called Caral in northern Peru that transformed the understanding of human history in the Americas. To get to Caral you take the Panamerican Highway north from Lima for 112 miles, then turn east along a dirt road. The signpost was so small I missed it, though my guide, Alejandra Cabieses, assured me it had been there. "If you don't know the way it is very difficult," she admitted.
Further on, there was a yellow arrow painted on a rock. Then, before bumping through a battery chicken farm, our minibus had to be sprayed with disinfectant. One hour (and just 15 miles) after leaving the highway we reached the site of one of the oldest civilisations in the world. No one appeared to be at home.
We got out and looked around. A desert plain bordering a fertile river valley was dotted with flat-topped pyramids and ringed by the foothills of the Andes. A wind moaned. Those mountains brewed an atmosphere of mystery and loneliness that reminded me of Castlerigg Stone Circle in the English Lake District.
During the 20th century Caral remained unexplored, just one among many ancient sites dotting the coastal strip between Lima and Peru's border with Ecuador in the north. From the pyramids of the Moche people to Chan Chan, the vast adobe city of the Chimu empire, which immediately predated the Incas, succeeding city states had evolved and dissolved. All were fascinating but none was regarded as pre-eminent.
Then, as the 21st century dawned, Caral took centre-stage. In 2000, carbon dating of a bag woven from plant fibres proved that the 163-acre site had been built between 3000 and 2100BC, making it the oldest civilisation on the continent of the Americas and contemporaneous with the pyramids of Giza in Egypt. At a stroke, Caral was rocketed into the archaeological superleague.
This lonely place became a source of national pride – La civilización más antigua de America – and excavations and restoration began in earnest. Pyramids, circular plazas, a round altar and strange monoliths have been revealed. The greatest find so far has been a set of 32 flutes made of pelican and condor bones and decorated with images of supernatural beings.
But on this overcast morning Caral's celebrity status was hardly in evidence. As we waited by the empty ticket desk, Alejandra, a tour guide based in Lima, told me I was the first visitor she had brought to Caral in 2008, and it was already June. "Everything about Peru is Inca, Inca," she said. "Everyone goes to Machu Picchu. They don't stay long enough to come up here." She was right. In a week spent among fragments of dead civilisations, haunted by phantasmagoric deities, we met just a handful of tourists. The shape of the trip was neatly chronological, starting with Caral and ending in the city of Cajamarca where the last Inca king was killed by the Spanish in 1532 – and ancient Peru, in its successive manifestations and outlandish beliefs, was made extinct.
The exciting thing about these old cultures is that archaeology is in its infancy in Peru and there is so much still to discover. At Caral, where more than 3,000 people are thought to have lived – fishing and trading, worshipping gods and observing the stars – they are still looking for the cemetery. We, meanwhile, were looking for the ticket seller. When he finally showed up he produced a megaphone and hailed someone to show us round.
Dino Augurto appeared walking briskly from a far pyramid he had been working on. He used to labour in the fields near Caral for about $3 a day. Now he earns $200 a month as an "excavation technician". And when tourists turn up he becomes an "orientator", walking them round and explaining things.
"My life changed when I came to work here," he said. "Before I was a chuncho [roughly, "miserable git"]. I didn't want to talk to anyone and didn't know how to. Now in my own small way I can share the patrimonio of my country with you."
Across an area as big as a small town, Dino led us among the remains of the principal monumental buildings. We felt awed by the scale and sophistication of these stepped pyramids, temples and public spaces. Who were the people who built them? We will never really know. "Our history is in the ruins but the ruins are without history," said Dino.
He meant that no written records have been left. The key fact about the Andean peoples before the coming of the Spanish is that they were illiterate, but that didn't mean they were primitive – they simply channelled their creative energies in other ways, often with astonishing eloquence.
The next day I experienced the full power of this eloquence in the unlikeliest of places. In the neat colonial city of Trujillo, a few miles north of Caral, we stopped at a Repsol garage sited on a busy intersection. Opening a door in a building on the edge of the forecourt, we were invited to descend some basement steps until we were, literally, standing underneath the gas pumps.
A young man then unlocked a door to reveal a room crammed floor to ceiling with priceless objects. The Museo Cassinelli, named after the owner of the garage, José Cassinelli, is a collection of 2,000 pieces of pottery (with a further 4,000 in storage) dating from 1500BC to the Inca period. Acquired from huaqueros (looters) over more than 50 years, every piece is original and exquisite, speaking powerfully of the culture it comes from. The most compelling pieces belong to the Moche culture (1st to 8th century AD), which was centred on two vast mud-brick pyramids, now called the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna (Temples of the Sun and Moon), just south of Trujillo. The Mochica, as they were known, were the only ancient people who made realistic portraits of themselves, showing a brutal candour that connects across the millennia.
Stacked on Sr Cassinelli's chipboard shelving are ceramic representations of conjoined twins, a man with a nose eaten away by leishmaniasis, another with a cleft palate, a person with Down's syndrome, someone with bulging thyroid eyes, another who looks zoned out on hallucinogens, an amputee with no arms or feet, a sufferer from elephantiasis, a series of three studies of the same face showing the onset of blindness – and much more, including lots of realistic sex.
The canny Sr Cassinelli, now 88, put in an appearance while we were there. "There is no writing here," he said, pointing at the ceramics, "but in each piece there is a message." One possible, intriguing message, given the Mochica's evident fascination with physical imperfection, is that they revered people who were different, rather than stigmatising them.
The volume and quality of Sr Cassinelli's collection was so dazzling as to make me momentarily forget how he acquired it. While looting and trafficking in antiquities are serious criminal offences, collecting them is legal, and it is because of this benign double-standard that much of Peru's priceless patrimonio has remained in the country rather than disappearing abroad.
It was the huaqueros of this region who made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the late 20th century. In 1987, at a place called Sipan, villagers became rich overnight after plundering gold and jewels from a Moche burial site. When the authorities got wind, they unearthed funeral treasures so plentiful and exotic that these funeral tombs of the so-called Lords of Sipan inevitably became known as "the Tutankhamun of the Americas".
Wandering the site, we gazed 20 feet down into the burial pits, where replicas of the finds have been placed: a tomb guardian with amputated feet, a sacrificed llama, the skeletons, the treasures. All around, the mesa-like, flat-topped hills overlooking the Sipan Valley are actually temples made of mud-bricks, troves of untold treasure awaiting exploration. "And nobody comes here," said Alejandra, shaking her head. "Everybody goes to…" "Machu Picchu," I supplied.
The actual treasures are on display in a museum 20 miles away in Lambayeque. If it seems perverse that the museum is so far from the site, the pieces themselves live up to the King Tut billing. In the most lavish grave, the Lord of Sipan was found with 451 ornaments: gold and turquoise earrings, pectorals made of seashells, half-moon nose clips of gilded copper, gold and silver nose rings depicting sun and moon and a mesmerisingly weird necklace of 10 gold peanuts and 10 silver ones.
You could say that gold and silver destroyed the last of the pre-Columbian civilisations. To visit the place where the old, preliterate Peru died, we left the sea-fogs and fishmeal factories of the coastal desert and turned east off the Panamerican, climbing through irrigated foothills alongside the Chillete river. Past rice terraces in semicircular steps, we reached the ceja de selva, "eyebrow of the jungle", the altitude at which mangos, bananas, castor oil plants and sugarcane grow, and the hallucinogenic San Pedro cacti stand like stubble on the jutting jawlines of the Andean headlands.
Cajamarca is a colonial town sprawled across a mountain plain at an altitude of 9,000ft, high enough to put the squeeze on unacclimatised lungs. The native population lend it an exotic feel. The women wear brightly coloured blouses, lots of petticoats instead of underwear, and marvellous stovepipe hats made of palm leaf with brims with turned-up edges like the Victoria amazonica lily pad.
Ironically, given the treacherous role of gold in the city's history, an enormous gold mine (the biggest in Latin America) was discovered nearby in the early Nineties. Along with some prosperity, the Yanacocha mine has brought bribery, corruption and even murder to this peaceable place. In such ways does history repeat itself.
In 1532, the Inca king Atahualpa was captured in Cajamarca by the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro. The circumstances, in which many thousand Inca warriors were massacred in a matter of hours by 200 of Pizarro's men, are still a source of pain to the indigenous people. Atahualpa himself was imprisoned in a room in his own palace.
All that remains of the palace is that room, in a side street off the main square. Of classic Inca design, it is the size of a double garage and consists of large blocks of stone with trapezoid niches set in the walls. It is known as the Cuarto del Rescate, the Room of Ransom, because it was there that Atahualpa reached his hand above his head, touched the wall, and promised to fill the room with gold and silver up to that line, in return for his freedom. Nowadays a red line "marks the limit of the ransom".
Atahualpa kept his word; his subjects brought huge quantities of precious objects, which were melted into coins and taken to Spain. Pizarro executed him. "It should be called the Room of Deception rather than the Room of Ransom," said my guide, Jorge.
For the first time in Peru's history, there were words to tell the story. Pizarro wrote that Atahualpa was "a handsome man with an imposing stare". The vision of him stretching up to summon untold treasures with his hand, while his adversary kept treachery in his heart, came easily in this place of cold stones. In that moment, said Jorge, pointing at the line on the wall, "one culture died and another was born".
Author: Nigel Richardson | Source: Telegraph.co.uk [24 Jun, 2009]