The bus wails through the suburbs of Lima past mounds of uncollected garbage, where the homeless search for food, and down the Panamerican highway, with a grey sea on the right. We alight at the gateway and walk in through the bright modern museum, and then up a dusty track through an outer wall four metres thick, across the remains of a great colonnaded court where pilgrims gathered, up the hillside past the painted temple, its plastered walls still showing faint traces of red and yellow murals, and beyond to the largest, highest building, the Inca statement of dominance, the sun temple.
Standing on the top here we can see a three hundred and sixty degree view: of the open sea to the west, where a pair of mythic islands float; the contagion of Lima approaching from the north; a broad desert plain spreading out to the east, crossed by an monumental ancient wall of adobe brick through which cuts the modern road to Lima; a crude settlement of self-built plywood housing encroaching from the river banks to the south, across the sandy brown desert; and the foothills of the Andes rising beyond, while the coast unfolds to the south towards Lurin, Chilca and Mala. It is a view which has been shared across several thousand years of history by people from some of the world’s great civilisations.
The keen young guide tells us that Pachacamac was the most important sacred centre in the Andean region long before the Inca came to the coast. For more than 1,000 years in late prehistory, native peoples worshipped a central deity here whose presence is still vibrant in myth, oral history, and Peruvian identity. The temples, pyramids, palaces, plazas, and oracle of Pachacamac were the destinations for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from different societies throughout the Andes. The Moche and later the Chimu came here, as did the Wari. Only very late in its history did it fall under the control of the Inca Empire.
“Control may be an overstatement,” Mayra explains. “The Inca built this Sun Temple to dominate the site visually, but the older temples below us”, she points down to a sloping hillside covered with plastic sheeting, “remained far more important. The Inca hoped to gain some glory by association with the Pacha Camac deity rather than to replace it.”
The site has a vital part in the history of Peruvian archaeology, Mayra tells me. In 1892, German archaeologist Max Uhle visited Peru and undertook the first proper scientific study of Tiahuanaco, an extensive area of impressive stone ruins on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. It was claimed by the Incas as their birthplace and is the central site for one of the great pan-Peruvian cultures, six hundred years before the Inca. Four years later Max Uhle returned to Peru and undertook excavations at Pachacamac.
The importance of Pachacamac as a deity and a temple for people throughout Peru long pre-dated the Inca. But Uhle found plentiful evidence of Inca influence in the temple complex that straddled a southern hilltop, and in the sectors of the township of Pachacamac that sprang up after the forces of the Inca ruler Topa Inca subjugated the area in 1465.
On the southeastern terrace of the complex, there was a cemetery that was clearly set apart for the burial of the mamacuna, a group of women holding a privileged position in the temple’s services. In life they took responsibility for the weaving of textiles worn by the priests, and made the corn beer (chica) that figured in so many Inca festivals. In sacrificial death, they were accorded the highest ritual. All these women at Pachacamac had been strangled — many still had the cotton garotte twisted about their throats — wrapped in fine cloth, and then buried in stout, stone-lined tombs. Each was surrounded by funerary offerings of foodstuffs that were specific to the Peruvian highlands—coca, quinoa, cayenne pepper —rather than the local plants found in tombs elsewhere at Pachacamac. They would seem to have been replicating the ritual sacrifices of the Inca capital of Cuzco.
The inner complex of the sun temple is shut to visitors now, because of their vandalism and graffiti. The Old Temple too, the shrine and oracle of Pacha Camac, earth maker and earth shaker, protector of the crops, and bringer of earthquakes, is closed, undergoing conservation to protect and preserve the murals of fish and plants on its Painted Temple extension.
Between the Pacha Camac temple and the northern wall of its inner forecourt Uhle found layer upon layer of graves, thousands of them, that he could date by stratification. He believed that the earliest went back to 600 AD whilst the top-most were almost 1000 years later, the coming of the Inca.
There were burials in the ground in front of the old temple, and then burials in a sloping layer of debris above that ground level. The new temple had clearly been built partially on top of the old temple, and that too had a sloping layer of debris up against its walls. This gave three identifiable strata, plus any discoveries within the old and new temples.
In each of these layers he identified particular types of pottery – in the lowest and oldest layer the ceramics were polychromes painted in brown, buff, black and white. In the middle layer there were red and black designs over a white slip, and in the uppermost there were distinctive Inca styles. In addition to using the strata to help him estimate a date, he used the principle of seriation, that variations in the frequency of stylistic traits could be used to deduce a relative sequence of variations over time.
Elsewhere in Pachacamac, he found layers of blackware, others with largely Inca ware and some black ceramics, and areas of entirely Inca ceramics. He concluded that blackware could be dated before the Inca period, but after the period of red and black designs over a white slip, since this phase did not appear to overlap.
Assumptions like this might be appropriate to Pachacamac but not elsewhere, if the evolution of pottery styles differed from region to region. The beauty of Uhle’s dating was that Pachacamac was a powerful and deeply respected shrine, a site of pilgrimage for people from almost the entire length of the coast northwards, and for much of the highlands. The pottery sherds at Pachacamac came from throughout the country.
Travelling northwards and investigating the Moche sites of Huaca del la Luna and Huaca del Sol, the Temples of the Sun and Moon near Trujillo, and then at Chan Chan, the capital of the Chimu empire, he deduced from his finding of polychrome ware (Moche) and blackware (Chimu), but the absence of Inca pottery, that the Moche culture pre-dated the Chimu, which in turn came before the Incas. In so doing, he laid the foundations of a chronology that could be applied along much of coastal Peru.
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Turning from the view down over the Old Temple, the pilgrims courtyard, the great outer wall pierced by a modern road, the sprawl of Lima and the mountains beyond, we circuit the outer walls of the hill top, seeing some traces of the red paint that once coloured the whole of the temple, and stand looking out to sea.
From the path below the walls we look down on two offshore islands, one large and one small. Here rest Caui Llaca and her baby. The mother strode out to sea and stayed there because she could not find the father of the child, who had been conceived by eating a lucuma fruit.
“Caui Llaca had always remained a virgin. Since she was very beautiful, every one of the huacas and vilcas longed for her. “I’ve got to sleep with her” they thought, but she never consented,” according to The Huarochiri Manuscript.
“Once this woman, who had never allowed any man to fondle her, was weaving beneath a lucuma tree. Cuni Raya, in his cleverness, turned himself into a bird and climbed into the lucuma. He put his semen into a fruit that had ripened there and dropped it next to the woman. The woman swallowed it down delightedly. Thus she got pregnant even though she remained untouched by man.”
Caui Llaca called a meeting in Anchi Cocha, and invited all the top men and gods. “Which of you made me pregnant?” she asked them one by one. And no-one answered. So she told the baby “go and find your father yourself.” And the baby crawled round the gathering. Only when he reached the friendless beggar at the end did he brighten up and crawl up onto Cuni Raya’s knee.
“Because I have given birth to the child of such a ruffian, such a mangy beggar, I’ll just disappear into the ocean” said Caui Llaca.
She did not turn back to see Cuni Raya Vira Cocha put on his golden garment and chase after her saying “Here, look at me, now I am really beautiful!” and making his garment glitter.
The child’s father was in fact the first of the gods. He searched everywhere for the woman and her child. Along the way he asked the animals to help him. He met with a condor, a skunk and a puma, a falcon, a fox, and a parakeet. He finally reached the coast and found a place where the god Pachacamac’s two daughters lived, guarded by a snake. The girls’ mother was Urpay Huachac, “She who gives birth to doves”, who bred her fishes in a small pond.
But Urpay Huachac had gone into the deep sea to visit Caui Llaca. Infuriated, Cuni Raya took all Urpay Huachac’s fishes from her pond and threw them into the sea.
This turned out to be a good move, since there had not been fishes in the sea before, and they thrived and multiplied.
The pond is still there today, a gentle reed fringed pool surrounded by palm trees a stone’s throw from the Pachacamac oracle. And Caui Llaca and her baby sit offshore, two islands, one big and one small.