John Haigh

After three months in Lima, looking for a reason to get out of the noisy grey city, I read on a blog that “Calango houses an enormous stone with magico-religious symbols … that performs miracles for women that wish to become pregnant”. Calango is a small village, a little inland from the coastal town of Mala south of Lima. The next  Saturday morning I hail a taxi in downtown Miraflores and tell the driver “I want the bus to Mala!”

He takes me through a grid of dirty back streets on the edge of the town centre, past several blocks lined with stores and stalls selling bicycles and bicycle parts, a cascade of wheels and frames hanging from shop fronts and spilling across the roadway. The ticket sellers calling “Mala Mala Mala Mala…” offer a clue. Within 20 minutes the bus is full and takes me on a 90 minute journey south along the PanAmerican highway to reach the bus station or “Landport”, Termino Terrestial, of Mala.

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An hour up the valley from where the bus had dropped me, at La Capilla, walking up the gravel track, I approach a man standing at the roadside outside a small farm building.

“You were here before” he tells me.

It had been four weeks since I had walked the road as far as the stones of Retama, and looked down and across the swollen river to Cochineros. This man had been tending his chickens in the block brick building by the Retama stone, had quietened his dog and fetched a broom to sweep the dust from the rock, and shown me the footholds to climb up to the top of the rock.

I shook his hand and asked him what he knew about the stones.

“ I have found many things…one time working in Chincheros I saw something shiny in the soil. Looking closer, I found a silver figure, this size.” He held up a calloused black-nailed farmer`s thumb.

“Another time I found a little bag, full of beads. The beads were made of stone, in white and red, blue and green. The bag was woven from vicuña.”

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Checta is one of the largest rock art sites in Peru, on a gentle hillside overlooking the valley of the river Chillon, a few hours from Lima. There is a small roadside sign, and you follow a steep rocky footpath up over a bank of stone before it levels along a ridge to where a field of boulders, large and small, occupies a terrace between the upper hillside and a dry ravine.

Dozens or hundreds of small boulders hold one or two designs, mostly abstract, crudely drawn on reddish brown rocks.There are however three great black rocks, a little apart. These have a multitude of cupules, round depressions in the rock, whilst the others are pecked to change the colour of the surface. This one variable, the manner of production. serves to distinguish between them. But they are different in so many more ways. The rock type used is different, hard, black and polished; the markings are deep and smoothed; the images are almost entirely circles and curving lines; the images face upwards towards the sky; the stones are massive; and the three stones are positioned some way from the rest of the group.

one of Checta´s three cupule rocks 2 metres long,

These three are outliers according to all these several variables, and very probably more. More simply, these three are powerful and timeless works of art, whereas much at Checta seems more akin to childrens’ crayonings.

Some valleys to the south, by the river Mala, are another series of petroglyphs. The most famous, at Calango, was recorded early when the Spanish authorities found a giant stone, laid flat, facing to the skies, covered in carvings. It is now surrounded by a wall with a padlocked cast iron door, built in 1990. The major keeps the key. What was public is now private. On the internal walls are an unfinished mural celebrating powerful individuals, six men, who had some hand in the recording and destruction of the stone. This is how history is written.

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The rock art of South America extends over a vast geographical area and across a long period of time. The earliest paintings known were found in the North East of Brazil. Here in the cave of the Toca de Boquairoa de Pedra Furado, a fragment of stone with two parallel lines painted in red was found under a hearth whose upper level was dated to 17,000 years BP, Before Present. The paintings visible today in the rock shelter are thought to be more recent, early Holocene, 8-9000 BP, when the first Maize and squash was being domesticated in South West Mexico.

At the beginning of present times, hunters of the Holocene or “Completely New Age”,  produced paintings of animals, humans and geometrical figures, found in the lowlands of Brazil and Argentina, and in the Southern Andes of Chile, Bolivia and Peru. The oldest are thought to be scenes from North East Brazil, showing scenes of hunting, fighting, dancing, sexual relations and giving birth, dated to 12,000 years BP.

In Patagonia a few thousand years later, there are camelids, alpaca and vicuna, chased by humans, and the famous hands in negative of the Cave of the Painted Hands by the Rio Pinturas, Paintings River, in Santa Cruz. Similar hunting scenes appear in the Andes from the North of Chile, through Bolivia to South and Central Peru, whilst the the hand paintings are found in small numbers in Chile and Bolivia but no further North.

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If we are to attempt to understand the depiction of llamas or camelids on the Mala stones, we have to know more about how llamas and humans work together, or worked together. Fortunately, whilst many of the scenes on the stones may be forever undecipherable, men and llamas work together still every day in the Andes.

In 2007 A PhD student from UC Berkeley joined a llama caravan for 14
days in order to get a feeling for how they travelled and what insight
it could give to understanding the archaeological record of tracks,
and the sprit of historic transport in the Andes. Llamas are still
widely used in the region, the Cotahuasi canyon in the Arequipa region
of Southern Peru, to transport goods.

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  Archaeologist Corey Hoover had invited me to visit a dig at Cerro D`Oro, close to Cañete, sixty kilometres south of Mala.  I walk up a track as it contours above a farmstead where a woman is hanging washing beneath a hanging burgmansia. Chickens scratch under the washing line and a burro chews hay morosely in a corner of the yard. A small boy maybe four years old, calls out to me from below. “What is your name? Where are you going? Do you have money?”

On the hillside above me I can see lines of small round adobitos, mud bricks, the remains of walls, peering through the sand. Ahead by the side of the track is a giant wall, three meters high and half a metre thick, made of slabs of clay known as tapia, pressed in moulds, each block the size of a hotel minibar.

At the end of the track is a bend and I am facing a nippon buddhist arch and tall white walls. Looking through the gateway I see a central monument marked with a cross and japanese script, and 20 plain white headstones standing in a small area of raked gravel. Here are buried the remains of the first Japanese immigrants who worked and died on the Casa Blanca, La Quebrada and Santa Barbara haciendas. 

To one side of the cemetery was another three metre high wall, this time made of the round adobitos. The marks of the fingertips working the wet clay mortar between the bricks could be clearly seen, though they were made 1500 years ago.

“Hey there man!”

Corey was striding down the hill to meet me…

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In January, I took a business trip to Mexico. On the second afternoon I escaped from the Commercial Gifts and Accessories Show to visit Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology. Set in a woodland park with a name in Nauhatl, one of the original languages of Mexico,  Chapultepec, Hill of the Grasshoppers, the Museum is a two storey building set around a central courtyard, at one end of which is something like a fountain.

But here, the water, rather than shooting upwards, falls from a giant column the height of the building. The carved stone column is a fertilising penis dripping blood, a tree reaching up to the sky, the arching vault of an underground cave.

The museum is extraordinary. With all the rich archaeology of Mexico and the many civilsations that were born here, flourished and spread, exchanged ideas, evolved and died, this is truly a museum of anthropology – about people.

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There is a smell of fish and salt in the air in Chincha. It is only 5 km from the sea. Huancor, the site with the stone carvings, is  33 km from the coast in a direct line, just two days journey for a llama caravan.

Archaeological studies in the area show that the valley was inhabited during the four hundred years before the coming of the Inca by the Chincha Kingdom. Chincha (the word means Jaguar) villages, cemeteries, and refuges have been found not only by the coast but through the upper valley territory too.

Broad swaths of the coast at this time were controlled by powerful, politically centralized groups. The Chincha kingdom would have flourished for five hundred years before the Inca influence reached them around 1475 AD.  And the Incas never managed to dominate the Chincha. A small Inca structure at Huaca La Centinela, the coastal ritual centre, hides in the shadow of a much larger Chincha building.

Only a few generations separated an independent Chincha from the Spanish invasion and the founding of Lima in 1535, and the earliest Spanish writers. Pedro Cieza de León’s La crónica del Perú was published in Seville by 1553. Cieza describes the realm of the Chinchas as a “great province, esteemed in ancient times . . .splendid and grand . . . so famous throughout Peru as to be feared by many natives”. Their wealth and power was said to have supported major Chincha incursions into the highlands while the Incas were still consolidating the Cusco region.

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On the corner of the market, two cars stood with their drivers by the side shouting “Vergueta”. I jumped in. Minutes later a cheerful round girl squeezed in beside me with a  box of tinned condensed milk, a sack of oranges, and a much older man. The half hour to Vergueta ran through the edge of town, across the river, and then through irrigated farmland along the Panamericana Central. The older man put his arm round the girl and she whispered and giggled throughout the journey.

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the 20 metre high 200 metre long and 180 metre wide Huaca Tres Palos, in the background, behind the llamas and alpacas grazing in Lima Zoo.

An understanding of the pre-colonial history of Lima and the surrounding valleys starts with a trip to the zoo in the San Miguel district of Lima. Until the 1940s this was rural farmland on the outskirts of Lima. But rising above the farmland were dozens of mounds that would not grow crops.

The largest were hundreds of metres long and wide, and 30 metres high. Some of these were truncated pyramids built by the Lima people, who occupied the site from 300 to 800 PE, Present Era. Later, around 1000 PE, the Ychsma people built their own ceremonial mounds, plazas and storerooms closer to the sea.  Besides the temples and palaces there was a  town of residences and workshops, Maranga, a settlement surrounded by walls and with canals bringing water from the Rimac. When the Incas came to the coast, they tidied up and re-organised, adding their buildings.

We can see a thousand years of history in a walk through modern day Lima. The present day zoo houses not only exotic animals but constructions spanning 1500 years. From the truncated pyramids of the Lima people and the adobe mounds of the Ychsma through to the late additions of the Inca. Then the Spanish built a house on top of one of the pyramids. There is nothing unique about the grounds of the zoo, because modern Lima is still dotted with such sites, although only a fraction remains of the rich civilisations that previously lived, worked and worshipped here.

If we exit the zoo at Parque de Las Leyendas and walk round the high back end of the Huaca Tres Palos where the 98 posts were possibly used to track the motions of the sun and stars, we can walk up a modern road that separates the grounds of the zoo from the grounds of Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, more usually known simply as Catolica or PUCP. When we reach the eastern end of the huaca, we are at its front, the lower end where an access ramp leads to the storage and administrative structures on top. And leading towards this access ramp from the south is a fantastically preserved stretch of road running through the university campus.

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