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…