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.