A major part of this site contains a first person fictionalised account of how I came upon some fascinating petroglyphs on the banks of the Rio Mala, and set out to discover, with others, what they might have to say.
In writing that story I have tried to dramatise a very exciting journey. I spent the best part of three years researching around the issues the stones and their engravings raised for me.
This took me to museums, at first in Lima and then further afield, as well as across the internet, where I discovered realms of published work that would have been impossible for me to access twenty years ago. Accounts such as those of Antonio de la Calancha whose writings are only available in a handful of libraries worldwide, but are now preserved digitally and shared online. My exciting discovery of two other engraved stones near Calango, for example, was only possible because I could read his original account in archaic Spanish, or Castilian, which would have been all put impossible to access for previous scholars.
I visited the stones only seven times in three years, because for all but a few months of the year the river is too high to cross. Between visits, I studied the photographs I had taken, researched the history of the central coast, motifs of Andean art, and studies of petroglyphs in Peru and beyond, and shared ideas with many wonderful people whose contributions might appear here in the mouths of fictional characters.
While the characters and conversations reflect my experiences in Peru
The restaurants and bars in the book that I visit in Lima and elsewhere – the Blue Moon, El Chita Erotica, Juanitos, and more – are true to life. The food atmosphere and locations are as I describe them, and I don’t imagine they have changed much. They are there for visitors to enjoy and I heartily recommend them all.
I hope the story will serve as an introduction to aspects of Lima and the central coast which many visitors do not discover. It has also been an opportunity for me to explore the rich indigenous the native art, culture and beliefs, the amazing layers of empires and
At the end of that process, real and fictional, I believe I have some interesting ideas. They are presented here in non-academic form, without formal introductions and references. I see them rather as proposals for discussion.
There are more than twenty rocks with petroglyphs, and five or six dominate the site, with surface areas in excess of 5 square metres each. The largest has a surface area of over 40 square metres. One rock panel with a surface area of 5 square metres, appears to have had a unifying theme, for a large part of its life. I propose that motifs on the rock, and the rock itself, recall and refer to Paria Caca, the founding father of the people of Huarochiri, whose river flows past the stones. Such a direct affiliation has rarely been proposed in Peruvian rock art, to the best of my knowledge, but this is a spectacular panel and the evidence is compelling.
162b -How old are the engravings
The second is that on this panel, the brightness of the images can be used to date many of them. First of all they can be placed in date order. Then, by calibrating with images of known date and understanding the process by which the images fade, they can be ascribed absolute dates.
The approach can not be used on all images – those that are drawn in full rather than outline present a better area for measurement. It is also only reliable on panels with a particular gradient and orientation, for reasons explained.
The dates are accurate to of the order of +-200 years.
The dating gives a scale for the development of the site which is compatible both with iconographic comparison, and with the date estimates of some other researchers for Central Coast petroglyph sites.
152c Conclusions and Ruminations
Thirdly I consider some more speculative interpretations of the site. Could it have housed multiple satellite shrines to regional deities, similar to a group of rocks upriver at Yampilla described by spanish chroniclers? If so, what might these have been? Would there have been attendant priests living here, hosting annual festivals and the visits of supplicants? I suggest some directions for future enquiries, looking at the remains of buildings, underground storage or burial cysts close to the stones, and stone platforms on the hillside above. The less accessible engravings could also be recorded via drones before they are damaged by the inevitable fracturing of the rock, which has already destroyed several square metres of engraving since Nuñez recorded the site in the 1970s.
I would of course welcome any comments