Chan Chan on the North Coast of Peru

Chan Chan was the Chimu capital on the arid north coast of Peru, near the modern city of Trujillo. The Chimu and the Chimor Empire, which included most of the northern and central coast of modern Peru, dates between A.D. 1000 and 1470. The culture grew out of the Moche culture and disappeared when incorporated into the Inca Empire.

The site is about eight square miles in size, and within it are nine to eleven monumental enclosures, depending on how they are interpreted. These monumental enclosures are thought to have been palaces of the kings of Chimor and the other elites. They are walled structures with mounds, rooms, halls, courtyards, etc., on a grand scale. Surrounding these enclosures are the remains of the modest quarters of most of the city's residents, made of adobe and cane.

View of Chan Chan

Map of Chan Chan

We toured the excavated Tschudi Enclosure, which has been partly reconstructed and interpreted for tourists. The high enclosure walls, the spacious plazas, the maze of rooms for ceremonial and storage, the beautiful adobe wall decorations, and the large interior reservoir are features that still amaze the visitor to Tschudi. Each of the enclosures have been found to include rooms that probably served as administrative offices, storerooms, walk-in wells, and a burial platform, although it must be pointed out that archaeologists, unlike pothunters, have barely touched the site.

Workmen Stablizing the Tschudi Enclosure

Reconstructing Wall with Adobe Bricks

Cross-section of Wall of Adobe Bricks

Plaza of the Tschudi Enclosure

Detail of Plaza Wall

Other Wall Decorations

Ceremonial Room in Tschudi Enclosure

Ceremonial Room with U-shaped Construction of Unknown Purpose

Detail of Ceremonial Room Adobe Decoration

Reservoir in the Tschudi Enclosure

Chan Chan is without doubt one of the great architectural achievements of Native America, and it was the product of a complex aboriginal civilization.

North Coast Peru Moche Sites

On my recent trip to South America, I was able to tour a few impressive archaeological sites on the dry north coast of Peru. These included the sites of El Brujo and Moche and the large Chimor site of Chan Chan. The latter I will write about in another post: It is an incredible site covering some 8 square miles with 11 monumental enclosures, dating A.D. 900 to 1400, and deserves its own separate treatment. The former sites are earlier, and these north coast sites of the Moche culture are thought to date from the beginning of the common era to about A.D. 650. The art and monumental architecture of the Moche culture has been known and studied since the colonial period, but they received a great deal of new attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the spectacular royal tombs of Sipan were discovered and excavated in the same area. These also were Moche, and there exists a large literature on those discoveries.


My visit centered around the north coast Peruvian city of Trujillo. Twenty miles north of the city is El Brujo (the Sorcerer), and 18 miles south in the Moche River valley is the site of Moche itself. The name Moche is given to the river, to the site, which possibly was the capital of an ancient state, and to Moche culture, which spread throughout the north coast of Peru. Since the culture is known primarily from archaeology, whether Moche was one or two or several states has not been established, but regional stylistic differences suggest it may not have been a single state.


Moche art and architecture is spectacular, and the use of gold in some of its artistic expression has attracted attention since colonial times. One of the first things I noticed when arriving at the El Brujo site, after of course the huge mounds, which could be seen even before arriving at the site, was the cratered ground surface throughout the site area. These craters are potholes: the remains of the search for treasure by looters. One of the two large mounds at El Brujo, Huaca Cortada, has a large cut through its middle, an attempt to find treasure early last century. It is remarkable that anything actually remains at the site for archaeological study. Armed guards patrol the site today, guarding what is left.

Looters' Potholes at El Brujo

The other large mound at El Brujo is Huaca Cao Viejo. It was constructed of adobe bricks and had at least six decorated terraces and a large, enclosed plaza on its north side. There is a ramp leading to its summit where a structure once stood. Adobe reliefs on the terraces facing the plaza show a Moche warrior leading a procession of prisoners with a rope tied around their necks and battle scenes.

Huaca Cao Viejo

(plaza covered at left, burials covered at upper center)

Warrior and Prisoners in Relief

Detail of Prisoners in Relief

Battle Scene

Burials were found on the upper terraces. The most elaborate is referred to as the Mausoleum of the Queen. The principal burial was of a woman interned with gold and gilded copper ornaments and furniture, accompanied by attendants and juveniles, presumably sacrificed. Whether she was a queen or not we do not know, but her opulent burial with sacrifices in a large, elaborately decorated mound suggests a high status within a complex polity. A museum is under construction at the site, but it was not yet completed at the time of my visit. There is also an archaeology museum in the city of Trujillo.

Mausoleum of the Queen at El Brujo

Tombs of the Queen (left) and Attendants (back)

The site of Moche has two large mounds built of adobe bricks and a residential and craft area between them. The Huaca del Sol (Temple of the Sun) is one of the largest pre-Columbian structures in the Americas, but it has all but been destroyed by looters. In colonial times the Moche River was even rechanneled to erode the mound to wash out any treasure. Archaeological study has focused on the other mound, the Huaca de la Luna (Temple of the Moon). This is a complex of platforms, patios, ramps, and plazas, with stylized painted decorations. It completely overwhelmed me with its enormity and spectacular beauty. This most certainly was the center of political and religious activity for a complex culture.

Huaca de la Luna


Painted Relief from the Great Patio in Huaca de la Luna

Just when I thought I had seen the pinnacle of Peruvian cultural development by my visit to these Moche sites, I was taken to Chan Chan.

Darwin's Birthday

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

-Theodosius Dobzhansky 1973

This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). As an archaeologist, a gardener, a birdwatcher, and a largely self-taught naturalist, I have come to embrace Darwin's powerful explanatory idea to understand the world in which I find myself. Retirement has freed my reading priorities from strictly archaeological and anthropological books and articles, and I have had time to read the works of a number of scholars who have written about Darwin and his idea. I just finished reading Daniel C. Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York, 1995). This is not an easy book to read, and, in fact, it took me four months to finish. Rereadings and reading pauses, during which I read numerous other lighter books, accounted for some of this time, and there is the fact that the book has 500-plus pages, but the main reason is that there are so many fascinating facets to this idea dealt with by Dennett that absorbing and thinking about them made reading ten to fifteen pages or fewer a usual evening's quota. I was an undergraduate philosophy major, so I have experienced challenging philosophical texts before, but none so interesting as this one. Dennett is well-read and brilliant, and his writing is very readable and has references for addition reading throughout the book. Most importantly, because he deals with a profound idea dealing with the meaning(s) of life, all life, your life, my life, it is a book that is best digested slowly. I have read the works of evolutionary biologists, including Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, but Dennett, a philosopher and a Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, in this book, has more thoroughly examined and explained the "Darwinian Revolution" and its implications for understanding who and what we are, at least to this old student.

Finally, on the subject of this blog, Darwin's birthday is February 12, which of course is the same day as President Lincoln's. In fact, they both were born on the same day in 1809. What a good day that was. We know what great importance Abraham Lincoln was to us, and we celebrate his birthday each year on Presidents' Day. Little attention, however, is given to Darwin's, yet Dennett states, "If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else." I hope more attention is given to Darwin's, at least in this year of the bicentennial of his birth.

A Trip to Cuzco and Machu Picchu

As a former college professor who has taught American archaeology for over 35 years, I have always wanted to visit Machu Picchu, the Inca site in the Peruvian Andes discovered by Hiram Bingham, with the help from local Indians, in 1911. It is relatively inaccessible and in a beautiful setting above the Rio Urubamba Valley on a ridge between Machu Picchu Mountain and Huayna Picchu Mountain, at 8040 feet above sea level. Because it was unknown to the Spanish, the site and its structures are remarkably well preserved. It and its discovery has the aura of an Indiana Jones adventure or, at least, the closest real archaeologists get to such an adventure.

Machu Picchu (Site and Mountain)

Our trip to the site began in Lima, at the same time leaders of the Pacific rim nations (APEC)were meeting there. Parked at the Lima airport were numerous official jets from the large and small nations that participated, including China, Russia, Japan, and, of course, the United States. Air Force One and George W. Bush were in town for the meeting. We would return to Lima just after it ended, but with the security at hand in Lima and the inconvenience it would cause us, it was fortunate that we were headed for Cuzco and not staying there. The flight to Cuzco on LAN Peru Airline took about 75 minutes, and it took us from sea level in Lima to 11,200 feet above sea level in Cuzco. My wife and I had taken high altitude medication (Diamox) to minimize the affects of this altitude, and we were glad we did, as we saw a number of tourists who became sick in Cuzco from the altitude change. We became tired easier, but taking it slower and drink plenty of water kept us healthy.

Ruins of the Inca Qoricancha under the arches of Santo Domingo Convent

We stayed at the Hotel Libertador, near the center of the city and across the street from the Santo Domingo Convent and the ruin of the Inca Temple of the Sun (Qoricancha) over which the convent was built. After lunch at the hotel, we walked around the city, visiting the convent and the Inca ruins within it, the Plaza de Armas and the Cuzco Cathedral (built over the Inca Wiracocha Palace), and other sights in the city. We had a wonderful guide who showed us Cuzco's sights and later Machu Picchu: Fernando Boca. We met him at our hotel, and he walked with us around the city and then took us above the city to the Inca fortress, Sacsayhuaman. The fine Inca stonework in the city is readily distingishable from modern and that of the Spanish. It is made of closely fitted large stones, sometimes regular and flat, as at the Qoricancha, and sometimes irregular and pillow-like, such as at Sacsayhuaman. Both forms are without mortar and are of impressive craftsmanship. Spanish and modern walls of buildings in the center city often rest on foundations of Inca walls. Our guide spoke English very well and was very knowledgeable about the Inca and their culture. He gave us the native point of view; for example, he pointed out native additions and alterations to numerous things that the Spanish forced the Indians to construct, to paint, and even to think.

Arches of Santo Domingo built on Inca walls

Sacsayhuaman (sounds like "sexy woman," according one of our bus drivers) is an large complex built on one of the hills overlooking the city. The stonework is massive, and some individual stones must have required huge efforts to put them in place and to fit them together. The size of both the stonework and the site suggests the formidable power of the ruling Inca.

Sacsayhuaman

The trip to Machu Picchu involved a bus ride over mountain roads from Cuzco to the train station at Ollanta (about 1.5 hours) and the train ride along the Rio Vilcanota valley to Aguas Calientes (another 1.5 hours). The train goes where no road goes, so it is the only way to get to the site, unless you want to walk the Inca Trail from Cuzco. The trip takes you from an Alpine mountainous environment at 11,200 feet to a tropical mountainous one at 8040 feet. From the train station at Aguas Calientes in the valley, a road goes up the mountain to the site. You can walk a well-defined trail or take a bus, which snakes its way up to the site on a narrow dirt road with numerous switchbacks. We took the bus and noted that some of our fellow passengers closed their eyes for parts of the trip.

Aguas Calientes train station

The site is beautiful and a magnificent monument to Inca culture and technology. It is breath-taking in it setting and scope, and not because of the altitude. We carried with us a copy of Ruth M. Wright and Alfredo Valencia Zegarra's recently revised book The Machu Picchu Guidebook: A Self-Guided Tour (Johnson Books, Boulder, 2004), and with it and our guide, I believe we had a wonderful tour of the site. We visited and photographed all the site's landmarks: the Temple of the Sun (which was inaccessible because it was under excavation) and the cave below it, the royal residence, the Sacred Plaza, the Intiwatana, the Group of the Mortars, the Temple of the Condor, the Slide, several of the site's 16 fountains, and others. Some areas of the site have been reconstructed, most probably to stabilize and to make the site more accessible to visitors, and thatched roofs have been added to a few of the guard houses; but, for the most part, the site is one of a kind: it was not destroyed or built upon by subsequent cultures.

Guardhouses

Stonework in the royal residence

Temple of the Three Windows

Intiwatana Stone

One of 16 fountains

Condor stone in the Temple of the Condor

Agricultural terraces

There is a hotel and restaurant at the site, and there are more tourist facilities in Aguas Calientes. Everything from postcards to jewelry to clothing (more tee shirts) are sold in the stalls outside the train station.

Tourists and Aguas Calientes vendors

We returned to Cuzco the same way we came, and to Lima again by air. We took a tour of Lima before leaving. Our Lima guide, unlike our Cuzco guide, had no native heritage and no identification with native culture. In fact, Betty, as she introduced herself, complained that the native people come down from the mountains to Lima for employment and pay no taxes on their earnings. She said they move in with family in crowded, poor housing and have overburdened the city's infrastructure. She took us to the main plaza and the Cathedral, where we saw the tomb of Francisco Pizarro, who after arriving in 1532 proceeded to destroy Inca culture. Nearby is the Presidential Palace, and around the corner is the Church of San Francisco, which has mummies and is the roosting place of hundreds of pigeons. The center of the city has beautiful colonial architecture, in addition to the numerous churches, and this is recognized by its designation as a UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site. It also has several important archaeology museums, including the Archaeological Museum, with its notable Inca ceramic and Paracas textile collections, and the Gold Museum, which displays the lure for the Conquistadors. Peru is an archaeologist's paradise. I want to go back soon.

Pizarro's Tomb (right) in the Lima Cathedral

50th Wedding Anniversary

My wife and I have been retired for several years, and after retirement, the next big occasion is the 50th Wedding Anniversary. The 50th high school reunion actually preceded this big occasion, but since I had not seen those people in 50 years, I decided to skip that commemeration. That probably was a mistake, but I had reservations about seeing what 50 years did to all those people I knew and remember as teenagers. In any case, my wife and I faced what to do to celebrate the benchmark anniversary. In addition, it seems to me that wedding anniversaries are not as important to young people today as to previous generations, but marriages are more fragile today than in the past and golden anniversaries probably are rarer now than in the past and will be more so in the future. Therefore, we decided not to leave it up to our family, who for us are the principle celebrants for such occasions.

We decided to host a family cruise that included the anniversary date and invited our two sons and their families, ten people, including six children from 17 months to 13 years old. My wife's brother and sister-in-law also joined us, but at their own expense. The ship made a round-trip to New England and eastern Canada, leaving from Norfolk. We all drove to the to the port, and this made getting to the ship easy and not subject to the restrictions and inconviences of air travel. The actual anniversary day was spent in port at Bar Harbor, Maine, where we had a family lunch on the patio of the Parkside Restaurant. Dinner with sparkling wine was on the ship as it sailed for Saint John, New Brunswick. A few days later, on a formal night when the family dressed for dinner, we took a family photograph, and my wife and I also posed with our six grandchildren. The cruise celebration was fun, and it marked the occasion in a way that most of our family will remember it.

In addition to Bar Harbor and Saint John, the ship visited Boston, Portland, Maine, and Halifax, Nova Scotia. We did family tours at many of these ports, but my brother-in-law and I took a tour to the Cog Railway at Mount Washington, New Hampshire from Portland, and my wife and I took a tour to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia from Halifax. My wife and I had visited some of these ports in the past, but Saint John and Portland were new to us. I had thought about a visit to L. L. Bean in Freeport from Portland, as I am a big fan of their clothing, but an uncle, who is a train buff, encouraged me to see the Cog Railway, and I was not disappointed. Besides, L. L. Bean has a large store not far from the harbor in Portland.





The Cog Railway, built in the 1860s, now uses both steam and diesel engines and climbs to the summit of Mount Washington at 6,288 feet above sea level (from the Marshfield Base Station at 2700 feet). For us, the summit was wet and foggy. The view must be spectacular on clear days, but we found ourselves "above the clouds."

Lunenburg is a UNESCO World Heritage site, with many charming and historic structures from the 18th century. It is a famous fishing port and was home to the Bluenose, the winner of four international schooner races from 1921 to 1931 (See the Canadian dime for her likeness). The Bluenose II is now docked there. I had a great lunch of fresh mussels on the porch of the Rumrunner Restaurant with a splendid view of harbor.

Bluenose II

Boston was the final stop before returning to Norfolk. We took the Old Town Trolley Tour to get around the city and to see the sights. We visited the usual sites (Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, the USS Constitution, Trinity Church, Fenway Park, etc.), bought a Harvard tee shirt, and had lunch at Skipjack's at Copley Square. We had a day at sea to recuperate before arriving in Norfolk. It was a memorable 50th wedding anniversary for us.

The Site of Izapa, Chiapas, Mexico

The archaeological site of Izapa is in the Mexican state of Chiapas, only a few miles from the Mexican border with Guatemala on the Pacific coastal plain. I had the opportunity of visiting this site and the Soconusco Archaeological Museum in Tapachula in early May. The museum displays some of the important artifacts from the site. I was on the Holland America ship Westerdam, which was repositioning from Fort Lauderdale to Seattle, and the ship stopped at Puerto Chiapas. I know better than to expect that a tour from a cruise ship will satisfy a aficionado, in whatever he or she is really interested or knows something about. True to form, the tour gave us limited time to explore this large site, and the guide, although an earnest and intelligent young woman, had very limited knowledge about it and gave the tourists the usual spiel about blood and sacrifice. More seriously, she misidentified the plaza and ball court. In addition, a tour discharges a large number of wandering people on a site, and I really do not like to have my photographs, which I, at least in my former life, show to undergraduates and the public, cluttered with tourists in their touring clothes. Nevertheless, the tour did give me a chance to see the site I have often read about and had not seen before. I have visited most of the Mesoamerican sites of any importance, but the Pacific coast of Chiapas has always been a bit out of the way. The new port facility at Puerto Chiapas will remedy that from now on.

The Izapa tour stopped at Group F, one of six subareas of the site and the one that is located conveniently along the Interamerican Highway, but north of the main site area. It also is the group that the New World Archaeological Foundation in part reconstructed in the 1960s after excavation. However, Izapa was first settled about 3500 years ago, and archaeologists have found evidence of that settlement elsewhere (in Group A). Based primarily on ceramic sequences, Group F dates later, probably between 2000 and 600 years ago. In addition to its proximity to the highway, the better preservation of the later Group F was an important factor in its selection as the part of the site to be reconstructed and shown to tourists. The above photograph shows the Group F plaza with a monument platform (sans monument) in the left foreground, Mound 130 on the left (mostly out of the photograph), and Mound 125 in the background. Mound 125 is a complex consisting of a platform with a pyramid (temple base) at right and a several smaller mounds (one of these can be seen in the center background). All of these probably held buildings, which may have been temples, elite residences, storehouses, or whatever. These mounds of earth are faced with river cobbles, and they probably were covered with plaster and painted. There are several stone sculptures in the roofed enclosure in the center of the photograph.

The above photograph shows an I-shaped ballcourt, with the pyramid of Mound 125 in the background. The sides of the ballcourt are formed by Mound 126 on the right (and mostly out of the photograph) and two-tiered Mound 127 on the left. It is only ballcourt at Izapa and appears to be a relatively late feature. In fact, Group F may have been the last area of the site occupied.


After we had explored Group F, we were put back on the bus, which then headed for Tapachula. The guide passed around the above photograph, which was labeled Mound 30. Mound 30 is in Group A at Izapa, and it is within that mound that the earliest evidence of settlement at the site was found by archaeologists. However, we were not given the chance to visit that mound or the several stone sculptures there (in the photograph they are the things protected by small the grass ramadas). This early settlement and the influence it received from the Olmec and then presumably transmitted to the Maya of the lowlands is the major importance of this site. Interestingly, the photograph of Mound 30 was passed through the bus without explanation and with a number of other photographs of plants, birds, and other things of local note. The tour then headed for a tilapia farm!

Eventually we reached Tapachula. There in the center of the city is the Tapachula Cultural Museum (above photograph), and inside it is the Soconusco Archaeological Museum. The museum houses artifacts, including stone sculpture, from Izapa. At least, the artifacts that were not taken to Mexico City (to the National Museum of Anthropology) or to Tuxtla Gutierrez (Chiapas state museum).



The above photograph shows Olmec figurines, some of which could have been found at Izapa. The Olmec culture, with its distinctive art style, appears to have developed on the east coast of Mexico, and these figurines are evidence of Olmec influence (people, trade, and/or ideas) in the early period of the settlement of Izapa and the Pacific coastal plain.

The above photograph is of Stela 25 from Group A, which is in the Tapachula museum. It shows a human figure (right) standing above a conch shell and opposite an alligator (its head is near the figure's feet) from which a tree grows. The human figure holds a snake and a staff on which sits a large bird. The stela is from volcanic tuff , is broken at the top, and was removed from the site by vandals. Its meaning can only be conjectured. The museum does not have some of the more famous stelae from Izapa: the beautifully carved Stela 5 from Group A, which has a tree of life and seven human figures, and the grisly Stela 21 from Group D, which has a priest carrying a severed human head. I guess I will have to be content to view other people's photographs of those.

You can read bits and pieces about Izapa in just about any textbook or reference book about Mesoamerican archaeology, but the primary references that discuss the excavation and the details about the site are the Papers 25 (1969), 30 (1973), and 31 (1982) of the New World Archaeological Foundation at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. It was an interesting visit, but I guess the best thing about it was that it prompted me to research the site in more detail. Labeling tour photographs, and you should always label all photographs, always does that for me.

Mountain Lake Elderhostel

The recent elderhostel at Mountain Lake addressed the natural history of the lake area and of the Appalachia region. I enjoy visiting Mountain Lake whenever I can, and I have found that the elderhostel programs there are a good way of doing it. As usual, there were many interesting people to meet, things to learn, and activities to enjoy. The lake itself is down, so one of the activities that I always look forward to, fishing, was not possible.

The photograph above was taken from the was lake side in 2005. The lake now looks like a quarry, and the water is only 60 feet deep at its deepest location at the north end of the lake. When the lake is full it is nearly twice that depth. I was told that the lake loses 600 gallons of water per minute from a crack in its bottom.

The above photograph was taken from the north end of the lake in the summer of 2005. The lake then was down from 2004, but only slightly in comparison to today. What causes this fluctuation? It is a natural phenomenon that results from diminished precipitation and possibly recent earth movements in the area. Nevertheless, the lowered lake had only a minor impact on my enjoyment of the elderhostel and the beautiful resort at Mountain Lake.

The lodge is beautiful, the food is great, and the people are friendly. The weather also is very pleasant: it is at least ten degrees cooler than in Blacksburg and makes for very pleasant sleeping.

My last photograph for this post is from the elderhostel program orientation. Less than half the time was spent in a classroom, but classroom time is necessary if you want to be able to understand what you see outside. It's time well spent.