Chan Chan, Sun city

Freedom. The ruins of Chan Chan lie in the Moche Valley, midway between Huanchaco and Trujillo, in the department of La Libertad and covers an area of about 20 square kilometers. It is an archaeological complex formed by 9 citadels or small walled cities belonging to the Chimu culture. It is considered as the city of the world's largest mud.

It is estimated that in Chan Chan, which means "Sun Sun" because many theories say the city endured a great sun exposure, lived from 20 to 30,000 inhabitants and various kinds of architecture can be seen. Visit and follow it with accredited guide tourists to discover the remains of an ancient Peruvian culture, and marvel at the quality of the architecture of the Chimu.

Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimu kingdom, originally covered more than 20 km2 from near the port of Huanchaco to Cerro Campana. Archaeologists estimate that housed more than 100 thousand people.

In its structure plazas, housing, warehouses, workshops, streets, walls and pyramidal temples. Its enormous walls are profusely decorated with geometric figures, stylized zoomorphic and mythological beings. The tour of the archaeological site is complemented by a visit to the museum.

Source: RPP.

Visit Chan Chan!

Moche Route Tour 3D/2N

Archaeology and Nature Tour 4D/3N

Caral considered one of the 10 unforgettable findings of 2015

Caral considered one of the 10 unforgettable findings of 2015 according to National Geographic. "The Caral is the oldest civilization in the Americas," said Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady to this medium. The archaeological team unearthed three complete runs no clay figurines, two heads of the same material and numerous reliefs of starving characters that are an allegory of drought, famine and death he endured this culture. 

The disturbing expression of the three statuettes has not faded over the millennia. Most depicts a shaman priestess or showing breasts and genitals. The other two statues, with twenty fingers each, representing two characters in the hierarchy. "Women played a prominent religious, economic and political, as can be evidenced in the recovered material role activities," says Shady. "When the Spanish arrived in Peru they said that the natives were weak because they let women rule"

Caral is the cradle of as old as the Egyptian Memphis Andean civilization and culture that flourished in this holy city is considered the oldest in America, at least to date. Throughout the month of June, the Ministry of Culture of Peru has announced a series of findings about 3,800 years old that shed light on a remote culture that survived in an area hit by drought. The archaeological team led by Ruth Shady has unearthed three complete no clay figurines, two heads of the same material and numerous reliefs of starving characters that are an allegory of drought, famine and death he endured this culture.

Source: National Geographic.

Visit Lima!

Caral Ruins Full Day Tour

Lost city of 'cloud people' found in Peru

Archaeologists have discovered a lost city carved into the Andes Mountains by the mysterious Chachapoya tribe

The settlement covers some 12 acres and is perched on a mountainside in the remote Jamalca district of Utcubamba province in the northern jungles of Peru's Amazon.

The buildings found on the Pachallama peak are in remarkably good condition, estimated to be over 1,000 years old and comprised of the traditional round stone houses built by the Chachapoya, the 'Cloud Forest People'.

The area is completely overgrown with the jungle now covering much of the settlement but explorers found the walls of the buildings and rock paintings on a cliff face.

The remote nature of the site appears to have protected the site from looters as archaeologists found ceramics and undisturbed burial sites.

Archaeologist Benedicto Pérez Goicochea said: "The citadel is perched on the edge of an abyss.

"We suspect that the ancient inhabitants used this as a lookout point from where they could spot potential enemies."

The ruins were initially discovered by local people hacking through the jungle. They were drawn to the place due to the sound of a waterfall.

The local people "armed with machetes opened a path that arrived at the place where they saw a beautiful panorama, full of flowers and fauna, as well as a waterfall, some 500 metres high," said the mayor of Jamalca, Ricardo Cabrera Bravo.

Initial studies have found similarities between the new discovery and the Cloud Peoples' super fortress of Kulep, also in Utcubamba province, which is older and more extensive that the Inca Citadel of Machu Picchu, but has not been fully explored or restored.

Little is known about the Chachapoya, except that they had been beaten into submission by the mighty Incas in 1475.

When in 1535 the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in Peru, they found willing allies in the Cloud People for their fight against the Incas.

Spanish texts from the era describe the Cloud People as ferocious fighters who mummified their dead.

They were eventually wiped out by small pox and other diseases brought by the Europeans.

The women of the Chachapoya were much prized by the Incas as they were tall and fair skinned. The Chronicler Pedro Cieza de León offers wrote of the Chachapoyas.

"They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen in Indies, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas' wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple."

Archaeologists study headless body in Peru

Published by Science Daily
SAN MARCOS, Texas, May 30 (UPI) -- U.S. archaeologists say a recently excavated headless Peruvian skeleton has expanded their understanding of ancient Andean rituals.

Images of disembodied heads are widespread in the art of Nasca, a culture based on the southern coast of Peru from about 1 A.D. to 750 A.D. Despite that evidence and the discovery of many trophy heads in the region, only eight headless bodies have been recovered with evidence of decapitation, said Christina Conlee of Texas State University.

Conlee's analysis of the recently excavated headless body from the site of the ancient community of La Tiza provides important new data on decapitation and its relationship to ancient ideas of death and regeneration.

"Human sacrifice and decapitation were part of powerful rituals that would have allayed fears by invoking the ancestors to ensure fertility and the continuation of Nasca society," Conlee said. "The decapitation of the La Tiza individual appears to have been part of a ritual associated with ensuring agricultural fertility and the continuation of life and rebirth of the community."

She details her findings in the June issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

An Ancient Inca Tax And Metallurgy In Peru

Science Daily — Scientists in the United States and Canada are reporting the first scientific evidence that ancient civilizations in the Central Andes Mountains of Peru smelted metals, and hints that a tax imposed on local people by ancient Inca rulers forced a switch from production of copper to silver.

Their study is scheduled for the May 15 issue of ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.

The University of Alberta's Colin A. Cooke and colleagues point out that past evidence for metal smelting, which involves heating ore to extract pure metal, was limited mainly to the existence of metal artifacts dating to about 1,000 A.D. and the Wari Empire that preceded the Inca.

The new evidence emerged from a study of metallurgical air pollutants released from ancient furnaces during the smelting process and deposited in lake sediments in the area.

By analyzing metals in the sediments, the researchers recreated a 1,000-year history of metal smelting in the area, predating Francisco Pizarro and his Spanish conquistadors by 600 years. Their findings show that smelters in the Morococha region of Peru switched from production of copper to silver around the time that Inca rulers imposed a tax, payable in silver, on local populations.

Article: "A Millennium of Metallurgy Recorded by Lake Sediments from Morococha, Peruvian Andes"

New Understanding Of Human Sacrifice In Early Peru

Published by Science Daily — A study published in the August/October issue of CurrentAnthropology, reports on new archaeological evidence regarding theidentities of human sacrifice victims of the Moche society of Peru.

The Moche was a complex society whose influence extended over mostof the North coast of Peru between AD 200 and 650. They are widelyknown for their life-like mold-made ceramics, beautiful metallurgy, mudbrick pyramids, and iconographic depictions of one-on-one combatbetween Moche warriors. In recent years archaeologists had uncoveredevidence of the sacrifice of adult males at a number of Moche pyramids.What has remained unclear until now is who these sacrificial victimswere. Largely due to the nature of iconographic depictions of Mochecombat most scholars have speculated that the sacrifices were largelyrituals among local Moche elites, the primary goal of which was toprovide human victims for sacrificial ceremonies.

However, this newly published study by Richard Sutter and Rosa Cortezcompares genetically influenced tooth cusp and root traits for theMoche sacrificial victims from a pyramid at the Moche capital withthose of other North Coast populations. The findings of thisarchaeological comparison indicate that the sacrificial victims werenot local Moche elite. Instead they were likely warriors captured fromnearby valleys. When this result is considered in light of otherarchaeological and skeletal lines of evidence it suggests that theMoche populations in each valley were characterized by territorialconflict and competition with one another.

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research onhumankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarshipon human cultures and on the human and other primate species.Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in awide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physicalanthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology andprehistory, folklore, and linguistics. For more information, please seeour website: www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA

"The Origins and Role of the Moche (AD 1-750) Human SacrificialVictims: A Bio-Archaeological Perspective." Richard Sutter and RosaCortez. Current Anthropology 46:4.