Adventures in Peru 2: Lima from the ground and the Huaca Pucllana

Upon arriving in the Lima airport, my coworker and I were greeted by a driver from the hostel we'd reserved our rooms in. He would be taking us and two Australians to the hostel, so we had to wait while they took out dollars from a cash machine and then changed them into Peruvian soles. The ATMs in Peru give you the option of taking out in dollars or local currency, though I don't understand why you wouldn't just take out soles and avoid another conversion loss. At any rate, the prevalence of money changers in Lima was really striking for me, coming from Colombia. In Colombia it's very hard to find money changers, and the rate they give you is always bad. Everything in Colombia is managed in pesos, unlike in Peru, where many things are also quoted in dollars, and many places accept dollars. I assume this is due to Peru's long history as a tourism destination. Colombia is now becoming hot on the tourism circuit, too, but we've reached an age where most smart tourists avoid travelers' checks and money changers altogether, relying entirely on ATMs. In this particular aspect I think I prefer Colombia. It is clearly an economy where people are used to dealing with other locals, as opposed to catering to foreigners. Money is made and spent locally, and what development there is, is for Colombians.

Another aspect in which Peru comes out losing compared to my adopted homeland is in the general streetscape. Despite Lima's oddly cool climate (its proximity to the cold Pacific Ocean makes it feel as if you were at 4000 feet altitude or so), the city looks shabby, like the sweltering, grimy, tropical sprawl you might see in documentaries about the explosion of Latin American cities in the late 20th century. Buildings are lowrise, made of ugly block with ugly, soot-covered cement plaster. There are cars everywhere, and no one walks on the sidewalk.




I later figured out that this is because the city is so sprawling that it's impossible to get from one place to another on foot. There was evidently no urban planning involved in Lima's growth to its present size of 8 million people; it feels more like Skokie, Illinois ballooned to that size.

Look at this hodgepodge of highrises, lowrises, and everything in between:



It's like a wealthier version of Port-au-Prince. I guess in that respect it would seem like a model city to guys like Joel Kotkin and residents of Las Vegas, but I wonder what Lima will look like when gas is scarce. Speaking of gas, stations here sell not only gasoline and diesel, as in the States, and not only those two plus natural gas, as in Colombia, but also liquid propane. Cars can be retrofitted for either natural gas or propane complements to their gasoline.

In general you can see that I wasn't too impressed by Lima. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the air wasn't full of lung-clogging desert dust, as I'd dreaded on the plane, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm a pretty close-minded person. I like familiar things, and it takes me a while to adjust to any changes. When I'm traveling I mentally prepare myself to be out of my element, to do without stability and familiarity for a while, but it's difficult for me. Of course I live in a country I wasn't born in, but by now I've adjusted to that country, so any change from Colombia is difficult for me--sometimes even a trip to the US is a real jolt!

Anyway, despite my unspectacular first impressions of outer Lima, our hostel was decent, and the driver seemed really interested in us as people. He wanted to know about Colombia, and tell us about Lima's neighborhoods, its industry, etc. Later that night I strolled with my two colleagues (one of which met us at the hostel) around historic Lima. Apparently this is where all the pedestrians I hadn't seen that morning were. There is a big pedestrian street that runs through central Lima, lined with elegant shops and chain restaurants, and it seems that this is where middle-class families come to walk around at night. Bogota's central historic district is bigger than Lima's, and it's not at all considered a common reference or meeting point (except for winos and dreadlocked students and tourists). I thought it was nice that Lima still maintains the custom of the central stretch of walkways and plazas where everyone goes to see and be seen. It's perhaps a throwback to a time when the city was much smaller.

While walking around that night, I was painfully conscious of my height. I am a moderately tall guy, and I am happy about that. In fact, in public places I always instinctively make a visual sweep to see if anyone is taller than me. If I'm the tallest in the area, I'm happy, and if not, I feel pissed off! But here in Lima I was uncomfortably precisely because of how much I towered over people. Almost everyone was below my shoulder-height; I felt as if I really stuck out. In my town in Colombia people are short too, but maybe since it's so hilly I don't feel as if I'm towering a story over everyone. Anyway, it was an odd sensation, this embarrassment at my height, though in the days since I've gotten used to it.

The next morning, our first full day in Lima, we got up comfortably early and headed to the Huaca Pucllana. "Huaca" is the term used to describe the adobe pyramids erected at different times and places all along the Peruvian coast. My boss had arrived to Peru a few days early and had explored various huacas north of Lima with their respective head archeologists. She saw Lambayeque and Huaca del Sol, with wall paintings and exquisite tombs. The night before she'd shown us photos and guidebooks from the different places she'd seen. Particularly striking for me were the landscape, a huge expanse of cultivated green in the midst of coastal desert, and the layering of the huacas. Apparently each huaca actually consists in different layers built one over the other at distinct moments. One sovereign would die, and the next would build a new pyramid around the old one, such that now there are something like five layers of painted walls, most of which cannot be seen except at points where poachers have knocked down some layers.

Poachers' paths cut into the pyramids actually are useful to the archeologists. They need to get to the interior and the top, but of course they could never ethically cut into the original site. If poachers have done it already, the researchers take advantage to have an access path for themselves.



Anyway, our first professional visit for this trip was a Huaca right in the middle of Lima, in the Miraflores district. Here's the view from atop the pyramid.



Residents had long though it was merely a big hill, and throughout the 20th century it had been used as a garbage dump and as a slum settlement. But starting in the 1980s a team began excavating on this smooth mound,




to reveal the adobe block pyramid underneath the dirt.






The site is now an in situ museum. They receive lots of visitors from Peru and all over the world, so much so that they manage to support themselves mainly from the entry fees. In addition to the ongoing excavations, part of what they show to the public is a small garden with indigenous Peruvian plants and animals. They started it maybe ten years ago, and it's lacking in maintenance and signage since they don't have a dedicated agronomist or archeobotanist taking care of it. But it's a lovely idea, and is in fact what inspired my boss to begin thinking of our own Muisca Garden project, when she saw it almost a decade ago. This is largely why we included Huaca Pucllana on our itinerary for this work trip to Peru, even though it doesn't have many food remains, which was the ostensible point of our visiting Peru (to explore Andean crops in archeological sites and in the present).

The garden had peanuts



quinoa



Lima bean, which is very important in Peru and particularly adapted to its low-altitude but not-so-hot tropical coastal climate








As for animals, there are alpacas



guinea pigs





and Muscovy ducks, a domesticated duck indigenous to the Americas.




The restoration work is really impressive on the pyramid. In some places, after clearing away the dirt on top, the blocks were pretty much as they'd been lain. These areas are conserved as is, with only a sealant applied to protect them from the infrequent rains. In other places, the blocks were intact but the walls had crumbled, especially where they had been infilled over to have other outer walls built (which due to plundering or natural decay then fell down, leaving the crushed walls underneath to be covered later by dirt). In these cases the team removes and organizes the original but disheveled blocks



and then re-lays them, also filling in with new adobe blocks where needed. In this photo you can see above what the wall looked like just after excavation, and below with their restoration:


Nearby you can see the unexcavated portion, next to a relatively intact (perhaps already restored?) wall, and below is a more recent (maybe 700 years old) wall built when later sovereigns tried to build low protective walls to prevent grave-robbing.






Not only does the restoration give a better idea of what the site would have looked like when in use, but it's necessary to protect it from further deterioration. Without restoration, the uncovered blocks would themselves turn to dust.

Here's a cut where you can see unexcavated hill, excavated but not restored pyramid, and restored walls in the foreground.





Here is an example of a section of wall that had part relatively intact, and part that needed to be reconstructed. Again, as part of responsible conservation, the archeologists make it easy to see the new reconstruction (the perfect, straight blocks) as opposed to the original intact stretches (the less straight, more worn blocks).


Where the restoration stops at a flat horizontal surface, they make impressions of where the next course of blocks would go.




Here's a good representation of the process of building one wall over another. The new king would start with the existing platform at the top of the pyramid. He'd build walls at either end, then fill in with rubble.




The next sovereign will then build on top of this new platform, but to resist the outward force of the infill, he has to reinforce outside the lower retaining walls.



The end result is a series of pyramids built one inside the other.



Here is a part where a platform partially deteriorated away, so you can see the prior retaining walls and infill.


The pyramid-top plazas were sacred spaces, open only to the ruling class. But it seems that when they brought in workers to fill in a plaza and build another layer, the workers took advantage to bury small offering in the old plaza. Here's an example:





Over time, later cultures even made some commoner burials in the pyramid:



Sometimes even the original lime plaster that was slathered over the blocks has remained partially intact.



Look at the far wall of this plaza. It's all original yellow plaster.



Here is a plaza where only some yellow original plaster remained, so they filled in with modern plaster to give an idea of what the finished walls would have looked like. Notice the original, 1000-year-old-plus mesquite pillar in the ground.




In other parts the archeology team has made more bold reconstructions, always making clear of course what is a modern intervention and what is original. This is what one of the courts might have looked like, with columns to support a thatched roof.




The pyramid was ostensibly dedicated to a sea goddess, and looked directly to the sea. There were no intervening buildings between the pyramid and the sea, unlike today, when this is the view westward:




The archeological site has become a real economic boon to the neighborhood. It even has a fancy restaurant right next to the pyramid.


Next to the restaurant are some statues representing workers kneading the mud and making adobe blocks. The footprints and unfinished blocks are actually the originals, excavated in situ! These statues have also inspired some projects we've undertaken at our own museum.



Above all what I learned at the site was that what's now Lima was one of the largest irrigated valleys on the Peruvian coast. What's now unending city would have been verdant valleys when the Spanish arrived, a mosaic of cultivated fields, wetlands, and forest, all watered by the Andean river Rimac. Even today, when it's all paved over, many of the supposed rivers and creeks in Lima are actually prehispanic canals, engineered to spread water to every inch of cultivable land. It's a shame all this is now concrete cityscape, but it helped me to understand why Lima is where it is, and I liked thinking of a green valley stretching all around me.