Copyright 2002 by S. E. Hoffman All Rights Reserved.

        It is Sunday morning, the 27th of March, 1994.  Doves fly about my head as I sit at the Guardiana's table in her open air kitchen, writing up my field notes from the previous day.  Two skinny kittens play among the flowers at the side of the patio, and two little terriers take turns chasing each other and the kittens.  The third terrier, who is very fond of me, sleeps at my feet.  He will never leave my side whenever I'm in the house.
        Señora Consuelo, the guardian of the archaeological site at Checta, is doing her morning chores.  While the water boils for breakfast coffee, she feeds her animals -- chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs, and the omnipresent doves.  There's a box of dry corn at the end of the kitchen table where the doves eat.  The Señora has put it there so that she can eat her meals in peace.  Otherwise, the doves divebomb her plate.
        We are surrounded by the sounds of cooing doves flying into the roofless kitchen and about the house. The trills of songbirds rise up from the mango orchard on the other side of the road.  The trees and the fields in the Chillon Valley are softly green through the early morning mist.  The softest of breezes blows through the open doorways, bringing the scents of orchards and crops.  It is so peaceful that I never want to leave.  How I wish I could always stay here, with the Guardiana and her petroglyphs and her stories of Inca tunnels!
        By road, Checta is about 80 miles north and east of Lima, Peru, far beyond the crowds and noise of the metropolis.  Señora Consuelo goes to church in Santa Rosa de Quives, the hometown of the young woman who became Saint Rose of Lima.  There has been a town at Quives for at least 3000 years.  The lower drainages of the Chillon Valley have been continuously occupied for more than 10,000 years.  Everywhere there are ruins, and everywhere the ruins and monuments are under assault by modern life and rapid population growth.
        Although Peruvian law on the preservation and protection of the country's patrimony is quite strict, enforcement is lax and haphazard.  It is easy to evade the law or ignore it, and when the local representative of the law is a very old, infirm lady, it is easy to laugh at it.
        Checta is in many ways a perfect illustration of both the problems and the potential of pre-Conquest and pre-historic sites not only in Peru but throughout Latin America.  On the one hand, the growing population of the nearby town of Pucará infringes more and more on the ruins; and on the other, the archaeological and scientific aspects of the site have been only marginally evaluated. My own very short investigation of the Checta site convinced me of its untapped value.  Some of the petroglyphs at Checta may be older than 6000 years and if the glyphs could be dated, they may provide a record of artistic and cultural development for the most formative periods of Peruvian pre-history.  Furthermore, the unique geology of the site has preserved the record of the climatic transition from late Pleistocene glaciation in the Andean foothills to the present-day regime of arid desert.
        I was asked to visit Checta and provide a geologist's point of view by Francisco Medina, an archaeologist from the Museo de Antropología y Arqueología, of the Universidad Nacionál Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM).  He was dissatisfied with published work on the petroglyphs and the associated ruins, and the geological maps of the site were severely limited.
        Technically, the UNMSM has responsibility for the preservation and care of the Checta site, but continuous budget cuts and the rampant inflation of the 80's have decimated their preservation budget.  The on-sight, day-to-day activity there is monitored by Señora Consuelo Livia Aranguren.  She maintains the visitor records, and before she became too infirm, she led tours up the hillside to see the petroglyphs.
        Señora Consuelo and her husband came to Checta to be the resident guardians in 1960.  In return, they received a house in which to live, but no compensation.  Señor Aranguren died in 1984 of prostate cancer, and the señora has carried on alone since then.  Initially the house was a large, multi-roomed compound with a walled courtyard and surrounding quarters where archaeologists used to be able to stay while they did field work in the area, but a large earthquake brought down most of the roofing and many of the rock and adobe walls.  There has never been money available to make structural repairs.  The university had also begun construction of an on-site museum next door to La Guardiana's house, but only the still-standing walls attest to what might have been.
        In March 1994, when I was visiting, Señora Consuelo was 84 years old and her only income a pension of 50 soles per month, less than $25 US at that time.  She was just recuperating from surgery to remove lymphatic tumors in her right leg and had only recently returned to her home after being nursed by her daughter in Lima.  Despite her frailty, she still climbed up the quebrada to visit some of her favorite haunts, and she still was sallying forth to argue with the city fathers of Pucará whenever another building or animal pen was erected on the ruins at the mouth of Quebrada Alcaparossa, a seasonal feeder channel of the Rio Chillon.
        Her pension was so meager that the archaeologists from the university always tried to bring food and other supplies whenever they visited.  Señor Medina impressed on me the importance of augmenting her meager supplies whenever I came.  La Guardiana loves to be hospitable with tea or coffee and condensed milk whenever she has visitors.  It is the Peruvian way of hospitality.  But it is a real imposition on her when she has so little.
        When I came up from Lima that last weekend in March to finish my geologic mapping of the site, I made sure to bring things which I knew she would need -- rice, flour, coffee, matches, canned milk, bread -- but I also brought her some chocolate bars.  I had discovered during an earlier visit that the Señora is very fond of chocolate, but her pitiful income rarely allows her to get any.  With flour costing 50 cents a pound and rice more than $2 US a pound, even staples are impossible for her to purchase most of the time.  Her twinkling eyes and the mischievous grin she flashed at me when she found the chocolate in the bag of supplies were all the reward I needed.
        As always in Peru, I feel powerless to do much to help the Señora and to protect the integrity of the site.  The cultural heritage of Peru is nearly overwhelming in its antiquity, diversity, and richness, but this heritage is continuously threatened by desperate poverty and ignorance.  The government of Peru does not have the money to protect even its most precious ancient treasures from plunder and destruction.  All I can do is my job as a scientist -- describe the geology of a site, enumerate its uniqueness, publish my work, and hope that modern Peruvians can save it.
        The valley of the Río Chillon is one of only a few areas in the world where evidence for human habitation is both ancient and continuous.  The importance of its sites is equivalent to that of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile in parts of the Sudan, and sites along the Yellow and Yangtse rivers in China.  In these places, we can look for evidence of the earliest human agricultural communities.  But only in Peru is that record preserved by such a favorable climate.
        In the coastal desert of Peru, landforms and the human constructions resting upon them can survive thousands of years without noticeable change, provided of course that they are undisturbed by subsequent human activity.  Rainfall is essentially non-existent, averaging less than 5 cm a century in some places.  While I was in Lima in the early part of 1994, it rained there for the first time in nearly 40 years.
        The heaviest rain falls in the higher elevations, and the primary effect of that rainfall is flash floods which sweep down the steep quebradas and into the coastal valleys as the water rushes to the sea. Over time it has produced a landscape of deeply-eroded, but sedimented and fertile river valleys, separated by rugged and extremely dry mountain ridges.  At an elevation of roughly 3000 meters, sufficient scrub pasture survives to support herds of camelids, and in the high mountain valleys and on terraces built on steep mountain slopes, there is intensive agriculture.
        Even at the coastline, the river valleys are relatively narrow, seldom more than 10 km wide.  At Checta (1200 m elevation), the valley is just 3 km wide.  Thus, agricultural land in the valleys has always been scarce and precious.  To be able to farm as much as land as possible, the habitations of ancient farming communities were built above the valleys, on the arid slopes.  This protected the settlements from seasonal floods and helped ensure their preservation.
        The most ancient settlements are located closest to the coastline.  These range from 8,000 to 12,000 years old, precisely the period of human history when humans developed agriculture and settled communities.  The rising sea level that accompanied the melting of the vast continental glaciers at the end of the Pleistocene undoubtedly inundated other early sites along the coast.  Settlements perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 years old might be buried beneath the nearshore sediments on the present-day continental shelf.
        The archaeological sites that are still above sea level are under continuous assault.  Everywhere in Peru, population is growing and the people aspire to a better quality of life.  While the problems of encroachment are the worst in the department of Lima, where the bulk of Peru's population lives, every site in Peru has problems.
        These problems are not new.  There is a long tradition of digging for huacas, the ancient funerary bundles containing mummified human remains and accompanying grave goods.  Huaqueros, as they are called, have a thousand-plus year history of plundering graves.  It's often a robust family tradition.  The same people who watch a scientist poking around a site are sure to visit the same area later to see if there's anything of value to plunder.  Thus, archaeological excavations must have guards on duty 24 hours a day.
        The huaqueros are not at all interested in the mummy itself, but in the jewelry, pottery, and adornments which were carefully wrapped around it with textiles prior to burying.  So far as we know, the oldest surviving textiles in the world are found at sites in the coastal desert of western South America.  Their vivid colors and complicated woven designs provide some of the few clues to the symbology of the ancient cultures that created them.
        But the huaqueros care for none of that.  They shred through the fragile textiles, mummified tissue and brittle bones to find necklaces, pots, figurines, anything that might be sold.  The finds end up in the possession of private collectors for the most part, and the cultural information that a trained archaeologist could glean from the entire mummy package is irretrievably lost.
        As I walked through the site at Checta, I was continually finding scraps of fabric blown against rocks and shrubs, bits of bone and even clumps of human hair, blacker than night, coarse and dry from dissication and exposure.  Each clump was a story lost forever.
        The weight of sorrow and irretrievable loss made an ache from my throat to my stomach, a cramp of heartsoreness at the sight of so much wanton desecration.  The greed is so powerful, and all the university can afford to array against it at Checta is a frail old lady.
        Because geochronology is one of my specialties, I was hoping to find remnants of sedimentary sequences in the glacial strata that might contain pollen or other dateable materials.  But it was a futile search.  Every time I found a possible location, it had been profoundly disturbed, dug into and mixed about, so that the sediments had no integrity whatever.  This site had been pillaged and pillaged and pillaged again.  It made me sick.
        But hope is still with both the huaqueros and the arqueologos.  Scattered over acres of rocky quebrada slopes and glacial moraine are stone circles, standing stones and hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of petroglyphs.  Many of the petroglyphs seem to be symbolic notations.  Perhaps someday, some smart, young whippersnapper intellect -- a Peruvian Champollion -- will figure out what they mean.  And someone else will figure out how to use emission spectrometry or some other geophysical method to date them.
        As for me, a geologist looking for ways a geologist can help understand the site, I've already made a significant contribution by pointing out that the large assemblages of broken rock that sweep in curves down the quebrada and its side ravines are glacial moraines.  Ancient glaciers advanced and retreated at least three times here, leaving lateral moraines and a large, curved end moraine that redirects the course of the river.  The glacial features undoubtedly affected the pattern of human settlement in the valley of the Río Chillon, but it is up to others to figure out how.  I take some rock samples to analyze geochemically and then return to the Señora's compound to say good-bye.  It's good-bye forever because I will probably never be able to return.
        Back at the compound, I sort and pack my things, making sure to surreptitiously leave behind anything that I no longer need.  When she finds them, she'll know I did it on purpose.  The Señora embraces me and kisses both my cheeks.  I say goodbye to the little dogs while trying not to think that I will probably never see her again.  When it is nearly time for the bus from Santa Rosa de Quives, she walks with me, her arm linked in mine, to stand beside the road and wait.
        The bus pulls up. I have my money ready so I can quickly load my backpack and basket.  I turn to give Señora Consuelo one last hug, then get to a seat on the bus.  We wave at each other as the bus pulls away.
        And so I return to Lima, to the house of the darling sisters who are my hostesses during this extended stay in Peru, to a hot bath and a life of comparative ease and security.  I say a prayer for that courageous old lady, with little but a crumbling house and a few animal companions, fighting the good fight to preserve la patrimonia del Peru. May she and all her compatriots prevail.

 

Copyright 2002 by S. E. Hoffman

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