| Ancash |
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| The Origins of the Andean Civilization |
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An exceptional trip along the coastline
to Ancash |awaits all visitors who wish to understand
how about 4 700 years ago critical foci of sedentary
life appears in the small valleys surrounded by one
of the driest deserts on the planet, and of CHAVIN DE
HUANTAR, the first cultural manifestation in the Americas
rightfully deserving being called a civilization. Huaraz
(3 050 masl), the department’s capital located
400 km north of Lima and 200 km from the sea (Paramonga),
can be reached trough a paved road in excellent state
of repair. Visits are best from April to October, and
ideal from June to August. |
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| Las Haldas and the Casma
Coastline |
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A beautiful ceremonial scenery makes
Las Haldas the most remarkable of a string of temples
– the first in the New World – that amaze
us for their monumental proportions and early date,
among which are Salinas in Chao, Aspero and Carral-Chupacigarro
in Supe, and El Paraíso in Chillón.
Las Haldas ceremonial compound is located south of the
Casma valley (300 km north of Lima) sitting on top of
rocky outcroppings by the seashore. Four squares along
a single axis facing an irregularly shaped pyramid,
these buildings, featuring stone walls and clay mortar,
were erected by people ignorant of pottery, other than
making small figurines in raw clay. Nowhere else on
Earth were primitive farming communities capable of
sharing their efforts to such a grand scale.
The compound’s units effectively cover from 8
to 58 Ha and required mobilizing up to 100 000 tons
of building materials. On the other hand, hamlets in
the vicinity are smaller than one hectare. In Egypt,
Mesopotamia, Central America and China, 30 or more centuries
had to elapse from the emergence of agriculture to the
building of the first initial religious temples that
can be truly called monuments. |
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| The Temple at Sechín and
the Casma Valley |
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The earliest temples in the Americas
are in Casma valley, a wonderful oasis surrounded by
white sand dunes. At the fork of the valley, travelers
will find Sechín hill, one of the oldest examples
of monumental art in the Americas.
A rectangular layout temple with rounded corners built
over several centuries and in stages, during the first
half of the second millennium BC, the Sechín
temple features a stone covered façade depicting
figurative low reliefs that envelope the whole construction.
The entrance gate, symbolically protected by flanking
warriors wielding their weapons and provided with sumptuous
headpieces, leads to the elevated internal atrium, the
sacred-most place in the building. To its sides, severed
body parts (trunks, heads, vertebrae, limbs) spurt blood
upwards to create a macabre frieze. Accounting for the
impressive strength of this artwork are ritual combats
where defeated combatants had to offer their lives and
blood to ancestral divinities in exchange for the communities
well-being.
The modern site museum near the temple exhibits reproductions
of the multicolor reliefs and scale models of the buildings,
introducing us to the valley’s amazing ancient
history, a place that for reasons still unknown to us
is home to the largest number of monument compounds
from the second and third millenium BC found on the
entire Peruvian Coast.
Further into the valley not far from the museum is the
Sechín Alto compound – the largest temple
built in the Americas in the second millenium. Its main
pyramid (250 by 300 meters at the base and 44 meters
high), like all pyramids of its time, grew in stages
until reaching its present form.
During more than five hundred years, generation, people
renewed the ceremonial center perhaps to inject new
life to the deities. Courtyards, enclosed areas and
roofed rooms from the old temple were carefully buried
with landfill to build new areas for religious cult,
in a process repeated at leas once every hundred years.
The front walls were covered with mud friezes (in the
early periods) or granite blocks weighing up to two
tons.
Facing the imposing central pyramid are four rectangular
plazas lined one after another along a 1 400 meter axis.
Several smaller pyramids surround the main compound.
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| Pampa de las Llamas - Moxeque |
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Not less impressive for its size, decorations
and regular design reminding us of an urban settlement,
is the Pampa de las Llamas-Moxeqe compound (1 800-1
400 BC).
An axis providing perfect symmetry over 1 100 meters
connects the compounds three components: the large rectangular
plaza in the middle and two imposing monuments at the
ends.
On the southwest, the step Moxeque pyramid features
rounded corners and is 160 x 170 meters at the base
and 30 meters high. Several smaller buildings and atriums
at the top can be reached by stairs.
Obviously used as a temple, the building’s façade
is decorated by deep niches with sculptures of human
figures up to 3,20 meters high made with clay in different
colors.
A different type of pyramid (140 x 140 x 9 meters) is
situated at the other end of the axis (Huaca A) in Pampa
de las Llamas. A stairway cutting the façade
at the middle leads to a labyrinth of roofed areas,
with rounded corners and walls lined with niches.
Around 70 smaller rectangular buildings line up along
both sides of the center axis all the way to the grand
square.
The monumental character and planning required in building
the compound suggest this may have been the capital
of the oldest kingdom in the Andes and the Americas. |
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Archeology |
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| The Chavín de Huántar
Ceremonial Center |
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For reasons not yet totally clear, during
the ninth century BC the large temples on the Coast were
abandoned for good while two centers in the Highlands
–probably oracles- gained the devotion of people
both from the Coast and Highlands. They were Kunturwasi
in Cajamarca and Chavín, in Ancash.
To reach Chavín we must first make a stop in Huaraz,
capital city of the Ancash department. Ancash offers visitors
a wide range of tourist circuits for nature, adventures
and mountaineering lovers. In Huaraz visitors should not
miss the Municipal Museum that houses an important collection
of Recuay civilization artifacts (0-700 AD).
Beautiful multicolored ceramics, massive stone sculptures,
and tenon heads illustrate the main illustrate the main
elements of the religious and political life of a people
that competed with the Mochica for the control of the
Coastal oases. The war lords – dressed in richly
decorated attires depicting their divinities – and
the women in their entourage are the leading participants
in these rites.
Chavín de Huántar, located at 3 150 masl
in the upper Mosna river valley, is located half way between
the Coast and the Jungle regions, separated from either
by two towering mountain ranges. The Old Temple (eighth
to third century BC) is particularly well preserved thanks
to the semi-quarried stone used to build it. It comprises
two pyramid-shaped bodies reclining on each other that
were erected on a vast platform system housing a labyrinth
of some 14 galleries. The temple’s “U”
shape was inspired by the sacred architecture of the central
Coast with a circular plaza in the middle. The main gallery
still houses the principal cult image: an obelisk called
the Lanzón or great Spear.
The New Temple resembles the constructions of its type
found on the Coast and northern Highlands, i.e. a massive
truncated pyramid with a rectangular foundation on top
of which sit two chapel-like buildings placed along a
façade adorned with a figurative portico. The similarities
are no coincidence as proven by the offerings placed inside
galleries by people who came from a radius of about 800
km, from Cajamarca to Paracas.
The fierce iconography on the Tello Obelisk –originally
standing in one if the squares- gives us a glimpse of
Chavín doctrines. It shows two mythical bird-tailed
alligators of opposite sex joined in unnatural intercourse
whereby they exchange body fluids flowing from their mouths,
noses and genitals depicted as serpents. Their hind legs
are placed below ground level while the forepaws rise
to the sky. Their acolytes -–the jaguar for the
male divinity and the fishing eagle for the female deity
– suggest the divine couple divides their power
between the two confines of the universe: the jungle and
the sea. If so, the image was an attempt at explaining
the mystery of life and the eternal cyclical exchange
of waters between the heavens, earth and the sea.
Another couple of supernatural beings guards the entrance
to the New Temple, a portico divided into two equal segments,
one light and the other dark, as if evoking the joining
of day and night. Both are winged beings and of opposite
sex: the male deity is shown as a hawk and the female
as an eagle.
Different classes of lesser gods are also represented
in the Tello Obelisk, and on the plaques decorating the
sunken small squares facing the façade, to thus
configure a rich pantheon of mythical ancestors. The dual
and four-some partitions (couples and groups of four characters
in symmetric opposite arrangements) appear again and again
as the guiding principles in the sculpted ornamentations.
Judging from its decor and layout, the temple was designed
to mimic the universe and conceived as the fruit of the
union of two portions of the world, complementary with
and opposed to each other: one masculine and the other
feminine, in conformance with the principle that guides
the beginning of life itself. Each of the parts was in
itself made up of two mutually critical halves because
each needed its own day and night, its own rainy and dry
seasons.
Priests of the Old Temple descended inside the building
to render tribute to the Great Spear god, lord of the
netherworld whom they conceived as a feline-man emerging
from the dark jungle to drink its victim’s blood.
On the contrary, the priests of the New Temple climbed
to the summit of the pyramid to make offerings to heavenly
deities (the male hawk and the female eagle).
Building the temple at the joining of two rivers may not
be a coincidence either. In the religious beliefs of Quechua-speaking
peoples, this union –or tincumayo- symbolizes the
strong driving forces of the Wiracocha universe and is
replicated in the night sky as the merging arms of the
Milky Way, near the Southern Cross constellation. |
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| Chankillo and The Defense Systems
on The Northern Coast |
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Chankillo –an easily reachable site
on the Pan-American highway- was the stage of unceasing
ritual combats to gain supremacy over land and other resources.
Chankillo occupies the summit of one of the many barren
hills on the fringes of the valley, right in the middle
of the desert. Probably its construction dates back to
the times immediately before the fall of this civilization,
although it continued to be used after the fall of Chavín
de Huántar in the last four centuries before our
era.
The structure is comprised of three high concentric walls
all built of semi-quarried masonry of which some four
meters from the ground have been preserved to our days.
A total of five gates restrict access by means of diagonal
walls that direct traffic sideways, and by fences. Symmetrical
stairways allow access to the circus from the center of
the edifice. Two circular towers and an eight-sided building
stand out inside the defense circuit.
Together with other sites, Chankillo served as a defense
line along the river banks of the Virú, Santa and
Casma valleys. Casma also features a group of seven imposing
walls, 5,50 meters high and as thick as 2,70 meters as
the base, that run along hundreds of meters up and down
desert mountains where they provided a backdrop for ritual
where they provided a backdrop for ritual battles and
young warriors’ passage rites to manhood. |
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