[Aztlan] MYSTERIOUS CHACHAPOYA RUINS

[michael ruggeri]

Discovery could bring Peru's 'cloud warriors' to earthUpdated  
1/17/2007 12:40 AM ET
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
A massive ruin offers fresh clues about the culture of Peru's  
vanished Chachapoya, the "cloud warriors" who battled the Inca Empire  
more than 500 years ago.
Best known for building mountainous cliff-side tombs and filling them  
with bundled mummies, the Chachapoya (cha-cha-POY-ah) were once  
rulers of the northern Andes. Aside from cliff tombs and stone  
houses, they have left archaeologists few large ruins to study.

Until now.

The ruin was first discovered in August by Peruvians, four local men,  
who live in the remote, heavily forested area. They got in touch with  
Keith Muscutt, a scholar and author they knew because he has explored  
the region for three decades and is godfather to some of their  
children. Muscutt, an expert on the Chachapoya, is the author of  
1998's Warrior of the Clouds: A Lost Civilization in the Upper Amazon  
of Peru.

"I was shown to what seems likely the biggest free-standing  
Chachapoya structure in the world, and just about in the last place I  
would ever expect it," says Muscutt, an assistant dean at the  
University of California-Santa Cruz, who described the site last week  
at the Institute of Andean Studies meeting in Berkeley, Calif.

The structure was nicknamed the "Huaca la Penitenciaria de la  
Meseta" (The Penitentiary) by its discoverers because of its tall  
stone walls. It consists of two rectangular ceremonial platforms on  
one side of a plaza in the middle of a plateau called La Meseta — not  
the mountaintops usually associated with the Chachapoya — about 6,000  
feet above sea level on the eastern side of the Andes. The site,  
likely a town or ceremonial center, has been covered for centuries by  
forest.

"Extraordinary, a real head-scratcher, so enormous and isolated, it  
doesn't compare to anything else," says archaeologist Warren Church  
of Columbus (Ga.) State University. "The structure is mystifying,  
rather austere and blocky, unusual for the Chachapoya."

Broadly rectangular, the largest platform is 24 feet high, 200 feet  
long and 100 feet wide. Atop it are the remains of small homes or  
ceremonial buildings. A second building, 30 by 60 feet, abuts the  
main one, holding the apparent remains of a lookout tower.

Below, a plaza, about 200 feet wide and 300 feet long, rests on 12- 
foot-high walls. Marked by a distinctive Chachapoya frieze, smooth  
stones sandwiching rocks zigzagged in traditional Chachapoya fashion,  
the site was measured by Muscutt in August, but no other exploratory  
work has been done. Muscutt has registered its location with Peruvian  
authorities, he says, who will control any archaeological work on the  
site.

The Chachapoya, one of South America's little-known pre-Columbian  
civilizations, ruled northeastern Peru's Andean mountaintops until  
their conquest by the Inca around 1475. Spanish conquest of Peru in  
the 1500s wiped out the rest of their civilization. The high forests  
surrounding their homeland differ from the Amazonian rainforests most  
often associated with South America, Muscutt says, but offer equally  
impassable and difficult terrain.

The find upsets conventional thinking about the ancient Chachapoya  
kingdom, Church says, suggesting its mountain people had more  
extensive links to the Amazonian lowlands than previously supposed.  
The structure was likely last used at least five centuries ago, he  
suggests, when the region was heavily depopulated by the Inca and  
Spanish conquests.

One smaller, squared-off Chachapoya structure exists at a mountain  
site called Pirca Pirca. Honeycombed with rooms, that site has been  
extensively looted. Muscutt says the new site is too overgrown to  
tell if any inner chambers exist.

Muscutt is working with The Discovery Channel to plan an  
archaeological investigation of the ruin, which will require a large  
team due to its size. The site will be featured in a Discovery  
Channel documentary series, Chasing Mummies, planned for next year.

Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-01-16- 
peru-ruin_x.htm



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