Huaca Pucllana ***

Somehow you don’t expect to find a huge pre-Inca adobe pyramid mound in the middle of a city. I don’t know why it seems odd. Of course the most desirable sites are used by one culture or group of people and later, after they’re gone, that same site is still seen as desirable by a future group of people. So of course they build there. And they grow and build a city. And they don’t care about the earlier people, so they just destroy the earlier buildings – or build on top of them. Hundreds of years later, while leveling the land for yet another culture’s building expansion, things are found from the first one. Broken pottery. Bones. Pieces of broken tools. What will they find when they unearth pieces of our culture hundreds of years from now? Plastic Coca-Cola bottles? Microwaves? Laptop computers?
We walk the ten blocks from Parque Central to the site. It strikes me as a beautiful place – all brown adobe bricks. The people now referred to as the Lima people built the pyramid in the 5th century AD, and abandoned it in the 7th. It was later used by the Wari culture. We don’t learn a whole lot of history today, but we do learn that these people clearly knew something about building design, building their structures with the adobe bricks stacked vertically, looking like giant bookcases, to better withstand seismic disturbances. We also learn that they made human sacrifices, but always sacrificed only young women, and very important ones at that. So clearly it would have been a good idea not to be very important. When the leader died, the pyramid was filled in and another built on top of it, so that it became successively higher. After these early cultures disappeared, the area was pretty much built over and forgotten until twenty or thirty years ago, when an agreement between Miraflores and the National Cultural Institute enabled research, conservation and restoration to begin.

*** A “huaca” is a burial mound. Pucllana is the Quechua name used for the site in the 16th century.