COLUMN ONE : All Hands Reach for Treasure : In its battle to stem the outflow of artifacts, Peru wrestles with conflicting pressures from museums, collectors and an ancient tradition of looting.

In 1602, Spanish settlers diverted the Moche River to make the waters eat away an ancient adobe pyramid and bare its riches. They found stunning treasures from an earlier Indian empire and, as was common practice, melted down the artifacts for the gold.

In the 1960s, after three decades of pick-and-shovel looting in hundreds of thousands of graves in the Batan Grande burial ground, labor-intensive techniques gave way to mechanized robbery. Hacienda owners brought in bulldozers to move the earth and get at the gold. The objects nurtured private collections and museums in Peru and abroad.

One night in mid-September, armed looters tried to raid an archeological site in the village of Sipan that has yielded probably the most extraordinary tomb ever discovered intact in the Americas. A gun battle broke out as guards drove off the attackers from the Moche Kingdom burial mound.

That was a rare victory in a region of uncounted, unguarded pyramids and graveyards covering a 200-mile stretch of desert coast in northern Peru. More typical was the scene a few hundred yards from the Sipan excavation on a recent Sunday afternoon: Grave robbers, unmolested, were digging yet another pit in a time-worn cemetery that fills the floor of a mystical valley.

As the worldwide market for pre-Columbian artifacts surged in the 1950s, questions arose over the moral aspects of the trade, especially the looting that it prompts and the resulting havoc at archeological sites. The terms used suggest the tenor of the dispute: Archeologists excavate, grave robbers dig.

The spectacular discovery here, announced a year ago, and an intricate controversy engulfing it, have brought the issue of commerce in Peru’s cultural heritage into international focus. After spreading beyond Peru’s borders to a federal court in Los Angeles, the dispute is likely to prompt an emergency ruling by President Bush before the year ends, banning the import of the looted riches of the Moche Kingdom.

But this is no black-and-white case of saving the artifacts of 3,000 years of successive civilizations from greedy predators. At issue are the traditions of looting, the economic motives behind it, the legacy of corruption and neglect in Peru and the often conflicting interests of archeologists, museums, collectors and dealers, honorable and otherwise. At bottom, it is a wrenching debate over how nations where ancient civilizations once flourished can best explore and preserve their past.

In September, 1988, the National Geographic Society sponsored a news conference in Washington to disclose the discovery of the tomb of “the Lord of Sipan.” Peruvian archeologist Walter Alva had found an exquisite grave of a leader of the Moche, a pre-Incan people who dominated the river valleys along the coast from about AD 100 to 700.

In the continuing excavation funded by National Geographic, Alva and his assistant, Luis Chero, in July found yet another intact tomb in the same burial mound, a rectangular lump of adobe bricks in the shadow of a pyramid, both pockmarked from years of prospecting.

Workers are painstakingly removing the layers of oxidized copper objects that cover the corpse, dubbed Spiderman. While the find appears less dramatic than the Lord of Sipan’s tomb, Alva has already extracted a magnificent gold necklace made of spiders with human faces on their backs, poised on spiraling webs spun from thin gold filament stretched over palm-sized gold bowls.

Yet Alva is working the site only because looters found it first, in startling fashion. Funded by a local family, a team of grave robbers dug with skill and caution for two months in late 1986, and found what actually may have been the richest tomb in the burial mound. A substantial number of objects were sold, then police arrested several people and shot one fatally in a confused confrontation that still festers in the village.

Some of the best looted pieces are on display in a private collection in Lima, which infuriates Alva. Others were allegedly smuggled to Europe. Some made their way back from Europe to Los Angeles, where a few were seized by U.S. Customs, thanks to an informer and wire-taps. But many items have vanished into the clandestine world of illegal trading in pre-Columbian art.

Learning of the looters’ find, Alva came from the nearby town of Lambayeque, where he is director of an archeological museum called the Bruning, to investigate. He slept at the burial mound at night, armed, and chased away scavengers as the work proceeded.

Four-man police units armed with machine pistols now guard the site. Out of the thousands of huacas, or ruins, of sacred places from Moche and other kingdoms along the coast, Sipan is one of a handful that is protected from the huaqueros (looters). As the recent raid demonstrated, even the police guard could not deter an armed attack.

In the abject village of Sipan that abuts the burial mound known as Huaca Rajada, many of the several hundred families are bitter. These descendants of the civilization that built the tomb complain that they are now denied a piece of the action.

“Dr. Alva didn’t find that tomb, the huaqueros found it,” said Ismael Piedra Effeo, a 30-year-old sometime handicrafts seller, artifacts buyer and Sunday huaquero himself. “They may have titles as archeologists, but we know more in practice. We know early Chavin from classical Chavin artifacts, we know Moche I from Moche III and Moche V (phases). This is our own culture.”

He mused about the site’s lore: “They say the man who found it dreamed that the huaca was there. There had been a light over the huaca, and people heard a band playing music there at night. Years ago a girl went mad there. She was 13. She died a while later. She said the spirits were calling her.”

Emilio Bernal, 36, whose brother was killed by police over the loot, and three of whose family members were convicted in the case, scoffed: “Alva the great discover! He sits behind a desk and waits for people to find things and have them fall on his desk.”

Alva, a jovial, bearded man who is from the region and has devoted more than a decade to digs and to the Bruning Museum, has in fact made a number of finds of his own, but he acknowledges that such comments reflect the tensions.

“There is an economic crisis. We have vague laws. The traffickers go free. People say, ‘Alva is the biggest huaquero.’ “

Nevertheless, he claimed progress in getting residents to understand that the archeologists seek not treasure but information--how the Moche lived, what they believed, how they worshiped, why they disappeared.

“Ten years ago, we were lucky if we had two visitors each afternoon (at the Bruning Museum); it was a big event. The staff would come to me and say, ‘People are here!’ ” he recalled in his office. Raising his arm toward the now-crowded display rooms, rebuilt a few years back, he added, “There is an awakening now of awareness in the region.”

Yet the sackings have increased in the area since the Sipan find, and “we have the absurd situation where 600 meters (656 yards) from our site, people are looting while we are excavating. We go out with the police, but the next day they are back. There is almost a tacit agreement that we are letting people sack some of the richest archeological lodes in America.”

Indeed, the loot is abundant, or appears to be. In the old central market in Chiclayo, stalls offer an array of pre-Incan artifacts, most of them obvious copies, alongside the herbs used in faith-healing ceremonies that have survived from ancient times.

One dealer spied a browser surveying the pots and copper-work and murmured, “I also have genuine items.” Inviting the visitor behind the counter, he opened a drawer and brought out several handsome pots. An archeologist pointed out that most of those, too, were fake, but several were real.

The huaqueros range from poor villagers on weekends--and especially Easter Weekend when they believe the souls leave the cemeteries--to well-financed criminal teams.

“The huaqueros wage a saturation war. It’s like dropping 20 bombs to kill a single enemy,” Alva said. “The huaquero tries 100 times, and hits one tomb, but over time that is effective.”

The long-term solution, he said, is similar to that in Peru’s anti-drug war: reduce demand, both in the capital, Lima, and overseas.

“The moment that people stop buying, the occasional huaqueros will stop. The few professionals will continue. They have capital, they can afford to go a long time without finding anything.”

The hard-liners among archeologists reject any suggestion that they work with the huaqueros rather than fight them. They argue that the goal must not be merely to find the ceramics and gold objects but to learn where they came from and to investigate every aspect of the site, even the refuse, to discover who the people were and how they lived.

While the painted and sculpted pottery and jewelry of the Moche leave a rich record, the people had no writing system to offer details about their beliefs and practices. Given the ravages of the looting and the Moches’ mysterious disappearance 1,300 years ago, they are lesser known than the later Incas, although greater artists by far.

If the government encouraged looting by offering to buy rather than seize artifacts, many archeologists say, there would be a flood of loot but no knowledge of where it came from and its context.

Increasingly, though, some archeologists wonder whether it is time to face the reality of the huaqueros and even exploit their skills. The huaqueros themselves, and their local middlemen, certainly endorse that view.

Eduardo Garcia Cacho, a 69-year-old father of 17 in the nearby town of Zana, has dealt in looted objects since the 1950s. He displayed to an American visitor an array of his recent purchases, including bowls, pots, necklaces and beads, and allowed that they could be obtained for the right price.

“I would be the first to sell to the government if it was possible, to avoid the flight of these things from Peru,” he said. “We don’t do this to get rich, but to get by. The amount of sacking depends on the economy. If there is work, nobody is looting.”

James Vreeland, an American anthropologist who runs a travel agency offering archeology tours of the area, said much of the looting is a way of adapting to Peru’s growing economic stress.

“The contemporary inheritors of this culture see the huacas as a bank account left by their ancestors, to be drawn on in times of need,” he said. “The same is true for the collectors, who see their gold as a security deposit for the future.”

Vreeland, from the district’s provincial capital, Chiclayo, said that only in the 1950s did the value of the objects themselves begin to exceed that of their often minimal gold content. Then the looting really boomed.

“Everybody loots; it’s part of Peruvian cultural tradition,” he said. “We see it as a scourge, but there is no force of order out there to fall back on. The solution? That the huaqueros become the first line of defense in protecting the sites, that they become involved in the process with the archeologists.”

Johan Reinhard, a veteran American anthropologist in Latin America, cited one major obstacle: “Money. There’s no money for the archeologists, for buying objects, for controlling the sites.”

He tells of a friend in Nazca, south of Lima, who raced to police to advise of looters, only to be told: “You pay for our gasoline, and we’ll go after them.”

The archeologists and government officials tend to save their loudest complaints for the dealers and collectors in Lima and especially overseas. But here, too, there are complicating subtleties.

Enrico Poli, an eloquent collector, lives in a unprepossessing house in a Lima suburb. But when he opens the door to a visitor for a $50 tour, a startling world of pre-Columbian and colonial art beckons. Poli’s collection is arguably among the finest anywhere.

Before Alva even learned of the looting at Sipan, Poli says, he had bought about 200 objects from the first scavenged tomb. Poli insists the looters found by far the richest lode and that Alva’s Lord of Sipan is a poor cousin. Poli recalls the huaqueros’ description: “The gold came up to their knees.” They carried it away by the sackful.

Poli was allowed to register his Sipan pieces with the National Institute of Culture, to the puzzlement of many, since legitimate acquisition is normally a requirement. The registration prevents him from selling the items but lets him possess them.

The registry was designed as the guardian of cultural assets. But it is infamously disorganized, and the institute itself is scorned for doing little to prevent grave-robbing, illegal at least since 1929.

Poli and other dealers fret about government suggestions that all private pre-Columbian collections might be nationalized. He worries, too, that his Sipan works will be seized, and may try to hide them.

Government prosecutor Julio Ubilluz, responsible for handling the 400 or so cases involving grave-robbing and smuggling, said Poli is under investigation for the Sipan items, even though the cultural institute has registered them.

Ubilluz said the government believes another set of Sipan gold objects is floating around Lima, hidden for fear of seizure.

A proposed law that would consolidate and simplify the rules on pre-conquest patrimony has been debated for four years. Peru has had 251 laws and rules affecting these objects, Ubilluz said. A judge in Los Angeles ruled against a Peruvian attempt to reclaim some objects in part because of the law’s vagueness, even while expressing sympathy for Peru’s plight.

Aside from the legal disarray, Peru’s government has been criticized for failing to act aggressively while expecting foreign governments to crack down on trafficking. Only last June, more than two years after the Sipan looting, did the government formally request the United States to impose an emergency order, under a 1983 U.S. law, that would restrict imports of Sipan or all Moche artifacts. A commission is studying the request, and President Bush is expected to approve it in November. That would reduce the burden on Peru to prove if and when the works were stolen.

Ubilluz said control is improving, and the government also is attempting to raise awareness of the problem. New high school textbooks this year include a chapter on Peru’s archeological treasures and the need to preserve them.

“What is in the hands of the collectors is tiny compared to what is still in the ground,” he said. “We are more concerned with that.”

But after touring the northern coastal districts, where virtually no site appears undisturbed, it is hard to accept that 450 years of non-stop looting has left many tombs untouched.

Alva said that the best stolen items remain for only a few hours before moving to foreign markets.

Given that exodus, Poli contends: “You shouldn’t shout at the person who is keeping this art in Peru. I didn’t smuggle it. . . . I prefer to keep in the country what otherwise would flee. If it weren’t for me, where would the masks and the golden peanut shells be? In Boston? Vancouver?”

Instead, the string of gold peanut-shell beads, a ruler’s scepter and other treasure from Sipan are lovingly displayed in a vault-like annex that he has constructed in his back garden. Poli said he might give them to the national museum. Meanwhile, he notes with a smile that a tourist recently called him “the living Lord of Sipan.”