Science / Medicine : Treasure of the Andes : Peru Tomb Contains Gold--and a Wealth of Knowledge About Skilled Artisans of the Past

In an ancient tomb at the bottom of a deep shaft, Izumi Shimada has uncovered gold that looters failed to find. Finely tooled ornaments, recently exposed, peek out from the compacted dust of 10 centuries and gleam like sunshine breaking through clouds.

This cache was left by a little-known pre-Inca society called Sican or Lambayeque. So richly endowed were its burial sites near Batan Grande, in northern Peru, that the weight of Sican gold in today’s collections and museums probably adds up to tons.

“In quantities of gold objects, there is nothing that matches it in all of South America, or perhaps in the Western Hemisphere,” Shimada said. But because most Sican artifacts were dug up by looters, whose plundering sheds little archeological light, knowledge of the society’s characteristics and accomplishments has been murky.

That is changing, however, with the work of Shimada, a Japanese archeologist with Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, who has spent 13 years investigating the Sicans. His pioneering work has uncovered evidence of a complex and important society with astonishing skill in metallurgy and obsessive devotion to one fearsome deity.

Shimada’s project at Batan Grande, recently shown to American journalists for the first time, is an example of how painstaking research is revealing the vast cultural and technological wealth of Andean societies that flourished long before the Inca empire.

Another major project is expanding scientific knowledge of the great Tiwanaku empire, centered near the Bolivia-Peru border on Lake Titicaca. In northern Peru, Christopher B. Donnan of UCLA and Walter Alva of Peru’s Bruning Archeological Museum have found revealing remnants of the Moche culture, which preceded the Sican here.

Over the centuries, the shifting constellation of Andean cultures produced much of the hemisphere’s best pre-Columbian agricultural technology, architecture and stonework, metallurgy and metalwork, pottery and weaving. Many archeologists say the Incas, with their famous and far-reaching organizational skills, succeeded mainly in consolidating rather than surpassing the achievements of the cultures they succeeded.

Sican metallurgy is a case in point. Although the Incas made bronze from copper and tin, they did not change to the Sican method of mixing copper and arsenic after they conquered the Batan Grande area.

Shimada said the Sicans produced bronze for domestic use and export on “practically an industrial scale, with probably hundreds of smelters. There is no place I know of in the entire New World where you find in greater frequency the remains of metallurgical activities.”

Among the remains is charcoal used in smelting. The small size of the charcoal pieces, Shimada said, indicates that the Sicans burned fallen branches from the scraggly, tiny-leaved algarrobo trees of the area rather than cutting the trees down. An algarrobo forest still covering much of the area was recently set aside as an ecological preserve.

The Sicans cast bronze tools and agricultural implements. They made sheet metal, Shimada said, “and not just a small amount, but large amounts and consistent. This metal, even by modern high standards, is well done.”

For decoration, they plated bronze sheets with a thin veneer of gold or silver. “We don’t know for sure how the plating was done,” he said. Modern metallurgists have tried unsuccessfully to reproduce the process.

As he spoke, Shimada, 43, stood by the gaping mouth of a shaft dug 35 feet into the earth. At the bottom, workers meticulously cleaned loose dirt from the tomb’s various parts. An eye-catching glitter of gold came from within the outline of an ancient box in the far corner.

“What we have is a cache of head ornaments, including four crowns,” Shimada said. Near the gold were the bones of a young Sican in a sitting position, perhaps a sacrifice victim left as a guard.

The walls at the bottom of the shaft showed seven sealed entrances to what Shimada said were burial chambers for members of the Sican elite. Based on information gathered from veteran looters of other tombs, he said, more gold will be found in at least one of the chambers when it is opened.

It isn’t the gold, however, that excites Shimada the most. This is the first shaft tomb of an elite Sican ever excavated by archeologists, and he expects it to yield a treasure of new information about the culture as well as more samples of its best art.

So far, work at different sites of Sican culture has indicated a complex society. “I think we are looking at at least four different social levels,” Shimada said.

Social stratification is indicated by amounts and quality of funerary goods in different burial sites. Some tombs were relatively simple, some were elaborately embellished with pottery and bronze objects, and others contained large amounts of gold, evidently a symbol of status. A gold burial mask in the likeness of the Sican lord may have meant that an elite personage “was seen as the personified Sican diety,” Shimada said.

The amount of labor required for some huge burial monuments, and the sacrificed bodies within them, also show social differentiation--unskilled workers, artisans, sacrificial victims and powerful rulers.

The ruins of a dozen Sican pyramids, three of which were once about 140 feet high, along with lower ones, are scattered through a T-shaped area that measures about a mile by five-eighths of a mile. Archeologists have found evidence that the pyramids were topped by ceremonial structures of painted walls, wood columns and roofs. Boxes with the bodies of sacrifice victims have been found at the bases of the columns.

A big pyramid about half a mile away had 350 columns on top, and Shimada said sample excavations have shown a sacrificial victim at the base of each one. “Most of them were women,” he said.

The area was more than a huge burial site. It was the “Vatican” of a religious state that dominated much of northern Peru and traded as far north as Colombia, according to Shimada and Carlos Elera, the Peruvian co-director of the Sican archeological project. “The cultural nucleus, the axis, is in this zone,” Elera said.

No Sican art or artifacts have been found to indicate a military apparatus, so Shimada and Elera speculate that Sican power was based on profitable trade and compelling religious beliefs. Images of the so-called “Sican lord” show a fierce-looking deity with upward-slanting almond eyes, square or pointed ears, a protruding nose and a solemn mouth that reveals jagged teeth when open.

At another excavation site, Elera and Shimada recently found a portrait of the Sican lord holding up a decapitated head.

The Sicans repeated their lord’s image with monotonous profusion in their metalwork, pottery and painting. “It is somewhat obsessive,” Elera said.

A gold tumi, or round-bladed ceremonial knife with the Sican lord on the handle, has become a famous symbol of pre-Columbian culture in Peru since it was found by looters decades ago.

Beginning in Spanish colonial times, looters have pocked the grounds around the pyramids with countless holes in search of Sican gold. Since he first came to the area in 1978, Shimada has counted more than 100,000 looters’ pits. Some were dug with bulldozers or tractors by members of a ranching family named Aurich that owned the land until a national agrarian reform took effect in 1968.

Much of the gold found by the Auriches before they lost the hacienda ended up in private collections, including Lima’s famous Gold Museum. Shimada estimates that up to 90% of the pre-Columbian gold in the museum consists of Sican artifacts--burial masks, breastplates, cups, necklaces, and other ornaments.

Alva said the Sican shaft was opened in 1973 by workers in the employ of three investors from the town of Lambayeque. Looters had removed dirt from the shaft to a depth of about 30 feet but were having trouble reaching the tomb because ground water filled the hole. Police chased them off before they could bring in pumps, Alva said.

Then came Shimada, with his doctorate in archeology from the University of Arizona and his deep interest in pre-Incan culture. Shimada had taught at Princeton and Harvard, as had his father.

Since 1978, he has spent an average of six months a year in Peru, living in the town of Batan Grande and maintaining close relations with local people. Those relations have helped quash inevitable allegations that foreigners are spiriting away fortunes in gold.

“It’s a very conscious effort to show we have nothing to hide,” Shimada said. “We live in the middle of the village, and everybody can see what we bring in and take out.”