The Cursed Valley of the Pyramids Lost Cities of the Ancients

They were among the last great pyramid builders on the planet...

..one of history's most mysterious civilisations.

In an isolated valley in the Andes,

the Lambayeque people were gripped by an obsession to build pyramids.

But that obsession turned to horror.

The city descended into violence and bloodletting...

..and then the whole civilisation vanished off the face of the Earth.

Only recently has the evidence come to light

to explain what brought this great civilisation to an abrupt end...

..and to explain the fear that drove these people into oblivion.

In the foothills of the Andes in northern Peru there's a remote valley.

It's a place still haunted by its past.

Long ago the people who lived in the Lambayeque valley came to believe

that building pyramids was essential to their survival.

They built 250 pyramids,

one of the most impressive feats of engineering in the ancient world.

A vast valley of monuments that dominated the landscape.

But one day something terrible happened here,

and the civilisation disappeared along with all 250 pyramids.

And they were lost to the outside world for centuries.

The outside world finally did learn about them through the work of one man,

who arrived in this valley unaware that he'd entered a lost world.

Hans Bruning was one of history's accidental explorers.

He was an engineer from Germany who'd come here to work with machines for processing sugar cane.

They are precision machines.

-Herr Bruning?

-Yes.

-They need you in the workshop.

Ah, thank you, Carlos. Excuse me one moment.

Never in his wildest dreams did he think he'd stumble across a lost civilisation,

yet the hunt for this lost world would take over his life.

At the time, treasures from the lost world were regularly being dug up

and melted down in local workshops across the valley.

If you are interested, he can give you a good price on the gold.

For that one -

20 livres.

Silver is cheaper.

When that is melted down, 100 livres.

Tell him...tell him I will give him 200 livres not to melt it down.

Tell him!

Bruning witnessed kilos of gold and silver artefacts

being melted down for cash and lost to history forever.

Bruning decided to rescue these unique objects from obliteration.

He set off from the sugar plantation on a journey in search of the origin of the artefacts.

He gave up his life as an engineer for that of an archaeologist and explorer.

His travels took him through the Lambayeque valley,

from the Pacific coast to the foothills of the Andes.

He passed through a strange and eerie landscape.

The lost civilisation was all around him.

He just couldn't see it.

And it was on this journey that he was shown the secret of the valley.

My god.

Bricks.

Yeah.

The whole mountain.

So this...mountain...

was once a pyramid.

Every mound he had passed was the remains of a pyramid built out of bricks.

Over hundreds of years, they'd become heavily eroded...

then vanished back into the landscape,

turning into a series of hills.

He began to assemble a museum full of archaeological objects from this lost civilisation.

And his hundreds of photographs brought this valley of pyramids

to the attention of the outside world.

Eventually his journey would take him towards the most

impressive group of pyramids this civilisation ever built.

There's a town here called El Purgatorio.

Purgatory.

What's there?

At El Purgatorio there is a mountain.

Dangerous spirits live there.

They are very, very powerful.

No, they can kill a man.

The people there say it is the entrance to Hell.

-Do you believe this?

-They believe a lot of things.

It is just a name.

Bruning ignored the legend, heading for Purgatorio and the collection of pyramids today known as Tucume.

There was a line separating the city from the rest of the valley which locals feared to cross.

You can take your pictures from here.

Senor Bruning!

Bruning discovered a city of pyramids like nowhere else in the world.

He counted 26 in all, ruins, towering above the landscape.

This was the last pyramid city built by this mysterious civilisation.

The city of pyramids was shunned by local people,

though still used by witch doctors for strange ceremonies.

But Bruning had no way of knowing the horrific rituals

that had once taken place here in ancient times.

Hans Bruning devoted the rest of his life to studying the valley and its people.

But he died without learning why they built so many pyramids here

and what had happened at Tucume to cause this civilisation to vanish.

That task would fall to others.

A hundred years on, and an international team of scientists brought

the power of modern archaeology to solve the mysteries Bruning had been unable to tackle.

Field archaeologists, climate scientists and experts in forensics all became involved.

Their quest was to find out who these people were,

what drove them to build so many pyramids,

and what had happened at Tucume to cause this civilisation to vanish.

Archaeologists have carefully mapped

the pyramids in the Lambayeque Valley.

There are so many of them here, they outstrip most other pyramid building cultures.

This is the Valley Of The Pyramids.

This whole place is full of pyramids.

You look here. Here we are in Tucume, but look at all these black dots.

Every one of these is a pyramid.

There are about 250 pyramids in this valley.

I don't know anywhere else that's got anything like this concentration of pyramids. This is the pyramid place.

Across the valley, three great pyramid cities stood out.

Start with Pampa Grande up the valley.

There's only one pyramid there, but it's huge.

It's over 50 metres high and 200 metres wide.

Then we move to Batan Grande with over half a dozen.

And then we come to Tucume with 26, which is unheard of.

There's no other place anywhere in South America that has 26 pyramids in it.

There've been pyramids before, but one or two or three.

But Batan Grande, you've got, oh, over half a dozen pyramids,

large ones, and then they move to Tucume and it just goes crazy.

The people who went pyramid crazy had no writing.

No-one even knows what they called themselves, so they've been named

after the valley they lived in - the Lambayeque.

They flourished here around 700 AD.

They were the last descendants of a culture in northern Peru

who'd been building pyramids for thousands of years.

But the Lambayeque took pyramid building to the level of an obsession.

But what were these pyramids for, and why had the Lambayeque been driven to build so many?

Every culture that built pyramids did it for a very specific purpose.

A purpose that takes us to the heart of everything they believed in.

Over a dozen civilisations built pyramids,

but none of them looked quite like those of the Lambayeque.

You think about pyramids and probably the first thing that comes to mind would be the Egyptian pyramids,

these huge pointy tombs that were built to house a particular dead ruler.

One purpose, one time, that was it.

When you think of Aztec pyramids,

which were built for temples, Mayan ones as well, sometimes they may have had a tomb inside,

but mainly they were the seat for particular rituals.

At Tucume, the design of the pyramids was different from elsewhere in the world.

There are 26 pyramids of wildly different sizes,

all built around an imposing central mountain.

The site is vast, almost a square mile in size.

But one building stands out - a giant rectangular platform built into the side of the mountain.

We have what was arguably the world's largest pyramid ever,

sitting in the middle of the site.

It is 700 metres long and more than 20 metres high.

The space on top is the size of seven football pitches.

The pyramids are all solid structures, without rooms inside.

They have the tops cut off to create a series of huge open spaces.

And there was no evidence that they were built to be tombs or temples.

This is very different from other pyramids in the world.

There was only one way to the top, via a ramp.

This one was 120 metres long and built with rooms to control access halfway up it.

The route to the top then went through a complex maze of closed doorways and passages.

The layout of these pyramids was quite unlike

those built by the other great pyramid-building civilisations.

It's clear that pyramids were of such central importance

to this society that they were prepared to commit all their resources to building them.

Slowly, methodically, thousands of people must have toiled all their lives on these buildings.

The bricks are made from mud, baked dry in the sun.

The scale is dazzling.

It was like a military operation.

Every brick had a mark showing which factory it came from,

and the valley was crammed with hundreds of brick factories,

each one with its own recognisable mark.

Take a look at some of the marks. You can see footprint marks...

Spirals...

T shapes... Now, remember they didn't actually have an alphabet.

They didn't have a writing system.

Nevertheless they did have symbols that meant something.

And in total these are over 80 marks and they came out of a single segment of wall

in one small part of the site, so there would have been many more marks throughout the entire site.

Something clearly drove the Lambayeque to create a production line for pyramids.

Carbon dating shows that the first pyramid at Tucume was built around 1100 AD,

and for 400 years they built more pyramids and added extensions to the ones they already had.

An ancient architect's model found at the site

shows the pyramids were built according to a strict master plan.

It would have taken 2,000 people a year just to make the bricks for this one pyramid.

It would have taken another army of people to build the pyramid itself,

hundreds more to grow and cook food for the workers.

So it would have taken thousands several years to complete one pyramid.

And there were 25 others at Tucume, and another 200 across the valley.

So building pyramids must have become an all-consuming task for the people of the Lambayeque Valley.

The pyramids must have satisfied some overwhelming need.

Whatever that was, it had to be in some way connected to how these pyramids were used.

And on top of the pyramid there are clues.

Here a complex of rooms has been unearthed, some richly decorated.

Just outside these rooms, archaeologists found mounds and mounds of food remains.

This isn't usually found on top of pyramids.

Among the remains there were the bones of llamas and large fish -

the food of the wealthy.

TRANSLATION: We found a very important area because it was a space for many kitchens.

In this place we found formal ovens with a lot of charcoal, a lot of rubbish like seeds and animal bones

and fragments of cooking pots - all with evidence of cooking.

As they dug further down, they found so many layers of rich food

that generations of wealthy people must have lived and eaten here on the pyramid.

These facts confirm that people lived in this building

for long periods of time, and not just temporarily during ceremonial occasions.

And then on top of the pyramid they discovered the remains of

a 35-year-old man who they believed had once lived here.

He was found with the jewellery and the feather headdress he once wore.

The richness of these finds meant this was a member of the governing elite.

TRANSLATION: We found very clear evidence of the status and hierarchy this person had.

So there is no doubt that the pyramids at Tucume served as places of residence,

like a palace for the lords who governed the whole area.

So at Tucume it seems generations of lords had moved in

to live on top of the pyramids.

As with all rulers in the Andes, these lords must have been treated as semi-gods.

These were men who claimed to have magical powers to control the world.

Tucume was a truly bizarre city of 26 lords living on 26 pyramids.

Archaeologists believe the likely explanation

is the lords on these pyramids were rulers from across this valley.

Something about this one place drew them all here to build their pyramid palaces side by side.

If you look around all the pyramids at Tucume,

each one of them would have had some kind of lord living on top.

Perhaps the more powerful lords on the bigger pyramids like this one,

perhaps the less powerful lords on smaller ones.

But there are 26 pyramids here - that's a lot of lords.

And this is how the lords lived on top of their palace pyramids.

To get to the top you had to climb a series of ramps.

At the centre of the pyramid on a raised mount

were the rooms where the lord lived and met with priests and courtiers.

Behind it were his vast kitchens.

Llama and fish were favourites on the menu.

Nearby have been found the remains of rows of workshops and store rooms.

This must have been a place of constant noise and activity.

But the front of the pyramid served a very different function.

The vast open space was reserved for huge public ceremonies.

So why did 26 lords choose to live crowded together on 26 pyramids in one city?

One clue seemed to be the mountain at the centre of Tucume.

TRANSLATION: The mountains in ancient Peru and today

constitute very special centres of religious and magical power.

We know from later travellers to Peru that people here

in ancient times believed the gods spoke through the forces of nature.

Thunder was a voice of a god. So was lightning.

But the truly powerful gods lived in the mountains.

When they were angry, they could unleash terror on the population.

They also controlled life and death by bringing water from the Andes.

Without this water, the valley would be a desert.

Scientists believe that when the Lambayeque built a pyramid they were

building a replica mountain with the same supernatural power they hoped could control the forces of nature.

If you look back here you can see the mountain, the centre of the site of Tucume.

Mountains in the Andes are power, they're seats of the lords of the supernatural, the gods of the Andes.

And the pyramids are little mountains. They capture that power.

This is the power to protect.

So this was the logic of the valley.

The people would toil to build pyramids they believed had the magical power of mountains.

And just as the gods lived on the mountains, the lords would live on

top of these pyramids to protect the people from what they most feared.

But what was it in this valley they were so afraid of?

And why did they need so many pyramids to protect themselves?

Archaelogists believe they may have discovered the answer

in the ruins of the three great cities in the valley.

The carbon dates from the cities showed something surprising.

These three cities hadn't existed at the same time, each one was only

built after the previous city was, for some reason, abandoned.

Pampa Grande had been built first.

Then a few hundred years later, suddenly abandoned.

Immediately after this they built Batan Grande.

And then that had suddenly been abandoned.

Finally, enormous effort had gone into building the vast city of Tucume.

And it too was abandoned.

That was the end of this civilisation.

There were strange things linking the abandonment of all these cities.

Just before each city was deserted,

the very tops of the pyramids had been set on fire.

The evidence for this is clear in all three cities.

Here in the palace on the main pyramid at Tucume

there was a two-metre thick reddened layer caused by the fire.

TRANSLATION: The colour of the walls that we can see here is the product of a very intense fire,

a fire that was so strong that it not only burnt the outer surface of the wall but it melted the stones.

This fire was so intense it would have been visible for miles.

There's no evidence of battles or invasions to suggest these fires were lit by an attacking army.

Instead, it looks like the people of the pyramids had, for some reason, done it themselves.

So they spend a hundred years building this really big site,

this really important site, and then, boom, it's abandoned.

That's it. They burn the top of the pyramid, they go away and they never come back.

To wilfully destroy what the whole community had toiled so hard to build seems unfathomable.

But if you understand the logic of the valley it begins to make a sinister kind of sense.

Because fire is used throughout northern Peru to purify places

considered touched by evil.

TRANSLATION: Fire is a very important element.

It purifies sites.

It clears away all the bad energy or negative elements that could be present in a place.

And across the region scientists have found evidence

of the supernatural force the ancient people of the valley most feared.

When it struck, it drove them to purify their cities by fire and abandon them forever.

This region has been subject to some of the most extreme climate disasters on the planet -

disasters the lords and the pyramids themselves,

the source of magic and power, were supposed to protect the people from.

Archaeological layers from the city of Batan Grande show it had been hit by a great wall of water.

And the nearby pyramid complex of Moche had been hit by a wave of sand which covered the city.

These disasters of biblical proportions were caused

by the violent climate upheavals known as El Ninos.

They still strike in the region today.

It seems this must have been the supernatural force that the people in the valley so feared,

becuase for the Lambayeque, these climate disasters

could only be understood as the wrath of the angry gods.

So once the gods had struck, the pyramids and the lords who

lived on top of them were shown to have failed to protect the people.

These events keep happening, and they're extreme events.

Rains would have washed away the fields.

People would have had nothing to eat.

There would have been diseases.

It would be a good time to wonder if your lords and your pyramids were doing the right job,

or if it was time to abandon them to find new ones. And indeed that seems to have happened.

This was the obsession that ruled the valley.

When the pyramids failed to protect against catastrophe, it was as if

they were cursed, so they had to be purged by fire and abandoned.

And new ones built to replace them.

It suggests this is why the valley is littered with the ruins of so many abandoned pyramids.

But when it comes to the last pyramid city built in the valley, to Tucume, things are different.

There's no evidence here it was struck by an overwhelming climate catastrophe.

Something else must have happened to cause the people of Tucume

to set fire to their pyramids and for their civilisation to disappear forever.

A dramatic new discovery has recently revealed what may have

happened at Tucume in its final days.

It has allowed archaeologists to recreate the likely course of events that brought about the end

of this great pyramid city and the entire civilisation of the Lambayeque Valley.

It all began when archaeologists first noticed the remains

of a two-laned walled walkway that once led into the city.

The walkway took a series of right-angled turns on its way into Tucume.

Something about it was designed to take visitors past this one spot in the city.

This small unassuming building turned out to be a temple.

This was the ritual heart of Tucume.

At times of crisis, this was where the people came to make offerings to appease the angry gods.

A series of ritual offerings has been found at the temple dig site.

The stone at the centre of the temple represented the mountain and its powerful gods.

In a world without science, this ritual was how the people of Tucume believed

they could control the world.

But in the final days of this civilisation

the temple became the scene for a much darker series of offerings.

In the summer of 2005,

scientists were called in to investigate human bones found outside the temple.

This discovery revealed the sinister turn this civilisation took in its last days.

One specific indicator with this particular skeleton that suggests

that something is not right with this individual is the fact that the body,

the thorax and the upper arms are in a normal position,

but the head is twisted and out of place.

And what we're going to do now is we're going to lift the head up...

The head and the top two neck vertebrae have been severed from the rest of the spinal column.

So what we have here...

is the first cervical vertebrae and this is where the head sits right onto this vertebrae.

And then this vertebrae sits right onto this one.

These are the two that were found still attached to the head,

separated from the rest of the neck and the spinal column.

And when we turn them up like this, what we can notice on the base are very, very clear signs of

cut marks going across this inferior articular facet of this vertebrae.

But when you see cuts

reaching very far back - you can see

this is the space where your spinal column goes - they were cutting all the way through the spinal column,

and in fact they're even cutting into here in the back of the vertebrae.

So they're going all the way through.

This is clear evidence that this head was decapitated.

It was now clear this individual had not died a natural death.

This was ancient homicide.

Altogether 119 bodies were found outside the temple,

including women and children,

most of them decapitated.

All the evidence indicated this was human sacrifice.

It makes Tucume one of the biggest sites of human sacrifice ever found in the ancient Andes.

It seems that human sacrifice is always reserved for a time of greatest need,

when something is going wrong in the world which can't be explained.

And the only way to deal with these problems is to try and appease the gods.

The bodies had been buried in five layers.

Most were in the top, the most recent layer,

dated to the final years and days of Tucume.

The increase in number of human sacrifices in front of the temple

seems to suggest that there must have been something going on that required more sacrifices,

more offerings.

They needed to communicate with the gods in a way in which just a single offering was not enough.

It seems something so terrible had happened towards the end of Tucume that the only way to deal with it

was to offer the gods what was most precious.

The blood of men, women and children as young as five.

It looked like the number of sacrifices had increased towards the end of Tucume.

Archaeologists believe the increase in human sacrifice and the end of the city were connected.

And with this new discovery, archaeologists now believe it's possible to tell the likely story

of the final days of Tucume and how and why this pyramid civilisation vanished.

They believe it all began in 1532, the year the Spanish conquistadores

arrived in Peru, far to the north of the Lambayeque Valley.

These alien men stalking the land, riding strange four-legged beasts,

seemed like the ancestral gods returned to walk the Earth.

So when the news of the Spanish invasion eventually reached

the Lambayeque Valley, it would have created shock and incomprehension.

The conquistadores themselves did not come here and destroy Tucume,

but just the stories of their presence in Peru brought fear.

TRANSLATION: Although they did not directly come to Tucume,

the Spanish were greatly feared

by the people as it was known that they were in the region.

They came with different kinds of animals, like horses, that were not known in the continent.

From artefacts found at the site, it's clear that by the time the Spanish arrived in South America,

the Lambayeque Valley had fallen under the control of the Incas.

The Incas and the Lambayeque shared a belief that the Spanish,

these violent invaders, were a sign of the anger of the gods.

So now the gods must be appeased.

But within a year of the Spanish arrival, truly terrifying news would arrive at Tucume.

The invading Spanish had captured and killed the Inca god-king far away in the highlands.

This news would have set off a riptide of fear at Tucume.

So now the people of the valley had to start offering the gods something more precious -

human beings.

Once the victims had been chosen,

we know in detail from the archaeological evidence and

from the later Spanish chroniclers how the sacrifices would have been

performed outside the temple during the last days of Tucume.

The high priest talked to the sacred stone, to the god of the mountain.

Another priest to the god of thunder.

Another to the god of lightning.

For the sacrifice to work, it had to follow a strict ritual.

The elite Lambayeque lords and the Inca governor gathered around the temple.

The high priest blew coloured powders over the stone.

This is exactly what archaeologists found there.

By putting on a mask, the high priest would have shown he had assumed the role of a god.

The killing was soon to begin.

The 119 skeletons themselves give us a detailed description

of what it would have been like to be ritually executed outside the temple.

When you think of the violent way in which these individuals were killed,

it'd be natural to assume or to guess that they must have struggled or resisted.

However, when I look at the skeleton, I really don't find evidence of struggle.

First of all, there's no signs of peri-mortem trauma

that would indicate in any way that they had been, for example,

subdued by being hit or beaten.

Secondly, the cut marks across the throat and neck region are smooth single slices and there doesn't seem

to be any evidence of chatter marks, where the knife would skip along and bounce along the bone as though

an individual were struggling and the bone was missing its mark. And finally,

the arms were often gently placed by their sides or crossing the bodies, not tightly fixed together.

Nor was there any evidence of any ropes or ligatures.

There was no need to tie these victims up, as they'd been drugged with a seed called amala.

These amala seeds were found outside the temple.

They contain a drug that paralyses the body but leaves the victim conscious,

able to understand everything that's happening to them.

TRANSLATION: We can therefore come to a simple conclusion, and this is the current hypothesis,

that the people who were taken to be sacrificed in front of the temple

didn't put up any resistance to their death

because they had previously consumed a large quantity of amala.

It must have been a terrible fate.

To be aware of impending death but powerless to resist.

Now the sacrifice victim would have been brought to the temple.

He would already have been given the drug amala,

so every muscle in his body was paralysed.

He could neither struggle nor run,

yet he remained aware of what was about to happen to him.

Exactly what happened next is revealed by the skeletons themselves.

Of the 119 individuals that we recovered.

from this small area, almost 90% of them show cut marks in the area of the throat and neck region.

These patterns are very consistent across the group, suggesting that it was almost a systematic execution.

In each skeleton, the same pattern had been repeated.

And from the cut marks, scientists can piece together exactly how these people were sacrificed...

blow by blow.

Based on the patterns of the cut marks, their location as well as the angle at which the bone is being

struck by the knife, this suggests that most likely the individual was cut in an upward motion.

Now, based on the location of the cuts across the front of the throat,

there would be a great deal of blood generated from these initial cuts.

So it's not likely that the sacrificer would be in front,

because they would probably be covered with blood.

Looking at the cut marks, it suggests more likely that the

sacrificer was behind the victim and that they were cutting most likely from left to right across the body.

The angle of the cut mark upwards suggests that the victim was most

likely in a prone position, face down and the sacrificer would have been behind them,

perhaps holding their head, making the cut mark across the front of the body.

But even after the throat had been cut and the head hacked off, the ritual was not over.

Looking at the skeletons, I began noticing right away that

there's very distinctive patterning in the cut marks.

For example, across the left clavicle, this bone here

has seven distinctive cut marks going along the front of it.

Another bone is the manubrium here, right in the centre of the chest.

And we can see...

that a fragment of it, the left side,

has been completely sliced off.

And finally, there's some fractures that appear to have occurred around the time of death.

And here we have the first rib, and this rib has been fractured.

These cut marks are consistent with sawing up and down, trying to open the chest cavity.

The final moment of the human sacrifice ritual outside the temple

saw the victim's heart being ripped out.

So over and over again, this is what was happening

outside the temple in the final days of this great civilisation.

The priest approached the drugged victim with a ritual copper knife.

One has been found at Tucume.

This was the weapon of sacrifice.

The most important thing in this ceremony was blood.

We know from later chroniclers that the gods who controlled the

world were seen as living beings and that human blood would nourish them.

Finally, the victim's heart was hacked out.

CRIES OUT

But the sacrifice didn't stop the Spanish advance.

It must have seemed as though the gods needed ever more blood.

As the fear grew, the violence spiralled out of control.

Tucume's leading archaeologist believes that in the last few days of the city's existence,

the sacrifices must have been repeated day after day.

TRANSLATION: And the only way that this chaos could be controlled

was to offer an increasing number of human sacrifices.

Probably in a very few days dozens of sacrifices were carried out simultaneously

so that this state of crisis could in some way be controlled.

Before the end of the Lambayeque civilisation, the bodies piled up outside the temple.

But the mass of human sacrifices had failed to stop the Spanish.

It must have seemed that once again the pyramids and the lords

had failed to protect the people or bring the world back under control.

The pyramids had lost their supernatural powers.

They were tainted.

And so the logic of the valley, the same logic that lay behind

the building of the pyramids, dictated what happened next.

The people who'd built the pyramids began to purge them.

Just before the end of the civilisation, the burning must have begun.

They carefully set fire to the palaces on top of the pyramids.

The temple was deliberately set alight.

The cursed city had to be purified by flames.

After Tucume's abandoned, that's it for pyramids.

No more.

The end of this pyramid-building tradition that you could trace back for maybe 3,000 years -

it's over. That's it.

TRANSLATION: After the city of Tucume was burnt,

the city was completely abandoned.

It's a mystery really as to where the people went after this event.

The Lambayeque fled the city, hoping to start again,

to build a new city of pyramids.

But the Spanish ruled Peru now.

There'd be no more pyramids, no more lords.

The Lambayeque civilisation melted away into the valley.

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