Kingdom of the Desert Lost Kingdoms of South America

On the north coast of Peru,

between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes,

is a vast desert.

For over 450 years,

this was home to a kingdom whose rise and fall

is one of the greatest untold stories of the Americas.

At its heart was a city.

Chan Chan is that rare and precious thing -

a pre-industrial city, a lost city of types,

because it was built and functioned in a completely different way

to the cities that we know today.

I'm Jago Cooper

and as an archaeologist who specialises in South America,

I've always been fascinated by the secrets and mysteries buried deep

in these awe-inspiring and forbidding landscapes.

The history of this continent has been dominated by

the stories of the Inca and the Spanish conquistadors.

But in this series, I'll be exploring an older, forgotten past,

travelling from the coast to the clouds

in search of ancient civilisations

as significant and impressive as anywhere else on Earth.

The Kingdom of Chimor dominated the northern coast of Peru

for five centuries. In the face of some of

the most extreme climate conditions in the world,

its people transformed the desert..

..built an oasis in the sand...

..and created gold and silver treasures.

And they believed so strongly

in the power of their monarchs and their gods

that they were prepared to sacrifice their own children.

Wow.

From 900 to 400 AD,

these loyal subjects built an empire,

an empire that raises so many interesting questions.

What motivated them to invade their neighbours?

How did they build one of the largest pre-Columbian cities

in South America?

And why did this, the first empire of South America,

disappear back into the desert that it conquered?

I love coming to South America.

There's so much rich, unstudied archaeology here.

Everybody's heard of the Inca,

but they're just a few hundred years

of 12,000 years of history of this great continent.

There's so much more to study.

And by looking at these lost cultures,

we can help them take their rightful place

in the history of South America.

Long before the Inca were the Chimu,

and the Chimu once were kings.

And with their loyal subjects, they built the Kingdom of Chimor.

By its height, in the 15th century,

their kingdom had become an empire,

the first in South America.

Stretching along 600 miles of coastal desert in what is now Peru,

it was lapped by the Pacific on the west

and frowned upon by the Andes in the east.

In this unforgiving terrain, the Chimu left us

one of South America's greatest archaeological stories.

Neglected for centuries and exposed to harsh desert storms

stand the remains of a true lost city.

One can only imagine what the first Europeans must have thought

when, parched and dazzled by the desert,

they came over the hill and saw this.

This is Chan Chan,

one of the largest adobe settlements in the world,

a monument to the 35,000 people who once lived here.

They began building the city in the 10th century

and continued to expand it for over 500 years.

Chan Chan is as intriguing as the people who built it.

In eight dusty square miles, there's no single centre

or any roads.

Walls, some as high as ten metres, tower over you.

Inside them are the remains of ten sumptuous royal palaces.

Outside, hundreds of smaller dwellings

are marked now by the alignments of stone.

Chan Chan is a puzzling architectural jigsaw

that reflects Chimu society.

But when the Spanish arrived at Chan Chan in the 1530s,

they were only interested in taking Chimu gold

and imposing their Christian God.

People here were sceptical about Adam and Eve,

because they had their own origin myth -

that the common people of the Chimu came from a copper egg

and that the royal family of women from a silver egg...

and men from a golden egg.

For the Chimu, hierarchy was seen as preordained -

everyone accepted their place in it -

and at the top was an all-powerful monarch.

Chan Chan was the seat of power for the Chimu royal family

and thus, the very heart of the empire.

This city in the desert

is where all of the important decisions were made.

In their palaces, surrounded by riches,

the Chimu royal family hosted feasts and sacrifices

and worshipped powerful gods.

But how did such a vast, complex and wealthy city

come to be built in a desert?

People have been drawn to this coast for thousands of years,

but the exact origin of these coastal peoples isn't known.

The Chimu had their own explanation of how they came to be here,

and it began at sea.

Lying alongside the city of Chan Chan

is the mighty Pacific Ocean.

The Spanish recorded a Chimu story about how their ancestors

sailed down the coast from lands further north.

Whatever the truth of that legend,

the Pacific Ocean offered sustenance to the early cultures of the coast.

So, just going out to do some fishing with Juan and Luis.

Past the surf, I'm really struck by the vastness out here.

Just heading out into the Pacific Ocean.

Right down the coast, you go down past Chile down to the Antarctic.

Out here, the whole expanse of the Pacific,

going right across towards Australia.

But as the Chimu and their ancestors discovered,

you don't have to go far to find the sea's bounty.

Here off the coast of Peru,

you'll find one of the richest marine environments in the world.

It's home to the Humboldt Current,

that pulls up cold water right from the Antarctic

that's full of plankton and fish and marine life.

And this stretch of ocean has been

feeding the coastal populations of Peru for millennia.

I can really understand why these coastal peoples

were in awe of the sea.

Many believed that deities controlled it,

determining the weather and the day's catch.

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH:

The Chimus were masters of fishing technology.

They used fish hooks, harpoons and nets to try and catch their prey.

And now we're going to try and get this...

The Chimu used fish nets made of cotton,

and archaeologists have found hundreds of fish weights

at archaeological sites all along the coast.

The Chimu believed that their gods could whip up the ocean into storms

and endow its creatures with unearthly powers.

You see the pelican a lot in many of the friezes in Chan Chan

and the Chimu sites.

It's an iconic bird for the Chimu,

and they were used in the fishing because it helped the Chimu identify

where the shoals of fish would be when they're out at sea.

And when you get to the other end of the net,

there's a last float on the other side.

I'm hoping a heavy net means a lot of fish.

I'm glad I've got this big guy behind me

because it takes a bit of strength to haul this in.

But this part of the ocean can be deceptive.

Periodically, atmospheric conditions warm the water,

killing off its nutrients

and forcing the fish to look elsewhere for food.

That's not happening today, but I'm not sure the gods are with us.

THEY SPEAK IN SPANISH

It's not the biggest catch in the world.

Our meagre catch reminds me that fishermen around here

can't always rely on the sea to feed their families.

Coastal peoples, including the Chimu,

knew that the gods could send them back to shore empty-handed.

They had to look to the land as well if they were going to survive.

The coastal desert of Peru

might seem like a harsh, inhospitable environment,

but it's home to a vital, life-saving resource.

Winding through the desert sands are a series of rivers

which bring precious meltwater down from the high Andean peaks.

Understanding the environment of the river valleys

is the key to understanding the rise of the Chimu empire.

'I met up with archaeologist Dr Jeff Quilter,

'to ask him how these river valleys

'sustained early settlements on the coast.'

..self-defined Moche?

Well, the environment plays the role in every culture's development.

The fact that we have these river valleys that were abundant with life,

surrounded by deserts, clearly had an effect on how cultures developed.

They developed in the river valleys.

As a matter of fact, Peru's coastal valleys

were seen as one example of this great phenomena

that seemed to happen worldwide,

of the origins of civilisations in river valleys.

Before the Chimu were the Moche,

one of the most violent and sophisticated cultures

of the Americas.

For over 600 years, they ruled the Moche River Valley.

It's though that their demise, around 750 AD,

followed an extreme weather event

so catastrophic that it was almost two centuries

before the Chimu rose in the same valley.

And do you think that the Chimu could have risen up

if it hadn't been for the Moche before them?

Well, we all build upon the past.

Even though Moche collapsed in some ways,

a lot of what they did continued.

We see lots of continuities. They're sometimes subtle,

but they're in some of the ceramics.

The irrigation systems, that were developed thousands of years

before the Moche, continued, were expanded by the Chimu,

so we stand on the shoulders of giants.

CHILDREN CHATTER

Over 200 years passed between the end of the Moche

and the emergence of the Chimu empire.

But many of the challenges remained the same.

One priceless gift that the Chimu inherited

from their Moche great-great-great-grandparents,

was that engineering alchemy that transformed the desert - canals.

The Moche and their ancestors

had been building canals for hundreds of years.

But the scale and ambition of Chimu engineering

surpassed anything that had come before.

I've come to the Jequetepeque Valley,

just 74 miles from Chan Chan,

to see how the Chimu engineered their environment.

It's hard to believe,

but the land around here was once an infertile desert.

To what extent do you think the irrigation systems...?

'Archaeologist, Dr Luis Jaime Castillo,

'has been investigating how the land was reclaimed.'

What I find incredible is how irrigation can transform

a desert landscape into this verdant, green agricultural soil.

Well, you have to be aware of one thing, though.

You've seen the deserts here. Deserts here are real deserts.

They look like the Sahara.

There's no plants, no animals, no nothing.

So if you put water there, you're going to have a wet desert...

but nothing more. So the point there is

that one of the mysteries that we have is that the Moche and the Chimu

were forced to constantly re-create soil.

By sheer human effort, irrigation canals were carved into the earth.

It appears that thousands of tonnes of nutrient-rich soil

was transported here from the forested edges of the valleys.

Without machinery or the wheel,

countless armies of men and women, over many centuries,

transformed desert sands into fertile fields.

But importing the soil was only the start of the people's ingenuity.

One thing that is surprising about the ancient canals

is that they wind a lot. They are not straight, like ours. They wind.

And probably the reason why they wind

is because they want to stop the water.

They want to make the water flow slowly, nicely,

because the worst enemy of the canal is the water itself.

If it flows too fast, it's going to cut the canal,

so you want the water flowing nicely.

The engineering involved sometimes defies belief.

Some canals have an almost imperceptible gradient

of 1 in 10,000.

During the early days of the kingdom,

the Chimu people rebuilt and expanded the ancient canal network.

But as the population grew,

their canal-building became more strategic.

I guess the Chimu probably changed the rules

by creating a larger canal

that serves everyone and that was clearly controlled by them.

That's this one, the highest one, the longest one, the widest one.

You can imagine this full of water, running down. I mean, it's a river.

It's collecting lots and lots of water and pouring it into the desert.

And by connecting separate river valleys

to a network of aqueducts and canals,

the Chimu brought this freshwater to their deserts.

Thousands of engineers, labourers and farmers

were mobilised in a collective effort

that empowered the Chimu elite to turn their kingdom into an empire.

The Chimu were the only ones that actually coalesce the whole region

into a single political organisation that was managed and run centrally,

something that they probably learned by running irrigation systems,

because their requirements for the management of irrigation systems

in a way mimics the requirements

for the management of a huge territory encompassed by the state.

So, it is this society,

this is the incubator of real, complex societies, I think, in Peru.

And as the deserts were irrigated,

so the Chimu people shared their gratitude,

by offering the fruits of their labour to the elite at Chan Chan

by way of tribute.

The surplus fuelled population growth

and increased the power of the state.

For the kings and queens of Chan Chan,

canals and irrigation channels like these played a crucial role

in the expansion and consolidation of their empire.

It was their ability to mobilise and control the skilled workforce

necessary to construct them

that transformed the amount of agricultural land available.

By 1300 AD,

arable land under Chimu control

had expanded from four square miles to a staggering 340 square miles.

But the land, as well as the sea,

was subject to extreme weather events.

And as the population increased,

so too did the risk

posed by catastrophic conditions to the food supply.

In the face of danger, it seems the Chimu appealed to their gods.

In August 2011,

an excavation at a village near Chan Chan shed some light

on the relationship between the Chimu,

their gods and their children.

I went to the museum at Chan Chan

to meet archaeologist Gabriel Prieto.

What he had found amazed and horrified him.

So, these are some of your excavated materials.

Yeah, this is it.

-I'd like to have a closer look. Can we take a few and have a look?

-Sure.

-Let me...

-Sure.

-OK.

I'll handle it with care.

So, it's quite a lot of responsibility,

to find a site like this and start excavating it?

Yeah. I keep it safe from dirt or...

Yeah. So, how did you start working...?

'When Gabriel began his excavation,

'he never anticipated what he was about to find.'

I was told by one of the neighbours who lives around,

he told me his kids were playing with human skulls.

JAGO LAUGHS

He said to me, "You should come and see it. You're an archaeologist."

And so I went there with my team

and we ended up digging in this amazing context.

'Gabriel had stumbled upon

'the remains of 43 individuals.

'Dental evidence suggests that they were between 10 and 14 years old.

'Boys and girls on the cusp of puberty.'

'The first signs indicated a mass ritual killing.'

Wow.

-This has literally just come straight out of...

-Yeah.

So this is like a red ochre?

Yeah, this is red paint.

It was applied, as you can see, on the upper part of the face.

-Wow.

-And on the sides.

So, basically, 50% of the human skulls that we have found

have this pattern.

Was it was something to do with the ritual...?

It was intentionally made,

to show that these were special kids.

That they were offered for some special reason.

But, as an archaeologist,

I know that mass burials can mean many things.

And what makes you think that

they were sacrificed,

that these aren't the victims of war,

that they have this ritual context?

Well, we have very strong evidence

that they were actually cutting through the sternum

and then they were opening their ribcage

-and possibly...it's possibly to extract the heart.

-Right.

So you have trauma wounds in each of the ribcages.

We have trauma in each of the ribcages

and especially on the sternum.

Basically, what they did is to cut through the sternum.

That's why you can see a very clean cut over here.

And this is located here. They cut it in this way

and then they opened the ribcage in order to extract or remove the heart.

Working with all the evidence,

Gabriel is assembling a complete picture of how these children died

and why.

Having worked at the site, what do you think is the sequence of events

that led to these kids' death?

Well, it is very possible that at some point

they put all these children together somewhere here in Chan Chan.

You know, they were at a warehouse

or a big plaza, probably they were feeding them with special foods,

and then at some point they'd be appropriated.

For the rituals, it is very important

that the moon has to be in the correct position.

So, they took these kids

and they walked through all the outside of Chan Chan

and they went straight to this spot.

Gabriel is awaiting more tests to determine

whether any of the children were related to each other.

But he can see from examination that they were all fit and healthy.

It's impossible not to think about the adults

who prepared these children for their terrible fate.

These children, you know, they must have had parents.

I mean, do you think that they were separated in some way from society

at an early age

to break that relationship between children and adults?

I mean, it's like... It's a brutal thing to do.

From an anthropological point of view,

it is very possible that giving the best that you have -

your children, your siblings -

for a supreme purpose,

probably was something that was accomplished by their relatives

as something very important, and probably provided them

with a special status within the Chimu society.

It would seem that this slaughter of innocents

was demand by the state.

But what could be so important

that any state would sacrifice fit and healthy children?

I think that this context is clear evidence

of the Chimu state as trying to control a very difficult situation.

Because we have found a very thick layer of clay...

-Right.

-..that is on top of sand.

So it's clear that there was a very strong rain

right before this ritual...

and afterwards.

Which actually made us think about the gods

and the importance of the Chimu pantheon on this,

and it's very clear that this sacrifice was made not

only to stop the rains - these very dangerous and damaging rains -

but at the same time to what I consider

is the most important Chimu god,

and it's actually a goddess, the sea goddess.

The sea goddess, the most important of all the Chimu deities,

governed the sea and the moon...

..the two indomitable forces of the coastal environment.

Were these children killed to appease her wrath?

Human sacrifice is an incredibly emotive thing.

There's no getting away from the fact

that brutally murdering 43 children,

ripping out their hearts, opening up their chests,

is a hard thing for us to understand.

But as an archaeologist, we have to try and empathise

with how this can be culturally acceptable at the time,

perhaps even expected of the elites who ruled Chan Chan.

Gabriel paints a picture of a powerful people

desperately battling with their environment around the mid-1300s...

..the same period that a catastrophic weather event

struck the Peruvian coast.

Recurring periodically, but never predictably,

these events are a blight on Peru's history.

Meteorologists attribute them to a puzzling phenomenon

they call the Southern Oscillation,

known more commonly around the world as El Nino.

El Ninos are a climatic anomaly

that can periodically transform local weather patterns.

The consequences here in coastal Peru can be torrential downpours

that transform this barren landscape into a raging torrent of water.

At their worst, El Ninos can bring floods, drought,

plagues of insects and even waves of disease.

So when the Chimu survived the El Nino of the mid-1300s,

perhaps they believed

their sacrifices had appeased the sea goddess.

But the damage to their irrigation canals

seems to have encouraged a new policy,

one less dependent on the elements.

They abandoned canal-building

and seemed to lose interest in the time-consuming irrigation business,

instead opting for a new strategy,

a strategy that brought more wealth and power

to the kings and queens of Chimor -

empire building.

Along the west coast of South America,

other cultures, some much older than Chimu,

cultivated the land and traded with inland peoples

as far away as present-day Bolivia.

None was as powerful as the masters of the coast...

..and it took the Chimu just 100 years

to quadruple the size of their territory.

The La Leche River Valley, near the border with Ecuador,

was once home to the Lambayeque culture that had dominated the area

since the fall of the Moche in 750 AD.

These eroded structures were once towering pyramids.

From here, the Lambayeque elite

controlled a valuable trade in precious metals and shells,

making this place a strategic target for the Chimu.

This is Tucume,

for centuries home to the Lambayeque lords,

who built the 26 monumental pyramids here.

In fact, this whole landscape is man-made.

But during the 14th century, the Chimu conquered Tucume,

and built their own elite residences here on top of the sacred pyramids.

You can hardly get a clearer demonstration of domination.

Yet, after the initial invasion, there's no evidence of

violent suppression here, so how did the Chimu hold onto their power?

I've come to another excavation, 13½ miles north of Tucume,

where more information about the Chimu strategy

is slowly coming to light.

Here, at the recently excavated site of Cerro Chotolo,

we get a completely different perspective

on life within the Chimu empire.

250 kilometres away from Chan Chan, this was home to a Chimu elite,

sent here to administer the northern frontiers of the empire.

Archaeologist Juan Martinez has been studying

human and architectural remains at the site.

TRANSLATION FROM SPANISH:

Dominating the site today are stone walls forming

a series of concentric circles up the hillside.

The Chimu elite were segregating and protecting themselves

but, as at Tucume, evidence indicates

that the occupation of the site was peaceful.

This explains why the Chimu didn't need force to maintain control.

In fact, some archaeologists think that the Chimu shared power

with the conquered elite.

The defensive walls were for them as well as for their new masters,

and in return for this protection and a new framework for society,

precious metals and other valuable resources flowed back to Chan Chan.

Over the course of around 100 years,

Chimor's expansion transformed the kingdom.

Where the Chimu had once controlled

only the Moche Valley around Chan Chan,

by 1400, they ruled a whole series of key river valleys

to the north and south,

and as Chimu power grew, so did their wealth.

It was a clever strategy.

It brought lucrative trade routes under Chimu control

and diversified the kingdom's resources

and food supplies - a critical insurance policy in such

a harsh environment, and all the wealth,

all the abundance, was channelled back to Chan Chan.

By the early 15th century, Chan Chan was the centre of the royal family,

a pantheon of powerful gods and the most powerful empire in Peru.

Today, it's a popular tourist destination.

Centuries of desert storms have swept away much of the fine

decorative detail of the adobe architecture,

but you can still see glimpses of how it must have looked.

All of these little designs

and reliefs you see in all of this part of Chan Chan,

they look really nice,

but they're all made of fibreglass, and they're just reconstructions

of the originals, using photographs from the original excavation.

Visitors love the reconstructed palace compound.

But as an archaeologist, my interest is in the authentic remains,

however depleted they may be.

I want to know how the palace compound's administrative centres

and different parts of the city worked together,

because only then can I really understand how this place

became the centre of one unified state.

When you approach the city from the ground, you can't see

the palaces, because they're enclosed behind towering walls...

..that evoke a sense of power and segregation.

Archaeologist Guillermo Gonzalez explained

their part in the Chimu hierarchy.

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH:

The elite and lower orders may have been separated by walls,

but theirs was a relationship of reciprocal need and reward.

It's difficult to get away from the idea of class structure

when discussing the hierarchies of Chan Chan, but it's such a Western,

industrial-era term that really doesn't fit with ancient societies.

Chimu hierarchy was born out of a shared world-view.

Everything from their origin myths to

the geography of their empire reinforced their hierarchy.

The lowest tier - the fishermen and farmers -

lived beyond the city boundaries.

The next tier up - the artisans - lived closer to the centre

of power, crammed into the spaces between the palace compounds.

Outside the walls of this royal compound,

you can see a whole series of small single-roomed structures.

Because the elite of this ancient city controlled

all of the wealth in the region, it drew in artisans

and craftspeople to come and live here

and gain access to the raw materials they needed within the city.

These small spaces clustered together between the ten palaces

were once home to up to 90% of the city's population.

Conditions here must have been cramped,

but it certainly wasn't a ghetto for a slave class.

Far from it.

Archaeologists have unearthed tools which suggest that the

residents of those small dwellings were highly skilled artisans.

Peru's museums house thousands of Chimu artefacts made by them.

Portrait vases, said to be modelled on elite individuals,

hint at the integral relationship between power and art in Chan Chan.

These ceramics are monochrome and highly polished,

and you can see the faces staring back at us from over 500 years ago.

But whilst the ceramics are impressive and unique,

it's in fact the metals from Chan Chan

that the Chimu are most famous for.

These exquisite body ornaments were more than status symbols

for the kings and queens of Chimor.

They were a precious homage to the forces that they worshipped

and feared.

To them, gold represented the sun,

and silver represented the moon and sea. The Chimu were masters of both.

You can see images of monarchs worked into the metal

alongside sacred feline figures, birds and sea creatures.

It's not surprising that the artisans who created these

wonderful treasures were rewarded for their skills.

The artisan class of Chan Chan were afforded special privileges.

They could wear ear spools, marry among themselves

and be buried in their own cemeteries.

But this wasn't a meritocracy.

The Chimu never expected to become social climbers.

The artisans who lived between the palace walls were

allowed inside, but probably not for long.

In Chan Chan, archaeologists have found a whole

series of storage rooms, where the spoils of the kingdom were kept.

But if residents wanted to gain access to these storage rooms,

they had to walk down these long corridors,

filled with U-shaped rooms like these.

These rooms are called audiencias and they hold the key

to understanding how the kingdom functioned.

The lower orders were granted favours - arable land to farm,

or metals to work,

and in return, they brought their tributes to the audiencias.

All this bounty was stored in hundreds of storerooms

in the palaces and the outlying regions.

The Chimu had no currency so these storerooms were their banks,

amassing the vast wealth of the whole empire

here in its capital city.

Every level of Chimu society seemed to work together,

giving and taking tributes, but they all seemed to know on which

side of the palace walls they belonged.

The city is in architectural interpretation of the beliefs

of the Chimu - in other words,

everything is built around and for the royal family.

Inside the compounds, the kings and queens of Chan Chan hosted

sacrifices and feasts, which loyal subjects watched in awe.

And in their storerooms, they amassed their gold and their silver.

But there was one thing that they couldn't get enough of,

that they may have valued even more highly than gold.

To see it, I'm going back to the shore.

This is the spondylus shell, which lives further up

the coast in the warmer, deeper waters off modern-day Ecuador.

For the Chimu, this little shell was highly prized as a status symbol.

Spanish chroniclers recorded that the Chimu believed

the oyster inside was the food of the gods.

Its vivid-pink shell adorned Chimu jewellery and precious artefacts.

But it was valued for more than its vibrant exterior.

Surely it had other qualities that made it SO precious?

One quite interesting theory is that during prolonged El Nino conditions,

sea surface temperatures here would have warmed up,

allowing the spondylus to move down and live off coastal Peru.

The idea is that the Chimu thought that the spondylus had some

sort of predictive power, and that it was the harbinger of doom.

Like the sea itself, the spondylus was endowed with unearthly powers.

Perhaps the elite of Chan Chan believed that with

the spondylus, they could divine their fate,

or predict the will of the sea goddess.

These days, spondylus shells can be found in Peru's tourist markets -

a sad echo of the days when they were cherished

for their spiritual value.

Hola!

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH:

Like many ancient cultures,

the Chimu buried their dead with their most treasured possessions.

I'm going to see an excavation of a Chimu woman...

whose remains might shed more light on the true value

of these enigmatic shells.

In 2010, this late-middle-aged woman was excavated,

and alongside her body was found all of her grave goods.

Lovely Chimu ceramics, beautiful copper metal objects,

but most valuable of all, clutched in her right hand,

is a spondylus shell.

These shells - there was no safety equipment to help the Chimu - they

had to free-dive down to the sea floor, pluck them off the bottom,

and they represent the most valuable item within the Chimu culture.

The human cost of their harvest must have added

enormous value to these shells.

Owning one would surely mark its owner out as an elite individual

in life and in death.

According to one conquistador account,

a courtier would walk before the Chimu monarch,

scattering spondylus shell dust on the ground.

If ever there was a picture of decadence, it must be that.

Chan Chan was home to an elite so rich

that it could record its likeness in gold, a royal family

so privileged that it could walk upon a shell that others

couldn't let go of, even in death.

The royal family lived in these compounds,

counting their spondylus shells,

ruling the kingdom, almost like the divine

givers and takers of life to the rest of the population.

But of course, they weren't immortal, and when a ruler died,

it kick-started an extraordinary chain of events.

Throughout Peru,

death has always been seen as a continuation of a journey.

In Chan Chan, the king's journey into the next life began with

an elaborate ritual that has been captured in one of the rarest

and most extraordinary artefacts,

not just in Peru, but in the whole of South America.

I couldn't wait to see it.

So, just unpacking this box, and inside are these beautiful little

wooden figurines,

and we know from the dates that these are Chimu.

It's very rare to get preserved wooden artefacts,

so it's a real privilege to see these wooden figurines

depicting a scene from a Chimu burial.

It's an absolutely incredible level of preservation, and you can

still see the paint colours on the back of these friezes, showing these

fish on the back. It's beautiful.

What we've seen in Chan Chan is the physical embodiment

of Chimu ideology, built into the very fabric of the city.

This extraordinary artefact brings together

the rich threads of Chimu culture

into one evocative scene of life and death in the capital city.

It really is breathtaking.

This is a beautiful collection of maquetas - wooden figurines

depicting the burial of a Chimu royal.

Found in 1995, it reinforces many of the details that we

learn from the chronicles written by the first Spanish

to arrive here in coastal Peru.

Here we can see the mummified remains of the Chimu royal being

carried in a funerary procession towards the palace complex.

You can see the feathers preserved,

and that's what gives this little basket its colour.

The figurines each have an inlay of white shell,

like a mother-of-pearl, and the red is part of the spondylus shell.

What we can see are many of the details associated with

the rituals that would have been carried out on this important day.

You get a whole different set of characters within this

procession, from members of the royal family to priests, musicians.

At the back, you can see one figure right at the back

of the procession, naked, hands tied behind their back,

which looks like he could be in trouble - a human sacrifice victim.

At the front, we have a very interesting character

carrying a basket full of pulverised spondylus shell.

This whole procession would have been walked

on a bed of pulverised spondylus shell.

Again, we see the importance of spondylus

within these Chimu rituals.

The level of detail in these maquetas helps

change my understanding of death within Chimu culture.

It's not about the end of the life of the royal, as much as their

transference into a new role as an immortal ancestor,

or as a minaus, as they are often referred to.

This understanding is important because the royal lives on for ever

within the belief structure of the Chimu.

And one of the details that I really like is that the thing

they're all walking towards is the palace complex,

and you can see the representation of the adobe walls

exactly like you see them in the palace complexes at Chan Chan.

It's easy to imagine the funeral procession carrying

the monarch's body, dressed in their burial regalia,

through these gates to the next life.

In this burial platform,

archaeologists found the remains of 300 young women,

suggesting that the perceived needs of the king buried just over

that wall proved fatal for others.

Perhaps those women followed the procession like the sacrifice

victim in the maqueta,

their hands tied behind their backs.

The monarch was on his way to becoming a minaus,

an immortal ancestor who would have dominion over his people for ever.

In Chan Chan, palaces housed the living AND the dead.

This is the royal tomb where the king or queen would have been laid

during their transition between mortality and immortality.

They didn't have to give up their wealth or possessions,

because they took their servants, even their home, with them.

Their palace became their mausoleum.

This meant that the heir to the throne

had to prove their own mettle by conquering new lands

and building their own palace.

This tradition is known as split inheritance.

The next-in-line inherited the right to rule, but not the wealth

or revenues that had belonged to the previous monarch.

To earn their own tributes,

the monarchs had to give something back to their people.

That meant each new king or queen was highly motivated

and keen to demonstrate their ambition.

Because each new king or queen had to establish their own reputation,

it explains their relentless drive,

that Chimu aggression to conquer new territory.

It also explains why there are so many palaces here at Chan Chan

and that they all date to different periods.

The ten palaces are a memorial to the triumphs of the Chimor kingdom -

a kingdom where the people had brought water to the desert

and vast riches to its kings and queens.

Where shocking sacrifices were made to appease the gods

to protect the kingdom from the elements.

But in the 1460s, Chimor was gravely threatened - not by another El Nino,

but by a force that would change South America for ever.

As the Chimu were extending their northern frontier,

another empire was on the march - the Inca.

From their Andean strongholds further south,

they prepared to conquer the coast.

Around 1463, uniformed Inca soldiers descended from the mountains

to meet the Chimu.

Not even this powerful empire could withstand the Inca for long.

By 1470, the last king of Chimor was defeated

and exiled to the victor's capital of Cusco.

A society that embodied hierarchy for 450 years

was suddenly without a ruler.

With nobody in control, the Chimu were lost.

Chan Chan was abandoned,

its people scattered to the surrounding deserts.

When the Spanish arrived in 1527,

they brought lethal European diseases

and filled their galleons with gold and silver.

Tragically, the ruins of Chan Chan have been repeatedly looted

over the past 500 years.

By the time archaeologists arrived in the 20th century,

the El Ninos had transformed it into a true lost city,

a ruin, blasted by sand and storms.

After centuries of neglect,

the painstaking process of conserving and excavating it

is underway.

Archaeologist Margarita Pena is overseeing the project.

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH:

Today, Chan Chan enjoys the status and protection it deserves.

In 1986, it has made a World Heritage Site, and it's

taken its rightful place in the pantheon of Peru's great cultures.

The palaces, friezes

and fragile adobe structures are being protected and displayed,

and it's a testament to the builders of this amazing city

that 500 years after the last king of Chimor was exiled by the Inca,

the corridors, plazas and palaces of Chan Chan still inspire such awe.

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