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Fields of the Dead: Peru's Vanishing Archaeological Treasures
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20114 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
3,297 Words |
| Author
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Lark Beltran
A native Californian, Lark Beltran has spent the last twenty
years in Peru, working as a teacher and free-lance writer.
Wilfredo Beltranis a mining consultant. |
It matches the beginning of a midnight thriller. Alternate shreds and shrouds of mist move across the fact of the full moon, draining its essence. Wind skitters over a sands cape marked with dunes and black boulders, and ringed by shadowy foothills several miles away.
The pale object gleaming from a slight depression in the sand is a skull. A walk of less than twenty feet in any direction reveals that it has lots of company. A mélange of strewn ribs, vertebra, and femurs--antiseptically whitened by the moonlight--conveys a first impression of some ancient battlefield.
Four men approach from the other side of a dune, carrying shovels and picks. They offer me no threat; these are the tools of their trade. They will big until nearly dawn at a predetermined spot disclosed by their probing rods, the looseness of the ground allowing for a hole up to three men deep. The diggers are experienced, and their night's work will likely be rewarded.
The area's dreamlike quality is no less pronounced by daylight. For hundreds of square feet the ground is pockmarked with excavations: Here, a baby's mummified foot protruding from the sand. Over there two large red jugs, apparently unwanted by the person who found them. Shreds of pottery almost as widespread as fallen leaves. Faces enclosed within moons and stars, checkerboard patters, abstract birds and fish, triangles, suns, chevrons--a myriad cryptic remnants of vessels destroyed in the pillage.
Happily absorbed in looking for all possible pieces of a strange labyrinth design, I do not realize that a tall man wearing a straw hat stands before me. "Senora, would you like some huacos [pots]?" he asks politely, setting down a burlap sack. Another man is fast approaching. Simultaneously they begin to empty the contents of their bags, producing pottery jars in differing states of preservation. A few are exquisite, most chipped to some degree and much faded in design. They are unglazed, painted in black and white or brown and cream over porous red clay. Some are undecorated while other bear sculpted motifs of human or animal heads. The men's prices for these wares range from the equivalent of about fifty cents for a tiny, cracked huaco to over twenty dollars for a good-sized one in prime condition. I buy a tear-shaped, pale red vessel that has a painting of an enigmatic figure with white spots and long, drooping antennae.
In a few moments I am alone again, surrounded by the
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