Outside's Go Magazine - Travel and Style for Men

It was literally a boneyard. Even in the dark-blue dawn light, I could see that the entire surface of the small, square site, maybe 25 feet on a side, was littered with human bones, desiccated remains, shredded burial cloth, and holes resembling those from bomb blasts—stark evidence of decades of grave robbing.

The smell was like the dust of rotten meat. This was ancient death, dry and cold. I imagined the smell as a fitfully sleeping entity not meant to be disturbed. I had no doubt that when the sun rose over the Andes and heated the ground, the smell would strengthen, rise, and whirl. Cranky, chaotic, vindictive. I wanted to be long gone by then.

Around me, four huaqueros (pot hunters), hired to help us dig, were poking the ground with smooth metal poles about one inch thick. The poles were roughly six feet long—the length needed to reach down through the relatively recent Incan graves to cultures more than 2,000 years old. I watched Carlos, the eldest, as he rotated his pole back and forth, pushing it firmly yet gently down into the sand.

Experienced huaqueros can feel even at six feet whether the tip of a pole has touched something worthwhile. “I can tell a pot from a skull or a rock,” Carlos told me, “by just how this pole feels. You can tell a fado, or gravesite, because the pole slips a little. A pot is the most delicate; the vibration in the pole is like a little ringing. A skull, well . . . you hear things.”

I’d come to this desert site about 100 miles east of Pisco, in the southern part of Peru, with three well-to-do Peruvians I’d met several nights earlier at a vineyard/resort near Ica. There was Armando, a middle-aged frat boy who was the leader of this “expedition” and who’d hired the four huaqueros; his girlfriend, Marta, whom I hoped was out of high school; and his aunt Lina, the wife of the vineyard owner and the only member of our group with any training in archaeology, although I don’t think her education went much beyond textbooks and these illegal excavations.

Though her husband disapproved slightly, Lina spent weekends pursuing with Armando what they called “amateur archaeology” but was in fact illegally excavating for pre-Columbian artifacts. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my new friends were grave robbers.

“My father-in-law and his brother were among the great collectors in this country 70 years ago, when no one had any interest,” Lina had told me the night we met. “They preserved thousands of antiquities. When they died, they left their collections to the National Museum in Lima. Some years afterwards, my husband and I went to view the collections. There were only a few pieces left. No one knew what happened to the rest. I’ll tell you: stolen and sold. So we decided to build new collections and keep them private for our children and their children. We’re not robbers; we’re patriots. At least these huacos will stay in Peru.”

I noticed a round object lying at the bottom of one of the smaller craters. I stared, knowing vaguely what it was, though my brain seemed unwilling to spell it out. Lina hopped down into the pit and grabbed the skull by its intact hair. She held it toward me. “It’s probably Incan, maybe 500, 600 years old,” she said, turning the small head. The skin was stretched tight and the small white teeth were bared, but the features were still visible, and a mop of brown hair fully covered the forehead and shriveled ears. “It’s a boy,” Lina said, “probably 12 or 14 years old.”

As we continued to watch the huaqueros work, Lina held the boy’s head in her hands. She stroked the hair, brushing it away from the eyeless sockets in a way that was both dispassionate and motherly. “I think we’ll be very lucky today,” she said.

It was Ronaldo, Carlos’s grandson, who discovered the tomb. He didn’t announce it right away but made four penetrations in a small area before nodding to Carlos. He and the old man conferred privately for a few minutes. Armando and Lina joined them. The news was better than they had hoped. It was a Paracas tomb.

Paracas culture was short-lived—from 300 b.c. until it suddenly and mysteriously ended around  a.d. 100. But in that short time they achieved a level of artistry unmatched by any other pre-Columbian culture. Their burial sites contain textiles more detailed than anything else from the Americas. One nobleman was found wrapped in a cloth 13 feet wide by 85 feet long, an accomplishment virtually unknown in the world at that time. A Paracas weaving on display at the Museo Rafael Larco Herrera in Lima contains an astounding 398 threads per square inch, and tapestries kept in the ground for 2,000 years are still vibrant with color.

Though I had no doubt that the treasures Lina and Armando gathered would go into their private collections, I also knew that the antiquities from a Paracas tomb would be worth a sizable fortune on the black market. I sensed that everyone present was thinking this. The tension increased palpably. If the police caught us, the Peruvians would get a slap on the wrist and have their finds confiscated. But if I?were caught with this crew, Armando reckoned, I could face jail time. “To arrest a gringo would be good for their careers,” he said with a laugh.

After about two feet, the pinkish clay soil began to grow darker, until it was a deep reddish brown. In that sandy soil, there was no organic matter other than the possibly 3,000 years of human remains buried there. In such arid conditions, bodies take an incredibly long time to decompose. The bodies we found hadn’t simply turned to dust; it’s more like they had melted together. Armando postulated ghoulishly that it was like sinking a shovel into a huge collective corpse.

The first grave didn’t yield much. It was a grown man, buried in little more than a loincloth. Next to his head was a chicha pot, the pre-Columbian version of the beer mug. At first we joked about the thin corpse having been a bum, a drunk throughout eternity. But Carlos silenced us when he liberally doused the deceased with aguardiente—a raw liquor he brought to sprinkle on the graves. “You have to get the spirits drunk,” he muttered, “if you’re going to steal from them.”

Underneath the man was a much larger fado surrounded by dozens of pots. Ronaldo and Carlos traded places, scraping away the red soil and passing up the pots to the eager hands of Armando, Lina, and Marta. The fado was so thick with cotton wadding that Ronaldo had to tear at it brutally to get to the corpse.

We saw her feet first. She was still wearing sandals. They looked modern with their thin leather soles and a Y strand of twine between her first two long, delicate toes. She had beautiful feet.
A number of archaeologists have conjectured that the Paracas might have practiced a primitive form of mummification. It would be hard to otherwise explain the condition of this woman’s feet. The skin was like fine brown paper stretched thin and perfectly delineating everything from her toes to her ankles. For the first time that day, I was anxious for the digging to go faster. I wanted to meet this woman face to face.

Unfortunately, everyone was dizzy from the increasingly brutal heat and the aguardiente, of which we had been taking long slugs to counter the death smell. Ronaldo pulled frantically at the wadding, trying to finish the job. What he found stunned us all. The woman had been a weaver. Her fado contained not only exquisite mantas and small bolts of cloth in deep reds, magentas, greens, and blues, but also all the tools of her trade. There were spools of thread, bone needles, and parts of a loom. Though several of the mantas were just scraps, the funerary cloth wrapped around the woman was exceptional. After nearly two millennia, the patterns in yellow, blue, and green popped off the red background as vibrantly as if they’d been dyed in my lifetime.

Lina broke the spell. “I want her feet,” she announced quietly. At first, no one was quite sure what she meant. Ronaldo shrugged and stooped down to unfasten the sandals.

“No,” she said emphatically. “Her feet.”

We stared at each other. Carlos handed the bottle to Ronaldo. He drained it, then knelt down and broke off the feet just above the ankles. It wasn’t a break—more like the crumbling of a cookie.

“It’s too hot to continue,” Armando decided. “We’ll cover the fado up and come back another day.”

On the ride back, I sat with Lina in the truck’s cab. The feet rested in her lap. Her hands lay on either side of them, though she occasionally moved her thumbs along the edges of the sandals. Neither of us spoke.

It was late that afternoon, following a quick swim and a nap, when I answered a knock at my door. It was Lina. She and her husband had decided to go home early to Lima.

“I wanted you to have something from today,” she said, pressing a small object into one of my hands. “The police won’t even know what it is, so you needn’t worry about smuggling. And since it’s a gift from me, your North American conscience shouldn’t trouble you.”

It was a comb, two inches by three, with ten teeth made of dark wood. The teeth were held together by a tight weave of magenta and blue thread with specks of yellow. It was a miniature version of the dead woman’s funerary bundle.

“Take it,” Lina said, folding my fingers around the comb. “If I left it just lying around, someone might steal it.”

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