This past week I was detailed out on a field trip with the students in sixth grade primary. We went to an important archeological site in Northern Peru that was built by the Chimu or Moche culture between the first and 12th centuries. The place is known as Tucume. A book by the same title was written in the 1980's by Thor Hyerdahl the Norwegian explorer/self-taught archeologist. You may remember the story of Kon-Tiki another earlier and well known adventure by Hyerdahl. He came to Peru in the 1940's and built a large balsa wood raft and sailed it to the S. Pacific in an attempt to show that S. Americans could have populated the S. Pacific islands. Tucume was built by the people that had the folklore telling a story of a great leader who sailed to the west. This is also the place where you can see images of glyphs made of adobe depicting the large balsa rafts with strange bird-people sailing them. These people also used reeds to build seafaring rafts and it is not clear to me if those depicted in these reliefs are supposed to be reed or balsa... for the record....most formal archeologists in academic fields think that Hyerdahl is totally wrong about S. Americans sailing across the Pacific. Just because he did it doesn't prove anything. His book about Tucume is less controversial because he actually worked with trained experts when he excavated the pyramids here.
Below is a photo of the images made in adobe. There are two of these large rafts in the relief. It is hard to point them out with this photo, but have a look at this website to see them
http://www.kon-tiki.no/E-Exp_Tucume.php
These people were definitely not Incas, they were pre-Inca.
Below is a photo of part of the remains of a once magnificent city. The buildings and pyramids were made of adobe and over the years have suffered from El Nino events. If you thought that the impact of El Nino was big in N. America in terms of rain and snow, this is where it all starts and where the weather phenomenon was first named. These pyramids show the effects of many El Nino years that have nearly washed away these structures. In fact, many archeologists think that it was the severe precipitation events of El Nino that contributed to the decline of this culture. Right now it is hot and dry, but apparently they have serious inundations of water every 5-7 years. You can see from the landscape photos why the Incan ruins might be a bit more popular with tourists.
On the same field trip we stopped at a small public school on the outskirts of Chiclayo in a place called La Raya. It was not clear to me what we were doing at first, but it became obvious that the students were doing a bit of charity work in addition to seeing how the rest of Peru lives and goes to school. It was a huge eye opener to me and I'm sure that a few of the students felt the same way. This school has significantly fewer resources than the well- fortified halls and classrooms of San Agustine. The school in La Raya (essentially a colonia) consisted of a few scattered buildings around a sandy and dusty playground with one soccer goal made out of broken bamboo poles. We organized some relay races for the students to do with mixed teams of students from both schools. After a few "races" the students from San Agustine opened their backpacks and presented the local kids with new notebooks, pens, pencils, snacks and juice boxes. It was a touching moment clearly part of the social mission of the curriculum at San Agustin. The students from La Raya were having a great time, it was obviously a special day for them. I've never seen anything like this before done in the US. Maybe private Catholic schools do this in our country as well.
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