In 1886, Max Uhle conducted excavations at Pachacamac, a powerful oracle center at the time when Pizarro and his allies conquered the Inca Empire. Uhle's fieldwork uncovered a complicated occupation sequence stretching across hundreds of years that he struggled to understand. Many subsequent researchers have worked at Pachacamac and the surrounding Lurín Valley—the site is just outside the city of Lima—making it perhaps the most heavily researched location in the Andes. The pace of research has accelerated over the last two decades amid efforts to further develop Pachacamac as both a major tourist attraction and the location for a national museum.
The popular understanding of Pachacamac, however, remains tethered to ethnohistoric accounts and cross-cultural analogies. The now-classic interpretation of the site—one that I admit still colors my imagination—is of an enduring ritual center reminiscent of Delphi in Greece. Since time immemorial, the site is seen to have stood on a hill facing the Pacific, welcoming pilgrims from across the Andes. Travelers congregated for weeks in a sacred precinct, fasting and abstaining from sexual relations before they could pass through a wall into a second precinct containing pyramids with ramps that were shrines to the oracle built by different communities. Only a few, however, were allowed to pass through a final wall and climb to the ancient Temple of Pachacamac. Even they were not worthy of consulting the oracle face to face: priests disappeared into the darkest recesses of the building to consult with the wooden statue that embodied the god.
Empires loom large in the classic interpretation of Pachacamac. Wari in the seventh century co-opted the center to advance their hegemony, and then the Inca did the same about 900 years later. The Inca intervened greatly in the site, constructing a Temple of the Sun, an Acllahuasi (House of the Chosen Women), and other buildings. The essence of Pachacamac nonetheless endured through time in the classic interpretation until it was abandoned during the upheavals of the Spanish conquest. This view of the site has not only shaped our understanding of the long-term history of Peru's Central Coast but has also informed our understanding of religion, pilgrimage, and power throughout the precolumbian Andes. For the 13 authors in Unveiling Pachacamac, the classic interpretation is fundamentally flawed in both fact and omission. Their core audience, for now, are fellow archaeologists like me: scholars who know something about the site but whose understanding remain entangled within previous interpretations that by now have been given the weight of tradition.
The volume begins with an introduction by Giancarlo Marcone that positions the volume as a critique of Pachacamac's classic interpretation. Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar then discuss the Lurín Valley before Pachacamac, suggesting that the site emerged near the beginning of the first millennium AD after the decline of the region's U-shaped temple tradition. In Chapter 3, Izumi Shimada, Rafael Segura, and Barbara Winsborough argue that Pachacamac drew religious significance from both its location near water sources and its resilience to the natural disasters that plagued the Central Coast. Marcone then reminds the reader that Pachacamac's rise was associated with the coalescence of the Lima Culture, arguing that the site first rose to prominence in the mid-first millennium AD as the capital of a Lima State.
Wari expansion plays a limited role in Unveiling Pachacamac's interpretations, with the site likely abandoned from about AD 800 to 1000. The first pyramid with ramps dates to Pachacamac's reoccupation, and Enrique López-Hurtado and Andrea Gonzales Lombardi's chapter discusses how the site was reconfigured to become the religious center for the Yschma Polity. They view the site through the lens of independent elites living in the nearby village of Panquilma, who legitimized their power, in part, through their links to Pachacamac. For López-Hurtado and Lombardi, Pachacamac was the centripetal force that maintained Yschma identity in the Lurín and neighboring Rímac Valleys. The Inca then transformed the site into an important central Andean pilgrimage center.
The last three chapters also look at this Yschma–Inca transition but focus more on Pachacamac itself. Krzysztof Makowski discusses Pachacamac's layout during the Inca Empire, suggesting that almost the entire site that is visible today was the result of successive imperial building campaigns with different agendas. Denise Pozzi-Escott and Katiusha Bernuy's chapter focuses on the north–south street that bisected the site. They argue that the street was completed during the Inca Empire and served as a ritual way that led pilgrims toward the Temple of Pachacamac. Lawrence Owens and Peter Eeckhout, in contrast, emphasize the Yschma contributions to the settlement and posit that many of the site's core features predate Inca arrival. The authors favor a more incremental model for Pachacamac's development, rather than one that relies on sudden environmental or political changes.
All the authors in Unveiling Pachacamac agree that current archaeological evidence fails to support the traditional model of the oracle's enduring function and importance. Nonetheless, there is, in Owens and Eeckhout's words, “an unfortunate lack of consensus concerning what happened, when at Pachacamac” (p. 192). Reading the book is therefore both exhilarating and depressing. It is exhilarating because archaeological fieldwork is dislodging the essentialized vision of an unchanging Pachacamac. It is depressing because it can sometimes feel that our understanding of the site has advanced little since the time of Uhle. Despite so much fieldwork, core site elements are still up for debate: no two research projects, for example, seem to agree on the functions and dating of the pyramids with ramps. And neither more radiocarbon dates nor finer ceramic seriation seems to definitively separate Yschma from Inca-era alterations. Yet, rereading Uhle's 1903 excavation report reminds me of how far we have come. Although the veil may never completely lift from Pachacamac, we are beginning to see the site more clearly thanks to the tireless efforts of this volume's authors.
