The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

Today we visited Chan Chan, the remains of a large city of the Chimu people.

In the 15th century Chan Chan was a 20 square  kilometer mudbrick city. Now it looks like small bumps in the desert.

The archaeologists are working on excavating these piles of dirt and reconstructing one of the main palaces.

The palace contains many rooms. These little undecorated ones were likely used for storage.

The reconstruction and preservation efforts are still underway.

Many of the rooms were decorated with little animals. This one likely represents a sea lion.

This wall was covered in fish and pelicans.

Many walls were covered with this deep diamond pattern.

This was another pattern found on some walls.

Most of these walls are restored, and sealed on top with a hard waterproof covering as well as having tarps added overtop. It was difficult to tell which parts were original and which were recreated.

For the most part they probably know the basic floorplan, and a few of the symbols that make the pattern, but have filled in the gaps in the reconstruction.

Many of the symbols are very blocky, like a really low resolution graphic.

But others have smooth edges.

Some you can’t tell what animal they represent, if they represent an animal at all.

The dots on the bottom of this one seemed oddly irregular in size.

Most of the walls are very low because there was not much left after over 500 years of desert wind.

This is a reservoir they formed inside.

The water would not have been suitable for drinking, so they think they used it for ceremonial purposes.

This is the entrance to the large tomb. Most of the contents were looted by grave robbers.

This morning we visited the pyramids of the sun and moon.

These large pyramids are made of adobe.

The adobe bricks are made out of mud, which is formed into a brick and then left in the sun to dry. Then they are stacked and extra mud is added in between layers as mortar.

Most of the bricks are about normal brick size, but some of the ones for the wall outside were much larger.

Some of the bricks had marks indicating which family made them. Brick making was like paying taxes, each family had to contribute a certain number to the construction of the temple.

They were built between 100CE and 700CE  by the Moche people.

Before the pyramids were excavated they just looked like giant dirt hills in the desert.

The temple of the sun has not been excavated at all.

It was the larger of the two temples with 11 levels, and about 140 million mud bricks, but the Spanish conquistadors diverted the river to destroy about 3/4 of it.

There was once a small City between the two pyramids.

This is what they think it looked like.

They are starting to excavate some of the other buildings.

The temple of the moon is built right at the base of a small mountain, which was considered sacred. It is about 290m wide by 210m long, and 32m tall.

This is what it looked like in 1998, before they started excavating.

Inside the temple at the base of the mountain they found evidence of sacrifices.

The remains of a wall are found in front of the pyramid, running toward the mountain.

The brick walls were covered with more clay, engraved with designs and painted.

They have a weird blocky appearance, like old video game villains.

This temple of the moon had five floors, but only one was used at a time.

When the bottom floor was full, they would fill in the entire floor with bricks and build a new level on top. This eventually resulted in a pyramid shape, over a period of almost 600 years.

This guy was Ai apaec, their main god, who created the Universe.

This is him again, but from the floor above. He looks similar, but this one was drawn about 70 years after the first one, and the first one was already buried.

There were other murals depicting more minor gods, but they are not as well preserved.

The Moche had no written language and disappeared in the 7th century. Thus we don’t know very much about these characters.

But this guy doesn’t seem very happy.

One area was decorated with a man being pounced on by a large cat, over and over again.

One place had these coloured spirals.

This is the facade of the temple. It faced away from the desert winds, so it was covered by sand but not eroded by the blowing sand.

The layers are covered in very intricate murals.

Each row had something different, repeated over and over. One row was men holding hands.

And one row was men carrying things.

Then came a row of the god that archaeologists have nicknamed spiderman.

Above that is less well preserved and harder to see from the ground, but there is another row of men, followed by some two-headed serpents.

There was a large mural at the bottom on the left hand side.

Archaeologists aren’t sure what most of it means, but they think this section represents some sort of fight, and the winner is holding up the head of the loser while the vultures eat the loser’s remains.

There is definitely a lot of stuff going on in the mural.

I’m pretty sure this is one of the toys from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

It was a pretty impressive temple.