PERU - Shielding of the World's Largest Ancient City

"Peru shields an ancient city of sand from strong storms" PBS NewsHour 12/23/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In northern Peru, workers are fortifying the ancient site of Chan Chan, once the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on the world.  Earlier this year climatologists predicted strong El Nino weather effects in 2015, threatening rain in a desert climate that rarely gets any.  Jeffrey Brown reports on the efforts to preserve and protect Peru’s heritage from the elements.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  It looks like a giant sand castle, its walls and towers slowly being reclaimed by the earth.

This is the ancient city of Chan Chan.  Nine square miles-wide, it was once the largest in the Americas and the largest adobe city in the world.  It served as the center of political, legislative and religious life for the Chimu people, who ruled this region from the ninth century until the late 1400s, when they were conquered by the Incas.

Here, you get a hint of the splendor before and after restoration of palace ceremonial halls, all of it in one of the driest regions on the planet.

LUIS JAIME CASTILLO, Deputy Minister of Culture, Peru:  This is much more of a desert than Saudi Arabia.  There’s no rain for 15 years, and then one day, boom.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Booming, rushing, flooding.  These images from February 1998 show the impact of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino at its worst, drenching the region, destroying homes, bridges and endangering the lives of those who live nearby, as well as the thousands of archaeological sites that dot the land here, slicing through centuries-old adobe walls and smearing away paintings more than 1,000 years old.

Peru’s deputy cultural minister, Luis Jaime Castillo, was a young archaeologist when one of the most devastating El Ninos hit his country.

LUIS JAIME CASTILLO:  In ’83, when I was like in my early 20s, the El Nino happened and took everybody by surprise.  I mean, we were not prepared.  In the past, the Chimu would do lots of human sacrifices to prevent the rain from falling.  We cannot do that anymore.

JEFFREY BROWN:  No, that’s not allowed, even at the Culture Ministry.

LUIS JAIME CASTILLO:  No.  No.  Well, but we can invest some money, which we can put, unleash the archaeologists to do their work.

JEFFREY BROWN:  It can look as simple and as daunting as this, a local worker with a syringe squirting water into a crack to reinforce an adobe wall.