When the Spanish conquistador Hernando Pizarro arrived at Pachacamac in January 1533, he had before him one of the jewels of the Inca Empire. This extraordinary site covers nearly 600ha and consists of three concentric areas. The Sacred Precinct, near the sea, contains the principal temples; the Second Precinct holds many monumental mudbrick buildings, including elite residences known as ramp pyramids, as well as streets and stately courts and plazas; the Third Precinct, the largest and least explored, has today been consumed by the desert, whose dunes cover the buildings forming the suburbs of Pachacamac. ‘We arrived,’ Pizarro says, ‘in this city that seems very old because most of the buildings are in ruins.’ Archaeological research has since vindicated his judgement; the site’s long occupation is summarised in the table on p.26. The conquistador described the city as extremely large with beautiful buildings featuring ‘terraces as in Spain’.
Nearly 500 years later, as the morning mist lingers over the immense ruins, I think about how the site appeared at the height of its splendour. Over the course of my excavations, I have also tried to understand what the city was like before the Incas arrived, when both the site and its inhabitants were known by the name of Ychsma. For 25 years, I have been conducting research in Pachacamac under the auspices of the Université libre de Bruxelles, ULB Foundation, and the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, to establish a better understanding of the city that Pizarro described.
The terraced buildings that caught the Spaniard’s eye are what we now call pyramids with ramps. After dedicating more than a decade to the systematic excavation of these buildings and piecing together the political power structure of the chiefdom of Ychsma, we are now interested in its main deity, who was also called Ychsma, before being renamed Pachacamac by the Incas. They made his worship one of the main oracular cults of their empire and organised amazing pilgrimages in the god’s honour.
