Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2023 - 36

that included many of the same structures as
the palaces, but on a much smaller scale. Chan
Chan's commoners, it was thought, lived and
worked in small wattle-and-daub structures
in four neighborhoods spread across the city.
" The sharp social stratifcation of Chimú society
is very clear in the architecture, " says Joanne
Pillsbury, curator of ancient American art at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. " There are
extreme differences in the scale and quality of
building materials and ornament. "
For much of the last fve decades, there has
Chan Chan
Trujillo
PERU
been little investigation of Chan Chan. " Chan
Chan is greatly understudied considering its
importance, " says Tulane University biological
anthropologist John Verano. An exception has been ongoing
excavations conducted by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture that
began in 2006 and have focused on the palaces and especially the
funerary platforms, or huacas. For the past several years, archaeologists
have excavated the imposing Huaca Toledo on the east
50
100 miles
have made have begun to upend the traditional
view of the neighborhoods and redefne who
lived in Chan Chan. They have found that
these areas were much more ethnically diverse
than previously believed and, in some cases, the
people much better off. The work has also suggested
that some families in the neighborhoods
may have flled a special role in Chimú society.
Prieto believes that some of the children who
were sacrifced during one of multiple mass
sacrifce events that are known to have occurred
in Chimú history were either born in or moved
to Chan Chan before these ceremonies, which
were crucial to how the Chimú envisioned the
world and their place in it.
T
he Chimú were successors to the people of the
Moche culture, whose rulers controlled much of
northern Peru from about a.d. 200 to 900. According
to the 1604 Anonymous History of Trujillo, written by a Spanish
chronicler who recorded Chimú oral histories,
the frst Chimú king was Taycanamo, who
came to the Moche Valley from the sea, having
sailed there on a raft made of balsa logs, a design
typical of the north. But the idea that the Chimú
founder came from elsewhere may be more
myth than reality. " The Chimú are the same
people who have lived on the coast of Peru
for as long as there have been people living
there, " says Cutright. " There's no evidence
of any major population replacement, and
instead we should think about shifts in political
organization and cultural identity. " Once new
generations started to call themselves Chimú,
Prieto says, they tried to detach from the past
and wipe the slate clean. " Chan Chan doesn't
emerge out of nowhere, but is distinctly and
consciously different from Moche or anything
else before, " says archaeologist Alicia Boswell of
Chan Chan, which was built up over about 450 years, was the
largest adobe city in the world.
side of the city, which, sixteenth-century sources report, once
contained an enormous treasure of gold and silver belonging
to the Chimú king. During the recent excavations, the team
discovered fne tapestries and decorated ceramics, evidence of
important burials once placed in the platform.
In 2022, Prieto returned to Chan Chan to excavate the
neighborhood on the southwest side of the city and reexamine
how average residents had lived. " We thought we knew that
these types of neighborhoods were inhabited by artisans and
craft specialists-silversmiths, weavers, wood-carvers-from a
low social class who worked full-time for the needs and desires
of the Chimú kings and queens, " he says. " But archaeology
changes all the time and there are new techniques and new
things to learn. " Thus far, the discoveries Prieto and his team
36
Marine motifs, including fish, decorate many of the walls of
Chan Chan's palaces, a sign of the Chimú's dependence on the
sea to support the city's huge population.
ARCHAEOLOGY * May/June 2023
Pativilca River
Casma River
Jequetepeque River
Archaeology Magazine - May/June 2023

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