ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

When Walter Alva visited the Peruvian village of Sipan in early 1987,
following a tip-off from the police, he found the place deserted. Almost
all its 200 inhabitants were atop a dirt mound in a sugar cane field nearby,
frantically digging. A couple of weeks earlier, 10 grave-robbers had stumbled
upon a series of pre-Columbian royal tombs there. By the time Alva arrived,
an entire tomb had been stripped bare.

Police in this area of northern Peru, about 600 kilometres from the
capital, Lima, were alerted to the looting by a flood of items on the black
market – golden jaguar masks, warrior amulets, necklaces of gold and silver,
and earrings inlaid with turquoise. The booty they confiscated included
33 of the finest pre-Columbian gold and silver objects Alva had ever seen
in his career as an archaeologist and curator of the Bruning Archaeological
Museum in the nearby town of Lambayeque. Alva is convinced that if the plunderers
had not been disturbed they would have completely demolished the top of
the site’s adobe pyramid, centrepiece of a complex containing at least five
further burial vaults.

Since then, excavations at Huaca Rajada, as the site near Sipan is known,
have revealed the richest tombs ever uncovered in the Americas, which have
yielded invaluable information about the mysterious Moche culture (‘Riches
from the unlooted tomb’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 17 October 1992). The Moches ruled
Peru’s north coast from AD 100 to 800, yet chronicles of the Spanish conquest
make no mention of them. Until the discovery at Sipan the Moches seemed
to have disappeared almost without trace – the few clues that had been gleaned
about their culture came from beautifully detailed pottery found at looted
tombs and settlements. At Sipan, for the first time, archaeologists arrived
in time to unearth unlooted Moche burial chambers.

The plundering of the site that took place before the scientists stepped
in turned a spotlight onto Peru’s looters. Armed police and archaeologists
now keep a 24-hour vigil at Huaca Rajada. And in January this year police
and scientists joined forces in an unprecedented effort to stop the sacking
of pre-Columbian sites throughout the north of Peru. ‘If this model works,
it could be used elsewhere,’ says Alva, who directs excavations at Huaca
Rajada.

Worldwide, the smuggling of antiquities is a multibillion dollar business
– an underground industry rivalled only by drugs and arms trafficking. Officials
believe that Peru’s heritage is being sold off faster than any other. The
new anti-looting plan aims to counter this trade by targeting villagers
who rob ancient sites, rewarding informers and introducing an intensive
public education campaign to bring home the economic benefits of preserving
antiquities, rather than selling them. At the forefront of this drive is
Armando Martinez, who leads a team that has been specially trained in identifying
antiquities and the operating methods of traffickers. Martinez’s officers
are drawn from the Elite Corps of Peru’s national police – a group usually
more accustomed to tracking Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorists than
antiquity traffickers.

Some authorities claim the fanfare accompanying the discoveries at Sipan
renewed interest in looting. But archaeologists argue that grave-robbing
has been going on since the Spanish conquest, when the first European invaders
sacked Inca burial grounds. In the 1960s, there was a particularly spectacular
looting incident at the unexcavated ruins of Vicus, 50 kilometres from the
northern city of Piura. Droves of treasure seekers descended upon the site,
and 2000 pre-Columbian tombs are thought to have been ransacked by the time
the authorities intervened. For years, Sunday outings for the locals have
regularly included a stop to dig at a huaca, as these ancient sacred sites
are called. Huaqueros, the Quechua Indian term for looters, once even diverted
the Moche River to gain access to a pyramid. ‘Looting was a problem that
already existed, but no one wanted to recognise it,’ said Alva, who developed
the prevention strategy as a desperate response to Peru’s lackadaisical
enforcement of laws aimed at antiquities trafficking.

Lure of looting

In a country where an estimated 75 per cent of people live in poverty,
the lure of illicit gains is strong. Just last year, in a shanty town outside
Lima, people digging a well uncovered 600-year-old skeletons from the Ichma
culture. Rather than report the find, they scavenged for marketable artefacts,
destroying the burial chambers. At that site, and thousands of others where
pre-Columbian cultures like the Inca, Chimu, Nazca and Paracas flourished,
pottery shards and pieces of centuries-old bones blanket the ground – reminders
of the incursions that have robbed scientists of information about Peru’s
ancient kingdoms.

Looters have become so bold that burial grounds are no longer their
only target. Last year at the National University of San Antonio Abad’s
archaeological museum in Cuzco, thieves made away with 58 gold and silver
necklaces as well as figurines, brooches and other objects. When the robbers
were caught 36 hours later, the treasures had already been melted for their
silver and gold.

Seven months later, officials at the National Museum of Anthropology
and Archaeology in Lima discovered that three finely woven Paracas mantles
had vanished. The Paracas culture, which thrived from around 1800 BC to
500 BC, is renowned for its mantles, tapestries depicting repeated designs
of fish, two-headed serpents and tiny human figures carrying decapitated
heads. Only a year earlier another had been stolen from the same collection.
It was later found in the toilet at Lima’s international airport. Archaeologists
suspect that museums are robbed to fill orders from collectors abroad.

Looters have become increasingly violent, and archaeologists are a prime
target. Once when Alva was driving with the Norwegian anthropologist Thor
Heyerdahl, who is directing an excavation at Tucume in the north of Peru,
a looter’s relatives tried to run them off the road. The year before, a
group of students and their leader Christopher Donnan, a Moche scholar
who is curator of the Museum of Cultural History at the University of California
in Los Angeles, were confronted by gunmen at a site not far away. And in
1987, after a looter was shot dead in a police raid at Sipan, archaeologists
started receiving death threats.

Peru has had anti-looting laws since 1929, but few looters have been
caught and punished. There are no police figures showing the numbers of
people arrested on looting charges. Until now it has been rare for officials
to catch looters in the act and therefore difficult to convict them. Police
were more likely either to simply confiscate suspect antiquities, or to
accept bribes to overlook the crime.

This year, however, things have started to change. Alva has begun to
feel safe enough to stop carrying a gun. Under the new policing scheme,
more than 150 looters have been arrested and 2000 artefacts recovered –
200 of them from one man. Popular superstition holds that God will not punish
the robbing of ancient graves in the week leading up to Easter, and this
year’s Holy Week saw the usual upsurge in looting. ‘We detained almost 100
people and confiscated picks, shovels and other tools used by looters,’
says Martinez. One patrol car stumbled upon 200 people digging at a single
site. ‘What happens is that someone in the village reports finding gold,
so the whole town goes out to loot.’

Martinez’s team has had considerable success, but it remains a part-time
force. Archaeologists are now lobbying for a special police squad dedicated
to antiquities trafficking. The proposal is now with the Peruvian government,
which recently established an ecology police force to combat pollution and
enforce legislation to protect endangered species. ‘The normal police cannot
do this alone,’ says Martinez. ‘When local police officers get close to
a site, the looters run and hide in the sugar cane fields so they are not
permanently stopped.’ He points out that only a specially trained force
would have the knowledge and resources to keep track of what was going on.
Regular visits to established sites and surprise raids on illicit digs are
needed to deter looters, he believes.

Aerial surveillance is already helping the anti-looting campaign. Every
six weeks, archaeologists fly with Peruvian air force pilots over the Lambayeque
Valley. This 100-kilometre corridor was once dominated by the Moches and
contains hundreds of undisturbed sites as well as some, such as Huaca Rajada,
that have already been excavated. The archaeological importance of this
area is immense: an estimated 90 per cent of the country’s prehispanic gold
has been traced to the region. Aerial surveillance allows the scientists
to chart mounds that may conceal ancient complexes and sites where looters
are working. Alva wants to intensify the surveillance, and hopes by the
end of the year to be flying over the area twice monthly.

Meanwhile, public attitudes to looting are slowly changing. For a start,
locals are being persuaded to report any illicit activities – sometimes
encouraged by rewards. And with a new emphasis in state schools on learning
about ancient cultures, Alva hopes that a generation of children will grow
up valuing their heritage. Digs such as the one at Sipan have helped bring
the subject to life. And in that part of the country, particular emphasis
is placed on Moche culture, with pupils able to visit Huaca Rajada and talk
to excavators there.

The police are doing their bit to educate older Peruvians. When they
recover artefacts or find villagers sacking sites, they lecture lawbreakers
about the shortsightedness of robbing their forebears’ graves. The reward
for villagers is in any case often no more than a few dollars, it is the
middlemen who make whopping profits. ‘We are trying to instil in people
the value of the past and their national roots,’ says Alva. He is spearheading
efforts to combine archaeology and tourism as a way to bring economic development
to northern Peru – in the hope that prosperity will diminish the lure of
looting. ‘The population is responding well. We’ve been giving talks to
the people about why they have to protect the past of their ancestors and
also their future – tourism.’ Sipan is now one of the most visited pre-Columbian
sites on the country’s tourist circuit. It joins the mountaintop complex
of Machu Picchu, former capital of the Inca empire outside Cuzco, the nearby
fortress of Sacsahuman, and the Nazca lines sketched onto the coastal desert
plain south of Lima.

Saving the sites

Not every element of the anti-looting programme has proved so successful,
though. The most controversial scheme – hiring huaqueros to help archaeologists
– lasted just a few months. Alva is reluctant to discuss the disappearance
of three copper items from Huaca Rajada after one huaquero joined the staff.
But he does pinpoint a more basic problem: even when working on official
excavations, former grave-robbers see the dig simply as a search for valuable
objects and do not take the same scientific care as archaeologists.

Despite his efforts to change attitudes, Alva remains committed to a
direct method of preventing looting: making sure that scientists get to
the ancient treasures first. ‘The only way we can save the sites is to put
archaeologists there,’ explains Alva. But shortage of funds is thwarting
his aims. Money raised through the small entrance fee for visitors to Sipan
and to the Bruning Museum where the Sipan treasures are now kept is ploughed
back into the dig. But to reach his goal of maintaining just three digs
in northern Peru he still has to scramble for sponsorship from local and
international sources. Sipan is the only permanent excavation being undertaken
by Peruvian scientists, though some US universities are involved in part-time
excavations in the north.

But for Martinez the way forward lies elsewhere. His years in law enforcement
lead him to draw the boundaries of the problem more widely. He laments the
fact that there have been no arrests of rich collectors in Lima, international
investors or other key players in the sophisticated network that disposes
of the ancient contraband. He believes that only a police squad versed
in black market operations can identify the groups that are looting and
selling these goods. Without such a force, he argues, there is no way of
stemming the flow of Peru’s heritage to rich dealers and collectors in the
US, Europe and Japan.

Mary Dempsey is a writer who specialises in Latin America.