M
ore than a thousand years ago in
what is now Peru, the site of El
Castillo de Huarmey was among
the land’s most sacred places;
University of Warsaw archae-
ologist Miłosz Giersz was sure of it. Plenty of
people had warned Giersz that excavating there
would be difficult and almost certainly a waste of
time and money. Looters had already been tun-
neling into the massive hill, searching for ancient
tombs and treasure. Located on the coast, a four-
hour drive north of Lima, what was once a holy
place was pitted with holes, looking
more like a moonscape littered with
ancient human bones, and strewn
with modern trash.Looking past the debris, Giersz was entranced
by the bits of textiles and broken pottery he saw
dotting the slopes. They came from Peru’s little-
known Wari civilization, whose heartland lay far
to the south. In 2010 Giersz and a small research
team began investigating by imaging what lay
underground with a magnetometer and taking
aerial photos from a camera sailing above on a
kite. The results revealed something that gen-
erations of grave robbers had missed: the faint
outlines of buried walls running along a rocky
southern spur.
Working with Peruvian archaeologist Roberto
Pimentel Nita, Giersz and his team dug there,
and the faint outline turned out to be a massive
maze of towers and high walls spread over theTHE
WARI
EMPIRE
circa 600
Wari culture emerges
from the rugged terrain
of the Ayacucho Valley
in western South
America.circa 700
The Wari become the
dominant power in the
region. They establish
and govern large
settlements.PA IR OF
SMILES
Two ceramic jars,
adorned with smiling
faces (above), were
among more than a
thousand artifacts
recovered from the
tomb at El Castillo.
RROBERT CLARK/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICOBERT CLARK/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
FOUR-CORNERED HAT, WARI TEXTILES, SEVENTH TO NINTH CENTURY.
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART/ART RESOURCE/SCALA, FLORENCE