28 ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2018

middle- and lower-class neighborhoods. And most of it was still

standing, preserved by the desert environment and protected

by the site’s remote location.

As Vogel mapped El Purgatorio and excavated both the cen-

ter and outlying neighborhoods, she began to piece together

T

he turn-off from the Pan-American High-

way into Peru’s Casma Valley, a five-hour,

200 -mile drive up the coast from Lima,

reveals a forbidding landscape. The foothills

of the Andes loom over a bone-dry desert

interspersed with sand dunes. “Except for

maybe the occasional cactus, it’s all just sand and rocks,” says

Melissa Vogel, an archaeologist at Clemson University who

has been traveling there to excavate since 2004. She studies

Peru’s little-known Casma state, which had its capital city in

this valley between a.d. 700 and 1400 —a period during which

the environment was even more hostile. Devastating droughts

punctuated by unpredictable storms had already brought one

dominant culture, the Moche, to its knees. So when Vogel

first visited this area she expected to find, at best, evidence of

a small city eking out an existence.

Instead, she uncovered signs of a flourishing society. The

city of El Purgatorio—named for a nearby mountain called

that by Spanish conquistadores, who were perhaps reminded

of the peak Dante climbs in the Purgatory section of his

Divine Comedy—once covered about two square miles, a far

greater area than Vogel had imagined. “I was shocked,” she

says. “It’s enormous.” Enclosed plazas dotted the elite heart of

El Purgatorio, with similar, more modest structures anchoring

A gold and copper plaque (top) and a wall relief (above)

both depict a Moche god now known as the Decapitator. The

Moche, who preceded the Casma, were ruled by priests who

drew their authority from such fearsome deities.