Pachacamac: The Larger Zarahemla Capital – Part II

Continuing from the previous post regarding the larger area of Zarahemla, or what might be called the County of Zarahemla, being larger than the Land of Zarahemla, which of course is larger than the City of Zarahemla, and including several other city sites, such as Huaca San Borja within the city of Lima.

Huaca San Borja, situated on what is now the corner of Canada Avenue and Arqueologia in the district of San Borja in Lima

    The site is a 26-foot tall step pyramid surrounded on three sides by adobe structures. Inside are enclosures, passages, and uneven floors on a section of land that was mostly flat with a gentle downward slope of conglomerate, a soil deposited from the alluvial fan formed by the Rimac, which deposited nearly a thousand feet of rounded pebbles, coarse sand and small amounts of fine sand and silt in the valley. The site was literally out in the middle of nowhere, and just farmland until about forty years ago, surviving the devastating Lima sprawl that absorbed numerous small sites throughout the valleys.

 

Huaca San Borja was built with the same mud-brick system as Huaca Pucllana

    The river nearby now is a modern canal from the Rimac River, and today the area has a wide variety of birds that frequent the district. The site was constructed by a culture that had been centered in Pachacamac, and is surrounded by a mud wall enclosing three out of the four sides of the huaca, with a second inner perimeter wall that encloses rooms, corridors and platforms at different levels. possibly constructed by the Ichma culture and resembles pyramid foundations made of mud brick in the region. Inside there are enclosures, passages and uneven levels yet  unexplored. The site includes not only the Huaca San Borja but also the Huaca Limatambo (not currently open to the public), and Santa Catalina, each pre-Inca strtuctures, as is the Surco river (an old irrigation canal) which traverses the district in a northeast to southwest direction.

    Limatambo, once known only as the "Huacas de Lince," was a busy town surrounded by fields, and second in size only to Maranga. Only two structuctres still exist today, located on the edge of San Isidro and La Victoria in Lima, the rest having been buried beneath the expanding sprawl of the city. Thanks to a drawing and map by explorer Adolphe F. Bandelier, we know that originally the site consisted of a large settlement enclosed by a wall that surrounded eleven other structures.

The Great Pyramid of Limatambo as it appeared in 1904 when first discovered by Bandelier who named it, and from 1892-1904, found "ruins in the Rimac [Lima] valley in every direction, some on the valley slopes, as well as along the seashore, there were numerous vestiges of former aboriginal habitations." He originally called Pachacamac "Irma" 

    The other site there is La Victoria: Huaca Santa Catalina,  a stepped pyramid with a temple located on the top along the right side of the pyramid with numerous colcas (storage rooms), with the overall structure made of rectangular bricks of different shapes and a surrounding wall plastered with mud.

     In the middle of a triangle between the center of Lima, Callao and Magdelana del Mar, about two miles from San Borja, is the area of Huaca Tres Palos, which dates to the first century A.D.—a perfect time when Zarahemla  needed to expand, in the period following the crucifixion when Zarahemla was rebuilt and during the Nephite Golden Age of 200 years of construction, peace and expansion. Tres Palos, which includes several remains of monumental pyramids built of adobe and other strutures such as housing complexes, walls and canals. It is dated to 100 A.D., another of the complexes in Old Lima that date to the Nephite Golden Age of expansion in the Zarahemla area.

The massive Huaca Tres Palos, 15 miles north along the coast from Pachacamac, in an area that was once open farmland. Like all this area, most of the sites have been destroyed by the sprawl of Lima

    Another site is in the very middle of the San Isidro neighborhood in Lima, is a site that used to be known as Huaca Pan de Azucar (“sugar loaf”) and now called Huaca Huallamarca. This site also dates to 200 B.C. and was occupied continually until the Spanish conquest, when it was occupied by the Hualla culture. The remains of the Maranga, Chancay, Lima and Huari-Tiawanaku people have been found here.

Huaca Huallamarca has been restored and the mud bricks assembled and smoothed out giving it a very new appearance. Unfortunatly, its restoration was not along the lines of its original construction, which was a truncated pyramid

    The history of the "Huaca Huallamarca" (“people of the Hualla”) goes back to the last century B.C. or a little earlier when "Hualla" from the Lima Culture occupied the complex. It is 410’-feet long by 240-feet wide, with a conical shape, so it was called “Sugar Loaf,” located in the area today known as San Isidro, and was one of the main settlements of the cultural tradition Pinazo Peruvian central coast, but later abandoned in the third century A.D., about the time that the final Nephite wars with the Lamanites broke out, and in which Zarahemla was soon lost, along with all of the land Southward.
    The name Huaca Huallamarca was given it in the 1930s by Julio C. Tello, who called the entire area between the current districts of Lince and Miraflores ”Wallamarka” (Huallamarca). Originally it was a stepped pyramid, but its reconstruction was begun with no intention of replicating that original design when a minor archaeologist, Dr. Jimenez Borja made excessive assumptions about the characteristics of the building, with its design obviously meant to attract tourists. As an example, there was no ramp at the front of the building, yet the restoration has one that dominates the structure.
    Excavations carried out in the 1990s revealed instead a series of pyramidal structures superimposed on the summit venues connected with passages and stairways and yellow painted walls dominated the area. It is believed that its original purpose was to serve as a place for worshiping for the tribes of the Lima Culture. During the time of the regional development the big pyramid was built. It was constructed completely with adobe bricks, shaped by hand and assembled to platforms (one over the other) to create enclosures, patios, passageways and private areas. Everything was painted in a yellowish color. Side ramps were built to reach the different levels. During the early stages, the first burials were quite simple. The bodies were placed in an extended position, wrapped in cotton cloths and tied to a reed stretcher. The offerings placed around the head consisted of ceramic pots and food for the afterlife.
    As time passed by, new urban and cultural centers arose in the valley. In this second phase burials became more elaborate. Funerary bodies were wrapped in woven cloth and buried with textiles, decorated ceramic pots, gourds, tools, musical instruments, food and other valuable objects.

Huacas of Mateo Salado in Lima is a set of five monumental pyramids in the midst of urban town—in ancient times this was the seat of the chiefdom of Lima

    At Mateo Salado, or Cinco Cerritos (Five Hills), in San Miguel, a site of five pyramids (sometimes referred to as Huaca Azcona), are located at the confluence of the district of Cercado de Lima, Brena and Pueblo Libre near the Plaza de la Bandera, with a total area exceeding 20 hectares (about three-fourths [.077] of a square mile). Today, as a result of Lima sprawl, the complex has been split into three sectors. Much had been lost to urban expansion by 2000 when it was finally claimed as a Cultural Heritage of the Nation and an archaeological zone, but many sculptures archaeological pieces, walls, bricks, etc., had already been carried off or destroyed.
    The largest pyramid at 59-feet (about six stories tall) is located on a large rectangular esplanade, surrounded by four walls that rise and are superimposed on each terrace, forming streets and narrow passages. Because of its size it would have been the main temple complex. The second pyramid in size is located near the district of Brena and consists of a series of enclosures and places of great size, probably served as a palace for the ruling elite. The other three pyramids are smaller than the first two likely of less importance in occupancy, such as lower government officials, etc.

In front of the monuments a number of places that served as visitor centers, with one, an ushnu, or religious structure used for ceremonial events, with a large protective wall at one end. The later style of these buildings shows a discarding of the adobitos method and building mud walls on top of large adobes, became the construction method—which suggests an enlargement of the area, or a growth pattern within the area. When considering the overall development needed in the area of Zarahemla among the Nephites from about 100 B.C. to about 300 A.D., there is a considerably important match in growth activity in Pachacamac to Lima (an expanse today called the Lima Metropolitan Area) probably about the size in Nephite times as that of the today’s City of Provo, which is 44 square miles, an area from Orenm to Springville).
(See the next post, “Pachacamac: The Larger Zarahemla Capital – Part III,” for more information on the Nephite capital and its location and the development of other parts of the city of Zarahemla)