Peru is known as the land of the Inca but it's also home to more than 25 earlier cultures, each with its own rituals, traditions and languages. Some archaeologists claim there were three such cultures in the Greater Lima area, the Lima (100 AD), Wari (600 AD) and Ichma (1100 AD), that all left behind huacas in what is now Peru's capital city. Yet, at the same time these archaeologists claim the huacas in Lima date back to at least 500 BC.
Some of these huacas are small, others cover vast acreage, like El Paraíso, which is located in the Chillón Valley at the northern end of Lima in the theSan Martin de Porres district, and covers 50 hectares, making it roughly the size of 95 football fields. Archaeologists claim all these archaeological ruins hold clues to understanding the people who once walked Lima's streets. However, without knowing who built these pyramidal complexes, it is very difficult to determine any knowledge of the people who later occupied them, like the Lima, Wari and Ichma, but did not build them.
As mentioned earlier, in Lima are more than 400 known huacas and some may still be undiscovered. They are not concentrated in one part of Lima. Rather, huacas can be found across the city, hidden on residential streets and sandwiched between small businesses. They are everywhere, and maybe that's why they're in danger of disappearing as local people become less and less interested in them.
Presently, there are an estimated 46,000 historical sites all across Peru, with 400 located in Lima,which is home to the biggest number pre-Inca archaeological zones of any city in South America. However, about 60% of the 400 huacas in Lima are classified as threatened, and approximately 220 are endangered. These unsecure sites lack protective fencing, police supervision and other basic security features, and like in the past, many will be lost to future generations.
• San Borja. San Borja is a district of the Lima Province in Peru, and one of the upscale districts that comprise the city of Lima—it took its name from a former hacienda (estate) which dominated the area. It is a district largely of the upper, upper middle and middle class, about 560 feet elevation.
There are two archaeological sites in San Borja: Huaca San Borja and Huaca Limatambo. These were built in pre-Inca times. The Surco river (an old irrigation canal), traverses the district in a northeast to southwest direction, and is also pre-Inca. In fact, while the San Borja pyramidal complex was built long before the Ichma culture, it was used by the Ichma and the Inca after them.
The Ichma were a loosely organized kingdom that developed in the Lurin and Rimac valleys, centered in Pachacamac. The San Borja site was farmland literally out in the middle of nowhere, until about forty years ago, surviving the devastating Lima sprawl that absorbed numerous small huacas sites throughout the valleys.
The San Borja complex is a 26-foot-high truncated or stepped pyramid made of dried adobe bricks. It is surrounded by an adobe brick wall with the perimeter wall originally painted white. There is a second, inner perimeter wall that encloses rooms, corridors and platforms at different levels with uneven floors on a section of land that was mostly flat with a gentle downward slope. The ground was 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 abandoned at the beginning of the colonial period. During the Republic, a house was built on top, but it has recently been removed during renovation, and the site is now open to the public.
The 18½-mile Surco Canal, one of the ancient canals dug by an ancient culture from the Rimac River in San Borja for irrigation and is still in use for the same purpose today. In an area that has grown ten-fold in the last 50 years, destroying layers of its history, these canals remain almost untouched that has brought needed water to the agricultural people who anciently lived here—from which they developed luxurious green farmland in the midst of the coastal desert.
Some of the original canals are still in use but given that most have been excluded from official urban narratives, it seems quite surprising that in such a pressurized urban context, these canals were still working for the city 2000 years after they were constructed without most of the people knowing about them. In the words of Peruvian architect Juan Gunther, a specialist in pre-Hispanic Lima, this ancient irrigation system was one of the most important works of hydraulic engineering in ancient Peru and the least known to the population of Lima.
This was an issue often debated by archaeologists, architects and other specialists for decades, but outside academia few people knew about the canals and their role in the city. This lack of awareness resulted in the people of Lima considering this man-made canal infrastructure to be natural rivers. In a city where it never rains (two-tenths of an inch per year, making it a “hyper arid” desert), these ancient canals provided water from a source via a method unknown to most of the people in the city.
• Huaca Limatambo:
Between the two neighboring administrative areas of Maranga and Sulcovilca is huaca Limatambo, second in size only to Maranga. Once a busy town surrounded by fields, and second in size only to Maranga. Only two structures 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, but only two still exist on the edge of San Isidro and in La Victoria. No one knows what the town of Limatambo was really called—that name was given to what little remained of the deteriorating site in around 1904, before that the area was referred to only as the “Huacas de Lince.” What we do know is that Limatambo was given life by an arm of the Guacta (Huatica) canal that was built by the population’s ancestors centuries before, and that it was the main settlement in the area, only slightly smaller than the city of Maranga.
Before being buried beneath expanding Lima, in the era when Peruvians cared nothing for their long indigenous history, a simple map in 1892 was drawn up by explorer Adolphe F. Bandelier, the eminent scholar and historian of ancient Peru. This map had the ancient structure of Limatambo located on the Hacienda de Lince, which consisted of a large settlement enclosed by a wall, surrounded by 11 other structures. He also saw in the Rimac bottom “numerous ruins in every direction, and on some of the valley slopes, as well as along the seashore” (Frederick Webb Hodge, "Bandelier’s Researches in Peru and Bolivia," America Anthropologist, vol.10, no.9, American Anthropological Association, Washington, September 1887, p303)
The huaca Limatambo is as old as San Borja; however, Limatambo is not open to the public as archaeological studies are presently ongoing.
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