Scattered throughout the deserts of southern Peru are spectacular remains of ancient civilizations.

From the air you can learn about the Nasca people.

From the cities, about the Spaniards.

On lakeshores, the monument building Incas.

And in between, there are civilizations on the wild side.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

A group of concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of our desert areas.

♪ music ♪ The Incas were best known for construction of magnificent cities like Cuzco and Machu Picchu.

But their far-flung empire extended to the very limits of the driest desert in the world.

That's where our journey begins.

My archaeologist friend Axel Nielsen and I won't travel the 300 miles to the mountain stronghold of Cuzco.

We're more interested in the lesser known region where the desert meets the sea.

Throughout the region the Incas superimposed their culture on people and civilizations that had been around for thousands of years.

They were called the Incas because of their supreme leader who they thought of as a god.

He was the Inca.

I wouldn't mind having a house here, apart from here.

That's right.

We are in Puerta Inca, a vacation resort in the southern coast of Peru.

Tradition has it that 500 years ago it used to be also a resort for the Inca, who'd come here to spend time near the sea with his court.

Archaeological research has established that one of the functions of this settlement was to capitalize the Inca trade along the coast of the empire and from here up across the Andes all the way to Cuzco, the capital of the empire.

The overland trip, which was done along the Inca road, would have taken between three and four days under normal conditions.

My gosh, Axel, look at the cloth.

That's gotta be old Inca cloth.

Yeah, that's right.

It's both cotton and wool.

Oh, my.

Oh, good heavens.

Look inside.

The looters have been here.

Yeah.

Look at the amount of bones.

So with all those bones, does that mean this was just a funerary chamber?

Yeah.

This is a tomb.

One of the distinctive things of this period is that some of the tombs resemble houses implying that these are the houses of the dead.

These are vertebrae from llamas.

So they would have been buried as an offering along with the.

Yeah.

That's fairly common.

.from a dead person.

It's very interesting because this could be some of the llamas that came in the ancient caravans from Cuzco to get the goodies from the sea that it would carry back to the Inca.

You can tell this was a collective burial because several of the bones are repeated.

For instance, you have two tibias here of different, very different size so you can tell they belonged to different individuals.

And you have a third and a fourth tibia.

In fact, that one is not even fused so it probably belonged to a young person.

You also have several fragments of skull and two pelvis here.

One of the things that struck the Spaniards when they got to Cuzco was that the Inca was able to have fresh fish for his meals.

And Puerta Inca was probably one of the places from where he got this fresh fish.

It would have taken about 30 to 35 hours taking relays from Puerta Inca all the way to Cuzco.

But the Inca was so powerful that he was able to manage all these powers.

From the point of view of archaeology, one of the beauties of the desert is that it preserves organic matter in an excellent way like nowhere else in the world.

This is such that you can still see on the surface of this settlement bones and textiles and all kinds of organic remains that would have never preserved in other environments.

You can tell that this was a place of trade because some of the textiles that are found in this tomb are cotton, like these ones, whereas these are made of wool that had to come from the highlands.

This site has a lot of buildings, it feeds a lot of people.

Yeah, it's very big.

How many people do you think might have lived here at the maximum?

Well, it's hard to tell but I would guess between 200 and 300 people perhaps.

They had to bring everything in except the seafood, right?

Exactly.

Well, this was a port of trade.

So probably they would have had a lot of caravans coming down from the highlands carrying all kinds of agricultural products.

In expanding their empire, they discovered evidence of remnants of even older civilizations.

Most notable were the Nasca people who lived between Cuzco and the coast.

These desert farmers carved out enigmatic figures, geometrically concise shapes that can only be appreciated from the air.

The most amazing remains we can find today of the Nasca people are the giant drawings or geoglyphs which this really means drawings on the earth that they left on these huge flats here between the mountains and the sea.

There are two kinds of drawings, geometrical figures which include trapezoids and triangles or simple lines that in some cases go for ten kilometers long in a perfect straight line.

The other kinds of figures they drew were animals, representations of animals and some plants.

And this is very interesting because the animals they picked to draw on these surfaces belonged some of them to the jungle, this is 400 miles on the other side of the Andes, like the monkey, or the parrot for instance, and some other animals belonged to the sea, to the seacoast or marine animals like the pelican, the heron or a fish, a whale.

The Nasca people were real desert people because it almost never rains in this area.

So how did they get the water to survive to farm their land.

In that sense they depended from the rains that fall on the Andean mountains.

So, which only fall between November and March.

This means that for them predicting the moving of the seasons and the moon or the sun was a very important way of monitoring the development of their production systems.

Throughout the Nasca plains you can see remains of the settlements of the Nasca people.

They tend to live dispersed and you can understand that when you see, I mean the little water you have anywhere and therefore the little farm that you could work in any given place.

So people were dispersed trying to take advantage of these little pockets of land and water resources.

But they had a great capital which was not a city or town in the sense we would think about it today.

It was more a ceremonial center where all these dispersed people will come together at certain times of the year to celebrate some of their rituals and weather related ceremonies.

Yeah, probably they didn't need them from a practical point of view but if you think about the way these cultures looked at the world, perhaps by performing the rituals that were involved in marking the lines, making the geoglyphs or even using them as pathways in special ceremonies, perhaps they thought they were making the sun to move.

Oh, sure, they're manipulative rather than commemorative.

Exactly.

You can think of them as like propitiatory magic.

Some wild theories have been proposed about how these geoglyphs were drawn because people have been puzzled by how people could draw on the ground these figures that they could not see from the ground but only could be seen from the air.

Some people have thought that they used hot air balloons for instance.

Can you imagine a cotton textile like flying in the sky.

That's hard to imagine, really.

Other peoples have thought about UFOs sort of directing this drawing operation.

Probably the explanation is quite simple.

If you have a scale model of the drawing you want to make and you use a string to measure some of the dimensions of this scale drawing, then you can multiply the strings as many times as you want and then use the strings as compasses on the ground to make points on the ground, etc.

When surveying the geoglyphs, archaeologists have been able to find the pivot points of these circles marked by rock herons or rock that stand out of the landscape because of the color.

So I think there is a good case for this simple method of drawing the geoglyphs.

When you look at their handiwork, when you look at the engineering abilities they had to build all these tunnels for irrigation, when you look at the geoglyphs they were able to build, then you must conclude that these Nasca people were in a very high stage of civilization.

There's a great deal of mystery about the Nasca lines and figures but it's not much of a mystery as to why they stand out.

This is just a typical dry desert pavement.

It looks black and gray.

But if we remove the rocks, we can see that underneath it's a light silty color.

The silt has been blown in, perhaps it's volcanic ash, over the ashes.

If we take an area that looks undisturbed and simply rub it, all of a sudden it changes color and this color will remain for eons because nothing will come in to cover it up.

One of the most important problems that ancient Nasca farmers had to solve in the desert was how to take advantage of the subterranean water that ran here in the middle of the pampa, of the plain.

Well, the ground water was real high but it's not at the surface.

Exactly.

So they couldn't, how to take all this water and use them to irrigate their fields, it's because all the rivers that come from the cordillera, filter down.

Oh, so there was nothing at the surface.

They had to tap the groundwater.

Exactly.

And their solution was to dig these tunnels from the subterranean water all the way down there to the farmland, which is on edge of this huge alluvial fan, you see?

So.

Okay.

But water flows downhill.

Exactly.

That's one thing I learned.

Exactly.

So these tunnels go downhill until they surface on the farmland over there.

So they build these huge shafts just as check points so they could repair the canal in cases of collapse or sediment that could clog the tunnel.

Oh, they're ingenious because one person can do this.

You don't have to have any kind of a hoist, there's no, you don't have to bring a bucket down.

One person could go down here and get access to the canal, crawl through and clean out any rocks that have fallen.

The water is clear as a bell.

The canals are functioning as they were, what, 1200 years ago?

They built about 60 tunnels because they had to tap at different levels in these subterranean waters and lead it to the different levels of the farmland.

In each level they had to have sort of feeder tunnels go off to the various fields off the main channel.

Exactly, following the topography down until near Cahuachi, the Nasca capital is where these subterranean waters surface again.

As we drive higher, it's still desert but much colder.

We begin to look for the camel cousins that need cold, vicuñas.

Yeah, this seems to be a family herd.

You know, they have two kinds of herds; the males on one side and then family herds with only one male.

It seems to be one of those.

What do you suppose they weigh?

Maybe, maybe the big males maybe a hundred and fifty pounds?

Yeah, just about.

Their wool was so valuable that they were almost extinct 30 years ago.

Now they've come back.

It's a breathtaking experience to see them actually in the wild.

Yeah, you know, there are so many now that people are beginning to think about shearing them again like the Incas used to do in the old times.

Where do the llamas come from?

Are they descended from vicuñas or guanacos?

Well, the llama would be the domestic version of the guanaco and for most people the alpaca would be the domesticated vicuña.

These would be the four South American camels and as you well know they are close relatives to the old world camel.

Which I believe originally came from.

North America.

Yeah, from North America.

Yeah, both South American camels and the old world camel have an ancestor like sixteen million years ago I think in North America.

You know, when they stand up, you can see, and the way they walk, and by their silly grin, you can tell they're related to camels.

Well, the face certainly looks like a camel.

Boy, I'll say.

The first big city we encounter in the highlands is Arequipa.

It was an outlying settlement of the Incas and became a capital of the southern Spanish empire.

A lot of people from Spanish origin like to live in Arequipa.

It's a very important cultural place in Peru, ...has several universities.

But if you go in the shops and the outskirts it's very heavily Indian or indigenous.

It's a strange contrast between the two.

Yeah.

In fact there is a very sharp contrast between the city and the countryside around it.

I don't want you to get run over here by these ticos.

These ticos, these little taxis, there's thousands of them, and if we go faster we get smashed.

As a testimony to these early Spanish colonials settled in this area, we find a lot of old very beautiful colonial architecture in Arequipa.

And the people here who mostly speak Spanish in this case, Quechua is spoken mostly in the countryside, the people here feel very close ties to the Spanish heritage.

According to the laws of the Indies, all the Spanish foundations in America had to follow a certain pattern that was sort of designed around a central plaza in front of which they had to have the church, the city administration, this is the cabildo, and other public buildings.

And so the rest of the checkerboard layout of the city would just follow from that.

In those times, the plazas were dry plazas.

They were conceived as meeting places for the people that lived in the city.

It's only in the late 19th century and early 20th century that they began to put trees and plants and gardens in plazas and fill them with benches and monuments.

So they turned from being a place for meeting the society, assembling the society for important decision, they became a place of recreation.

Tradition has it that when the armies of the Inca arrived to the Valley of Arequipa on their way to conquest the coast, the southern coast of Peru, when they arrived to this place and they saw how fertile the land was and the amount of water they had, the general said, "Arequipa," which means,"yes, stay."

So probably there was an Inca settlement here and earlier settlements if we look at the archaeological remains that have been found in the valley.

And in some of the volcanoes that are around the city, there are some Inca offerings, these copacocha, remains of these ceremonies that the Inca did from time to time to favor the gods of the empire.

I'm just a little nervous, always, walking down the streets of Arequipa cause every couple of years they get another earthquake.

Yeah, I think the last one was two years ago in June of 2001.

It knocked one of the bell towers off the church.

Oh, that's right.

I heard about that.

I think they reconstructed it already.

Yeah, they did.

Let's not get run over by the ticos here.

I had always associated prickly pears and their succulent fruits called tunas with Mexico.

But the Incas cultivated them long before the arrival of the Spaniards.

Many of these fruits come from the Valley of Colca.

They don't look as great as they taste.

Mmm.

Amazingly sweet, full of seeds that you chew.

They are said to be very good for the liver.

And I think my liver at this high altitude needs some help.

So.mmm.

This clothing I'm wearing is cabana.

This is a hummingbird and this is a fish of all colors.

And the looms, weren't they worked by men?

Yes.

Men used to work the looms by hand.

It takes about a week to make something like this.

There didn't used to be any sewing machines like there are now.

No one wants to make them by hand like before.

Driving east from Arequipa at 8,000 feet elevation, the only way to go is up.

The color of the flamingo is represented in the flag of Peru.

They're found only at sea level in the brackish water along the ocean and above 14,000 feet in the altiplano.

They've decided to make book with the vicuñas.

They drink out of these same sort of salt lakes.

The vicuñas need the water, the flamingos need the tiny micro-organisms that they siphon through their beak and they making a living eating the water.

The closer to the center of the Inca empire we get, the more monumental become the remains of Inca architecture.

Especially the structures called chullpas that they built to hold their dead.

They chose their burial sites very carefully, even if they had to use other people's cemeteries to make their point.

Well, the Incas, the Inca dynasty claimed that their ancestors had originally come from Lake Titicaca mangu capac and mama okio , the original couple supposedly emerged from Lake Titicaca.

So it would make a lot of sense for them to make these sort of material statements showing that their ancestors were here first.

The most impressive group of chullpas in all the altiplano are the Sillustani ones, near the Omayo Lake, which are funerary towers, collective mausoleums.

There you could see two different kinds of chullpa space on the construction technique.

One group is made of just field stone, they are round and some of them are plastered in white.

The other group have a distinctive Inca masonry technology with very nice and well-worked fittings in the rocks.

They were done without the use of metals and with a technology that no one really understands.

Some people believe they were perhaps plant acids, some people used extreme heat maybe, some people believe that they were just simple slowly working down the stone until the work was done.

Then they were lifted by creating mounds and using human labor raised up to the top.

These staying here together after 500 years in spite of numerous earthquakes, the jointing is so perfect that even a seismic event doesn't cause the stones to fall.

It was probably more looters or one great earthquake that caused the top part to fall off.

The chullpas were not only used as mausoleums but also as altars in ancestral related ceremonies.

The Incas built these chullpas to sort of state that their ancestors were the most important among the ancestors in all the highlands of the Andes.

For ancient Andean peoples, the cult of the ancestors was a very important part of their lives.

They worshipped them because they considered them the owners of all the land and the resources.

They were vital for their survival.

In this sense, every group would sort of legitimize their right to be in a territory and in a place by claiming to be descendants of the original ancestor who founded the community and who was the original owner of that land.

In this same sense, the worship was central for political life and for the reproduction of territorial rights.

Do you suppose the Incas brought their stone masons with them?

Oh, I'm sure they did.

Because nobody else could replicate this magnificent stone work.

Well, to do all this just here they had to have had dozens and dozens of stone masons in addition to what they had in Cuzco and up north.

Well, yeah, you know, for the Incas stone masonry was so emblematic of the empire in the same way that you could think that textiles were for Paracas or ceramics for Nazca.

It was their emblematic craft so they took good care of that.

The technological and social accomplishments of the Incas were profound and far reaching.

Their imperial domain is best known for having dominated the highlands.

But the powerful hand of the Incas extended also to the deserts and the dry seacoast.

The way of life in the isolated canyons of the high altitudes desert in southern Peru has changed little for thousands of years.

These verdant valleys fed by glacial runoff were attractive to the conquering Incas for their productivity and to tourists today for their avian treasures.

Join us next time on the Desert Speaks It's a breathtaking experience to see them actually in the wild.

Yeah, you know, there are so many now that people are beginning to think about shearing them again like the Incas used to do in the old times.

Well, they'd have to kill them to shear them, would they not?

No.

No, no, no, no.

How do they capture them?

You have to corral them.

And in the old times they used to have these red strings.

So they would hold this, because the vicuña would never pass, never duck and pass under a red string.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

A group of concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of our desert areas.