Túcume

Túcume, also known as El Purgatorio, the largest late pre-Hispanic (c. 1000–1532) site in the Lambayeque Valley on Peru's north coast. The site is built around and atop a steep hill rising from the coastal plain. A monumental sector composed of eleven large adobe pyramid complexes and associated structures lies on the north and northwest sides of the hill; smaller structures, workshops, and cemeteries are on the other sides.

Because the Peruvian coast is a desert, crops can be grown only through irrigation from the rivers that descend from the highlands. Thus it is Túcume's location on a major pre-Hispanic canal that accounts for much of the site's importance.

Túcume probably began about 1000, as the capital of an independent polity, after the fall of nearby Batán Grande; later, it fell to three successive waves of foreign conquerors. First, around 1350, the Chimú Empire took over the Lambayeque region, moving north from its capital at Chan Chan in the Moche Valley. The Chimú were followed in the 1470s by the Incas, who came from Cuzco, in Peru's southern highlands. Finally, the Spanish conquistadores arrived in 1532 and soon controlled the entire north coast of Peru. Within twenty years, Túcume was in ruins and the surviving population had moved to a nearby village.

The largest and most complex occupation was under the Incas. At this time, structures were built all over the hill, making it look like the largest Huaca (shrine, mound) in the pre-Hispanic world. During the same period the local Túcume people comprised the bulk of the population. As in much of their empire, the Incas apparently used the local elites to help govern conquered provinces.

Scientific research at Tú cume began around the turn of the twentieth century, but until recently no large-scale excavations had been carried out at the site. From 1988 to 1994, a major research effort was organized by Thor Heyerdahl, led by Daniel H. Sandweiss and Alfredo Narváez, and funded by the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway, and private donors. In addition to the data on the Inca occupation, emerging results show that Túcume was involved in maritime activities, probably including long-distance exchange.

See alsoConquistadores; Incas, The.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A general review of the site and the results of recent research is in Thor Heyerdahl, Daniel H. Sandweiss, and Alfredo Narváez, The Pyramids of Túcume (1995). Paul Kosok provides excellent photographs and data on the pre-Hispanic canal systems at Túcume and related sites in Life, Land, and Water in Ancient Peru (1965), pp. 147-179. Christopher B. Donnan reviews pottery, chronology, and mythology in late pre-Hispanic Lambayeque in "An Assessment of the Validity of the Naymlap Dynasty," in The Northern Dynasties: Kingship and Statecraft in Chimor edited by Michael E. Moseley and Alana Cordy-Collins, (1990), pp. 243-274. In the same volume Izumi Shimada places the Lambayeque region in a deeper chronological framework in his "Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities on the Northern North Coast of Peru, Middle-Late Horizons," pp. 279-392.

Additional Bibliography

Heyerdahl, Thor. La navegación marítima en el antiguo Perú con énfasis en Tucume y el Valle de Lambayeque. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Histórico-Marítimos del Perú, 1996.

Heyerdahl, Thor. Túcume. Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 1996.

Moore, Jerry D. Cultural Landscapes in the Ancient Andes: Archaeologies of Place. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.

Moseley, Michael E. The Incas and their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

Valle Alvarez, Luis. Desarrollo arqueológico, costa norte del Perú. 2 v. Urb. Los Pinos: Ediciones SIAN, 2004.

                                      Daniel H. Sandweiss