Persia

See Iran

Peru

Investigation into Peru’s pre-inca past began during the early colonial period in the sixteenth century. The writings of Pedro Cieza de León record his visit around 1550 to the Guamanga Valley, now called Ayacucho, where he observed and described the ruins of Huari. The Indian residents of the area ascribed the ruins to an ancient race of people who had lived in the area long before the Inca conquest. Cieza, a very observant chronicler, noted that the walls of the ruins were deteriorating and showed signs of great age. Additionally, he noted that the plans of the buildings were distinctly different from those of the Inca constructions. Later, when he visited the ruins of Tiahuanaco at the south end of Lake Titicaca, Cieza drew similar conclusions about the antiquity of that now-famous site and proposed that Huari and Tiahuanaco were part of a culture that existed in the Andes before the Incas. In linking these two sites, Cieza anticipated what is commonly accepted among Andean scholars today, but his thinking was not recognized for another 400 years.

It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that scholars again took more than a fleeting interest in Peru’s prehistory. Tschudi, visiting Peru from Switzerland between 1848 and 1852, became interested in the many ruins to be found everywhere in the valleys of the Peruvian coastal desert. He was particularly attracted to the massive adobe-walled structures of chan chan, the capital of the Chimu empire, and one of those structures now bears his name in honor of his pioneering work at the site.

In 1850, Antonio Raimondi, a famous figure in Peruvian history, arrived in Peru from Italy. During the many years that Raimondi spent in Peru, he traveled widely and explored nearly every part of Peru’s very diverse geography. He wrote copiously about what he observed, and much of what he wrote was published in 1874 in his book El Peru. In the course of his travels he encountered many archaeological sites, the most noteworthy of which was the now-famous site of Chavín de Huantar, and one of that site’s most important monuments is called the Raimondi Stone.