Passion for past drives research

PUNO, PERU “”mdash; Elizabeth Klarich first met Charles “Chip” Stanish, director of the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, in 1994 when she was at her Chicago high school’s career day listening to his description of the field archaeologist’s way of life.

And she was utterly repulsed.

Stanish, then an assistant curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, “was talking about what a hard lifestyle it was,” Klarich said, listing the many challenges of living and working in remote, rugged areas for months at a time. “And I thought, “˜Ick, I don’t want to do this; it sounds terrible.'”

That reaction, Klarich explained, would not stop the young student from pursuing her lifelong interest in the study of the past.

Now an assistant professor of archaeology at Smith College, Klarich has spent 15 years on research conducted during summers in the Andean highlands of southeastern Peru.

She spent much of that time studying with Stanish both as an undergraduate and graduate at UC Santa Barbara.

Having spent nearly five years in total living in Peru, some without the company of any other non-Peruvians, she’s had plenty of time to get used to the lifestyle.

But Klarich was not the first or the last to be led to Peruvian archaeology by the professor.

Stanish, an expert who has been working on projects in Peru since the early 1980s, has had a hand in producing groundbreaking research in the study of pre-Incan cultures and has mentored some of the most successful archaeologists in that field.

His decades of field experience and collaboration with American and Peruvian academics have helped to establish a strong foothold in the city of Puno, where Stanish maintains a house to accommodate the living, laboratory and storage needs of archaeological projects.

Together with University of Arizona Professor of Anthropology Mark Aldenderfer, Ph.D. and Peruvian archaeologist Cecila Chavez Justo, Stanish co-founded and now co-directs the Programa Collasuyo.

The program was established to serve as the Peruvian anchor for Stanish and Chavez’s projects, many of which operate under its name and share in its resources.

Depending on the year, up to a half dozen or more individual archaeological research projects take place near Puno, and are based at the program’s house.

Though they are almost always funded through independent grants and fellowships, these projects and their respective researchers share in the benefits of the house’s facilities, as well as in the intellectual exchange between highly specialized and passionate archeologists.

An archaeological intermission

Located approximately 60 miles north of Puno, the town of Pucará is home to and named after a fortified hilltop archaeological site where Klarich and her Peruvian co-director Luis Flores Blanco began excavating this summer.

The site was founded in the Late Formative Period (200 B.C. – 200 A.D.), when people in the region began moving into larger towns and villages, and collaborated on monumental community structures, such as the mound on which Klarich is now excavating.

Pukara provides an excellent snapshot of what early Peruvian civilizations looked like because it has been relatively unadulterated by modern architecture, Klarich said. Though a handful of sites from this time period exist in the region, many continued to be inhabited and expanded in later times, piling modern architecture and artifacts atop those of historical significance.

Klarich and Blanco’s project is not the first to examine the site.

Pukara has been host to a slew of famous archaeologists and archaeological projects dating back as early as the 1930s, when Alfred Kidder excavated part of the site’s large central mound structure. But Kidder never published a final write-up of his findings.

Similarly, work done throughout the “˜60s and “˜70s ““ much of it funded by Plan Copesco, the Peruvian branch of Unesco ““ gathered a great number of high-profile researchers for substantive work. But this project, too, never yielded a comprehensive report because of political unrest in the early 1980s.

“You cannot find an archaeologist today between (the ages of) 50 and 60, a well-known archaeologist, that did not work on that project,” Klarich said. “And I think there might have been too many cooks in the kitchen. … Everyone came back and there had been so many people that nobody really ended up being the person responsible for putting all the information together.”

Now, in reconstructing both what was lost and that which never was, Klarich and her colleagues have been examining the field notes and few articles produced from the decades of study, considering artifacts such as Kidder’s archives at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, alongside pottery fragments and monoliths uncovered in the field.

“If not for such earlier projects it would have been much, much harder,” Klarich said. “We really would have to do much more systematic survey and try to figure out what was out there. There is so much of the site we don’t know; it’s so big.”

The size of the site, though promising in its potential to provide information, is the cause of some of its greatest challenges.

While none of the neighboring landowners would dare claim the site’s central structure to be their property, smaller structures at the periphery of the site are now part of private holdings.

Even when given the approval of the Peruvian Instituto Nacional de Cultura, or National Institute of Culture, which all archaeologists must have in order to work in Peru, most researchers’ work hinges upon the cooperation of local municipalities and landowners.

“Technically, our permission comes from Lima, but this country is so divided. … You have the world of the coast and the world of the highlands, and people in the highlands don’t recognize the authority of the coast,” Klarich said, adding that negotiations with locals are often delicate and complicated.

“I know at the end of the day that the local folks are the people who tell us whether or not we can work. … The (National Institute of Culture) is not going to send an army of people to force people to let us work, nor would I want it to be that way anyway.”

In order to get local permission to survey and excavate, either from communities or independent landowners, researchers must earn the trust of the locals and provide them with financial compensation in the form of paid employment on the dig site.

The latter can be tedious, requiring the organization of a work rotation, but is seldom insurmountable.

Earning trust, on the other hand, is much more complicated.

“They’re suspicious sometimes because they think we’re trying to find gold,” said Chavez, explaining that she is routinely met with the same scrutiny as Americans and others who are not members of the local community. “I explain to them I am working here for 20 years and I never find any gold because the Spanish took it, and they laugh with me.”

Because many Peruvians in rural communities are superstitious, it is common for researchers and locals to participate in “pagos,” ritual burnt offerings to mountain deities.

“It’s about the beliefs. They have a different (conception) of the land,” Chavez said. “So that is a problem. We need to talk to them with that kind of language and try to show them that we respect their beliefs. It is not our beliefs, but we respect them.

“So we follow the rules with them, and they feel comfortable.”