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Related: About this forumAirport construction threatens unexplored archaeological sites in Peru
The ruins of an Incan royal estate in Chinchero, Peru. FELIX LIPOV/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Airport construction threatens unexplored archaeological sites in Peru
By Lizzie WadeFeb. 5, 2019 , 2:50 PM
Last month, a phalanx of bulldozers and trucks arrived in Chinchero, Peru, to begin to clear land for a 40-year-old dream: an international airport in the heart of the countrys tourist region high in the Andes. Once it is completed in 2023, authorities say 6 million visitors a year will have an easier, more direct route to nearby Incan sites, including the famed royal estate of Machu Picchu. But archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and others say the airport and the resulting surge in development and tourism will destroy archaeological sites and some of the very cultural riches the visitors come to see. Nearly 200 Peruvian and international experts have signed a letter to Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra asking him to suspend construction and consider relocating the project. More than 2000 people have signed an accompanying petition.
Chinchero overlooks Perus Sacred Valley, one of the first areas conquered by the Incas in the 1300s as they began to expand their empire from their capital of Cuzco, 29 kilometers southeast of Chinchero. The Sacred Valley provided maize and other crops to Incan rulers, and several emperors built their private estates there. Incan agricultural terraces still cover the hillsides around Chinchero and are used by local farmers. Its one of Perus most archaeological and historically complex places, says Natalia Majluf, a Peruvian art historian at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, former director of the Lima Museum of Art, and one of the petitions organizers. You put an airport in the middle of that landscape and its a disaster.
Topa Inca, who ruled from 1471 to 1493, built a royal estate at Chinchero, similar to Machu Picchu (built by his father, Pachacuti), and others nearby including Ollantaytambo and Písac. Unlike those, Chinchero has remained largely untouched. Its preservation is phenomenal, says Stella Nair, an architectural historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, who spent a year in Chinchero measuring and mapping the Incan imperial buildings and landscaping that still dot the town and the farmland around it. The key for studying the architecture is finding sites that havent been altered for tourist consumption. And that is incredibly hard, she says.
Alan Covey, an archaeologist at the University of Texas in Austin, led a survey of the region in 2004 and 2005. He found that, unlike the heart of the estate, which is in a protected archaeological zone, the airport site had little evidence of pre-Columbian occupation, as measured by visible ceramics and architecture. But archaeologists have conducted no excavations there. We dont know whats underneath, says Abel Traslaviña Arias, a Peruvian archaeologist and doctoral student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. And once airport construction begins, youll never get [those sites] back, worries Thomas Cummins, an art historian at Harvard University who has worked in Chinchero.
More:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/airport-construction-threatens-unexplored-archaeological-sites-peru?r3f_986=http://c.newsnow.co.uk/A/972842227?-17018:2266:latest_news
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