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CHAPTER TWO A History of Fieldwork in the Nazca Region The history of the archaeological investigation of Nasca society is, in large part, a reflection of the trajectory of the study of Peru's past. The early period of investigations at Cahuachi and elsewhere was overwhelmingly concerned with cemetery excavations and the establishment of a time-space framework. The middle period, motivated and influenced by the Virti Valley Project, brought to the south coast a newfound interest in settlement patterns and stratigraphy. This was followed by an intense concern in the 1950s through the 1970s with the construction of a fine relative chronology. The most recent era of Nasca investigations, the 1980s through the present, has seen a return to the field to tackle problems of social and political organization and cultural change through the study of settlement patterns. Uhle: 1901 and 1905 In 1888 Max Uhle, a young German linguist with experience in zoology and ethnography, began to work in the Museum fiir V6lkerkunde in Berlin. While there, he had the opportunity to examine five Nasca vessels in the collections (Proulx 1970: 8-9). The beauty of the magnificent polychrome pottery attracted Uhle and kindled in him a desire to locate its source since the vessels' provenience was noted only as Peru's south coast. Uhle was successful in locating the newly recognized pottery style on his first expedition to the south coast in 1901. In the Ocucaj~ Basin in Ica he excavated thirty-two Nasca tombs whose contents were sent to the museum at the University of California at Berkeley (see Proulx 1970). 14 Uhle called the style "Proto-Nazca" (Uhle 1914). On his second expedition to the south coast of Peru in 1905 Uhle directed his efforts at the Nazca valley. He did not excavate there but purchased a large collection of pottery his former Ica workers had looted (Rowe 1960: 31). This collection was also sent to Berkeley, and the vessels from Uhle's two expeditions form the core of the Lowie Museum's outstanding collection of Nasca pottery . Generally, Uhle (1914; see also Gayton and I(roeber 1927) did not clearly specify any of the sites in the Nazca and Palpa regions from which his collections were excavated, in contrast to the precise records of provenience he kept for Ica, but he did note that he obtained three pots at Cahuachi-though we cannot know if the vessels came from the archaeological site or the general grounds of the hacienda. It is important to note that already by 1912 it was the Rio Grande de Nazca drainage, rather than the Ica valley where the style was first discovered, that was considered to be the Nasca heartland. Joyce (1 912), for instance, speaks of the "Nasca style" and "Nasca pottery." This view was later explicitly stated by Gayton and Kroeber (1927: 2), who explain that the name of the style is "derived from the focal point of its regional distribution." Tello: 1915 In 1915 Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello carried out fieldwork in the Nazca region "from Tierra Blanca to Monte Grande, with the purpose of studying the different classes of cemeteries there." He referred once to gold C~lt;vQ.tiOh N t CAHUACHI ---. To ha.c;endQ Hills and IJS m. TerraC'es , d ... , .......--H--"do \ " \ /' " ,~ ~e \ ,,"}:!'.\~ G) b ~O) D, I ~ \, q-"",_ ..,.. , &. c::; " , ... ------ " u '~'..- ..' ~ ,~ ~f: I , , ...', t,l = '-"'-._---' C' ~ ."11.'" /, c 2.1. !(roeber's sketch plan of CahuachLHe has made an enlarged inset of Unit A. His field notebook gives the following key for the Unit A mound: (c) natural sand terrace, 6 meters above a; (d) first slope of hill; (e) first terrace, 7 meters above c; (f) second terrace, 6 meters above e; (g) burial terrace, 1 meter below h; (h) summit terrace,S meters above f; (i) burial (?) terrace, 2 meters below h; (j) level terrace, 1 meter below h; (k) unworked hill, connecting with B; (I) burial terrace , 3 meters below g; (m) burial terrace, 1 meter below I; (n, 0) square chamber grave; (p) wall, 65 meters long. Letters a and b, not shown, referred to "cultivation, 3 meters above river" and "slope" respectively. Courtesy Robert Feldman, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. pieces from "a cemetery at Cahuachi of different style and epoch" (Tello 1917: 283; my translation) and also noted the presence of artificial hills or mounds at the site. By his enumeration of locations at which he worked (Majoro, Ocongalla, Estaqueria, Las Salinas...

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