The Archaeological Perspective

 The Archaeological Perspective

Despite its location only 35 km inland from the Pacific Ocean the land still after several centuries remained barren with desert conditions.  Irrigation had revived the economy over the last several centuries and farming had once again thrived when massive desalination plants with new technology were brought on line to these drought prone regions of Peru.  

Unfortunately, the archaeological site including temples and palaces built to the god Pachacmac and a home where the colonial imperialist Francisco Pizarro, had once lived amongst the Incas during his conquest, all had been overwhelmed by the adobe brick homes of the poor squatters who had moved to Lima centuries later. Much of the finer antiquities and artefacts had been lost to the sands and erosion of time. 

At the time that I write, in my journals, about 1700 years after the Spaniards toppled the Inca Empire and approximately, if we are dating by empires, another 900 years after the decline and fall of the American Empire.  Now digging through time on these same historic sites that have seen sequences of abandonment and historic interest depending on finances and  public awareness.

During the Spanish conquistadors and colonial expansion, although it saw the collapse of one imperial empire, that of the Inca’s, who had conquered the surrounding tribes and drove them into submission. It also represented, at least for some a cultural renewal of European design.  This society had new elites but was also inclusive.  It thrived to the time the American empire discovered its new identity as what was called at the time, fascism. A certain propensity for the lack of democratic ideals and a new direction towards authoritarianism and a disregard for wealth division.  From an ethnographic point of view, as a Peruvian archeologist, it was an recall to the old Inca ways of centrality, authority and a perverse type of deity worship.  As it spread through the world like a cancer it took it’s toll on freedoms and prosperity, until once vibrant cultures, societies and economies were flaccid and anemic in their defeat.

From what we, as scientist, can retrieve from what few records remain as so much from the American/Western era was of a digital nature.  We have learned from those mistakes as I write in my field notes with a graphite stylus of the old design.  From this dig and from other scholars around the United World Government States (UWGS), we have discerned that America, once great, had turned to a deity worship practice combining their love of country, militarism and the rule of an authoritarian king, of which they had many, after shedding their brief history of democratic traditions.  Those traditions turned out to be more veneer that substance hiding the true nature of their culture unleashed.

Ironically, at this dig and the ones at such more remote places as the ancient capital of Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and other urban centres of the old American Empire, little of any substance remains other than plastic artifacts.