The guardian
Stickers issue death threats to archaeologist who discovered the oldest city in the Americas
In the 1970s, stickers were given to one family claim site of 5,000-year-old ruins. Illegal squatters invaded the ruins of the oldest city in America and made death threats against Ruth Shady, the celebrated Peruvian archaeologist who discovered the 5,000. year-old civilization. The threats come through phone calls and messages to various workers at the archaeological site at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in Peru. They follow the reports to the police and prosecutors about the invasion of the ancient ruins of Caral. “They called the site’s lawyer and said that if he continued to protect me, they would kill him with me and bury us five meters underground,” said Shady, 73. “Then they killed our dog as a warning. “They poisoned her to say, ‘Look what will happen to you,’ she said. This is not the first time Shady has been threatened or attacked. In 2003, she was shot in the chest during an assault on the 626-hectare archeological complex that was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009. After nine raids on the holy city during the pandemic period, Shady and her team repeatedly asked the authorities to intervene. ‘There is a feeling that there is no authority dedicated to the protection and defense of our heritage. That’s a big concern, ‘she said. Karakaart In July, squatters with a heavy shovel smashed adobe walls and tore the ground and destroyed old ceramics, graves with mummies, textiles and household remains, before the police and the premises on the site could stop. As a result of Shady’s pleas, a police car is now patrolling the archaeological site day and night, but nothing has been done to punish or drive away the intruders. The squatters are believed to belong to a single extended family and claim that the land was given to them in the 1970s during Peru’s controversial agrarian land reform permeated by a left-wing military dictatorship. Shady denies the allegation: “They do not have a single country title. The owner of the land is the Peruvian state. A planned eviction of one of the squatters was thwarted in December when a local prosecutor and official did not instruct him to proceed, despite the support of police officers, Shady said. the area has risen from about $ 5,000 per hectare to as much as $ 50,000 per hectare, as outsiders are in a hurry to buy land around the prestigious archeological site surrounded by a buffer zone of 56 square kilometers. Shady, named on the BBC’s 100 Women’s List this year, first visited Caral in 1978. But it was not until 1994 that she discovered the ancient city and excavated the site, which sits on a dry desert terrace overlooking the Supe River Valley nearly 200 km north. What she discovered was the “oldest civilization center in the Americas” that Unesco describes as “extraordinarily well-preserved” with an intricate architectural design with “monumental stone and earth platform fixtures and such circular courts”. Organic material found at the site was traced back to 2627 BC Shady and her team continue to explore and excavate a dozen former settlements, half of the 24 in the Supe Valley, which form part of the Caral. Supe civilization. Their findings revealed musical instruments such as transverse sheets of animal and bird bones and evidence of the cultivation of multicolored cotton used in textiles. “We cannot allow archeological sites to be invaded and destroyed because it is an unwritten history and we are recovering that history through our investigation,” Shady said. “If we can not do that, it’s like burning a book that no one will ever read.” “I hope we can continue the investigation and continue to recover our history because it has such an interesting message,” she adds. “It was a very, very peaceful society. We have not yet found a single walled settlement. “There is a message that we humans need to live in harmony between ourselves and nature,” Shady concluded. “We are living in part through this pandemic because of our abuse of nature.”