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 via 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 yard’s lawyer and said he would kill him with me if he protected me, and bury us five feet underground,” Shady, 73, said.
“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, Shady and her team repeatedly called on the authorities to intervene.
‘There is a feeling that there is no authority dedicated to the protection and defense of our heritage. This is a big concern, “she said.
Karalkaart
In July, squatters with a heavy shovel smashed adobe walls and tore the ground and destroyed old ceramics, graves containing mummies, textiles and household remains before police and the premises were able to stop them.
As a result of Shady’s pleas, a police car is now patrolling the archeological site day and night, but nothing has been done to punish or evict the intruders.
The squatters are believed to belong to a single extended family, claiming that the land was given to them in the 1970s during Peru’s controversial agricultural land reform which was overthrown by a left-wing military dictatorship.
Shady denies the allegation: “They do not have a single national 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.
Land prices in the area have 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 archaeological site surrounded by a 56-square-kilometer buffer zone.
Shady, who was named to the BBC’s 100 women’s list last year, visited Caral in 1978. But it was not until 1994 that she discovered the ancient city and started the site, which sits on a dry desert terrace overlooking the Supe River Valley. km (124 miles) north of Lima.
What she discovered was the ‘oldest civilization center in the Americas’, which Unesco describes as ‘extraordinarily well-preserved’ with an intricate architectural design with ‘monumental stone and earth platforms and sunken circular orbits’. Organic material found at the site was taken back to 2627 BC
Shady and her team continue to explore and excavate a dozen former settlements, half of the 24 located in the Supe Valley and part of the Caral-Supe civilization. Their findings revealed that musical instruments such as flutes of animal and bird bones and evidence of the cultivation of multicolored cotton used in textiles were cultivated.
“We can not allow the archaeological sites to continue to be invaded and destroyed because it is an unwritten history and we are recovering the 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 to investigate and restore our history because it has such an interesting message,” she added. “It was a very, very peaceful society. We did not even find a settlement with walls. ”
“There is a message that we, humans, must live in harmony between us and nature,” Shady concluded. “We are living in part through this pandemic because of our abuse of nature.”