Research at Magdalena de Cao Viejo took place in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. Future research is planned in July and August of 2008.

This page is designed to provide a general summary of the field work conducted each year. Details on the research described may be found in other pages on the Church and Town in this web site. In addition, you can read more on specific areas of our research, including mapping, aerial photography, artifact analysis, and historic research (coming soon).

Map of the El Brujo complex (which, coicindentally, has a resemblance to the shape of South America). The area where the colonial town and church are located is circled in red.

Map of the Magdalena de Cao Viejo site complex. The church is located on the prehistoric Moche plaza of Huaca Cao Viejo, and the town is located in front of the church.

In 2004 the U.S. team, working in close cooperation with Peruvian colleagues, was finishing research at a Moche ceremonial well towards to northern end of the El Brujo archaeological complex. As there was some spare time left after this work was completed, test excavations were conducted in the Cupisnique Mound and at the church complex. Because time was limited, a single excavation unit was placed on the north face of the exterior wall of the church compound near its northwest corner. This work encountered dense amounts of straw-like material and numerous artifacts, including fragments of paper letters and printed manuscripts. It was this work that encouraged plans for further work at the site. While our Peruvian colleagues had placed some test excavations in various parts of the colonial sector of the site all of the work reported below is based upon the combined Peruvian-U.S. team effort beginning in 2004.

Initial work, in 2004 was funded by the National Geographic Society. In 2005, funds were secured for continued research by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Support was also supplied from Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections for work in 2004 and 2005 and, in subsequent years, from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
Work to date is summarized by year, below. Details of research results may be found in other sections of this web site, such as the summaries on the colonial town and church complex.

2004: The first work at the site included defining basic sectors of the site. This included identification of the Colonial Church Complex, bounded by a large wall and located within the boundaries of the old Huaca Cao Viejo Moche temple plaza walls. This complex was defined as consisting of three major components: the church nave, the east atrium, and the west atrium, all built of adobe (clay) bricks.

Work in the church atrium was part of all field seasons.

The second major component of Magdalena de Cao Viejo is the Colonial Town, to the north of the Colonial Church Complex and apparently delimited by two Moche mounds (montículos). Some of the remains of the colonial town are visible in the remains of quincha (wattle and daub) walls protruding through the modern ground surface. Room blocks are divided by empty spaces which team member have arbitrarily named avenues, running north-south, and streets, running east-west, and a large plaza.

New excavations in 2004 were restricted to a small test pit (2 x 3 m) on the northwest corner of the west atrium of the church complex. This excavation revealed the presence of midden (trash deposits) which included food remains, miscellaneous artifacts, and paper fragments. In addition, pits made by illegal excavators (huaqueros) in the church complex were cleaned and examined, revealing fragments of painted wall or ceiling plaster.

2005: In the first full season of research at the site, project members conducted ground- penetrating radar studies of substantial sections of the colonial town. This work was linked to mapping of the entire area as known at the time. Preliminary maps of the colonial town and church complex resulted from this work. A single small test pit was placed in one of the structures in the colonial town. Undisturbed floors were found in this work.

A detailed study of the East Atrium was undertaken. This work included placing work units in various areas of interest and clearing away loose soil within them. This work found traces of red and white painted plaster on walls. The red plaster likely was on exterior walls and the white plaster on interior surfaces. Team members also found a segment of a floor. Unfortunately, severe looting prior 1991, when the site was protected by the recent Peruvian project’s efforts, damaged the site extensively.

Two major excavations took place in 2005. A large pit was placed on the southwest corner of the West Atrium in order to determine if the west wall continued southwards, perhaps indicating that there was another atrium to the south. This research indicated that the wall did not continue. It also identified prehistoric adobe structures below the colonial occupation, likely the Moche plaza wall. The second major excavation was in the vicinity of the entrance to the nave of the church, on its northern end. The entryway was identified as well as architectural details of the walls in this area.

2006: In the second major field season mapping continued. As this work took place, an additional area of the colonial town was discovered, to the north of the Moche montículos which researchers previously believed defined the limits of the occupation.

Excavations in the town included Unit 1 and Unit 19. Unit 1 followed a quincha wall that bordered a major avenue in the town uncovering dense quantities of animal hair and other remains in upper levels and living surfaces with artifacts in situ in lower levels. The work also revealed structures made of adobe in lower levels. Unit 19 was an excavation in a midden. It uncovered dense remains of food remains and other materials which had been thrown in a trash deposit by the site’s inhabitants.

The central section of the adobe house in Unit 1.

In the church complex work concentrated on clearing the remains of the walls of the nave and two attached structures. On the western side of the nave a small, square structure has been tentatively identified as a chapel. On the southeastern side another small structure has been tentatively labeled the sacristy, a room traditionally used by a priest as a place to keep and change into ceremonial robes.

The eastern wall of the nave is well preserved, standing at over 2 m. in height. The lower portion of this wall has eroded, however, due to the wicking of moisture. As part of the field work in 2006, this wall was reinforced by building up the wall with new adobes where it had eroded.

In 2006 kite photography was employed to take aerial photographs of the cleared walls of the nave. A mosaic of separate photographs has produced a composite photography of the structure which is both striking in its imagery as well as useful for future studies.

2007: The 2007 field season continued work in the town and the church. The basic goals of obtaining a clear understanding of the nature of the archaeological deposits in order to understand the history of the occupation of the site were our primary goals.

Screening soils next to the large trench in front of the church in 2007.

In the church, work first concentrated on clearing the walls of the atrium in order to be able to accurately map it. In doing this, we encountered an infant burial and an adult female burial interred next to the exterior of the southern wall. The adult, identified as female by project osteologist Catherine Gaither, was wrapped in a painted textile and buried with a small woven bag containing balls of twine in various colors and pigments for dying similar twine.

Work in the nave of the church began with the simple goal of attempting to understand the architectural sequence by cleaning out a large looter’s hole. To our surprise, we encountered between seven and nine partial to complete burials. The individuals, ranging from adolescents to adults, were buried in European style – extended with their heads pointing north and their arms crossed over their chest or abdomen. This would be an atypical burial position for the Moche culture, which involved an extended position, but with the arms at the side of the body and the head oriented towards the huaca. Burials were also interred on or near the huaca between the Moche occupation and Spanish contact, but the typical body position and mortuary practice for the cultures involved were flexed bundle burials. Only a few textile fragments were found with these individuals, all in apparent native style. Additionally, nonmetric cranial characteristics and craniometric analysis using FORDISC 2.0 are consistent with the identification of these individuals as native. A fragment of a distinctive twisted blue glass bead also was found with these individuals.

The most curious feature of these burials is that we could find no evidence of how they were placed in their graves. Although the looter’s hole was large, there was enough of it remaining that evidence of a shaft or other means to inter the burials below the floor should have been in evidence. The only conclusion we can draw is that the burials were of indigenous people who were placed in their resting places before the church was constructed or, at least, before the last major renovation of the nave; however, the burial positions do imply Christian influence.

In addition to the work in the nave, we were able to establish that the atrium was built directly on the surface of the plaza of the last Moche occupation of the Huaca Cao Viejo. Other work in the church area consisted of clearing in the area of the bell tower. Late in the field season we encountered the upper walls of what appears to be another room or building immediately behind the ruins of the tower itself which will be investigated in 2008.

In clearing the atrium wall we found an unusual feature placed there. It appeared to be the remains of a storage facility, a little over a meter in width and of uncertain height. The remains of a bean-like plant locally known as tara (Caesalpina spinosa) and used in leather curing, were found in and around this feature. In addition, a wooden sword-like implement was found close to this feature, with a distinct concave pattern of use-wear in the center of its blade.

We were uncertain of the significance of this feature but later work helped to clarify it. In the final weeks of work, we decided to place a large trench, 2 m. in width, running from the north wall of the atrium down to the surface of the colonial town. This trench eventually measured 30 m. in length. The purpose of this trench was to attempt to locate the entry ramp to the atrium and church complex. We had attempted to find the entryway in an earlier field season but the walls were so destroyed that we only could locate the surface of the entry and none of the vertical architectural features. Our work in the long trench in 2007 determined that there likely was no formal entry ramp to the church complex. Rather, there was a talus slope created by the collapse of earlier architecture and a section of this was used as the entry. We need to conduct more work, however, to completely confirm this.

The long trench uncovered thick deposits of tara, however. A great amount of this material appeared to have been deliberately deposited in the area. The great quantities of this material combined with our earlier discovery of the storage bin, on the west, wall, brought us to the conclusion that a late occupation of the site appeared to have been devoted to hide processing. The sword-like tool we discovered probably was used to scrape hides. The hide-working occupation probably occurred after the church had been abandoned and, possibly, most of the colonial town as well, probably in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.

Work in the Town
Our research in the town consisted of two major efforts. We continued excavations in Unit 1, expanding the long trench we excavated in 2006 westward, to open more area. The second excavation area was Unit 2, the large quincha compound we located to the south of Unit 1, across an east-west running street from it, in 2006.

Clearing, mapping, and excavation in a house compound, Unit 2, took place in 2006 and 2007.

Currently, the excavators of these units are preparing reports and, as we plan to work more in both areas in 2008, only a brief summary of this work will be presented here.

In both Units 1 and 2, research revealed large compounds several meters in length with two or three smaller rooms along one wall. We interpret the large spaces, outside of the rooms, as patios for daily activities and possibly for the short-term penning of sheep or goats. In both units we also were able to identify the earliest colonial occupation as in evidence by greater quantities of ceramics in native styles and fewer blue-on-white Spanish-style ceramics than upper levels. In addition, the deeper, earliest levels yielded sherds of heavy, salt-glazed earthenware ceramics in distinctive yellow and green glazes associated with the earliest colonial era pottery.

The earliest occupations appeared to be “poorer” than the later ones but it is interesting to note that the general pattern of architecture was established at an early date and maintained through the occupation of the site. In addition, there appear to be marked contrasts between Unit 1 and Unit 2 with the former household more prosperous than the latter. For example, the residential rooms in Unit 1 are constructed of adobes whereas more quincha was used for rooms in Unit 2. The occupants of Unit 1 also appear to have been more prosperous in terms of household goods than the inhabitants of Unit 2. We found more metal objects, glass, and other European derived and styled goods in Unit 1 than in Unit 2 including 2 small Christian crosses. No obviously Christian symbols have been found in Unit 2 to date.

Unit 24, a small excavation at the junction of two quincha walls excavated in 2007.

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