Huayuri, also called the Lost City of Huayuri, is a large

pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European col ...

archaeological site which flourished from 1150 to 1450 CE in the

Late Intermediate Period This is a chart of cultural periods of Peru and the Andean Region developed by John Rowe and Edward Lanning and used by some archaeologists studying the area. An alternative dating system was developed by Luis Lumbreras and provides different ...

(1000 - 1476 CE) of

Peru Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...

. Huayuri is located in the Peruvian coastal desert in

Ica Region Ica (; ) is a department and region of Peru. It borders the Pacific Ocean on the west; the Lima Region on the north; the Huancavelica and Ayacucho regions on the east; and the Arequipa Region on the south. Its capital is the city of Ica. Ge ...

. Its prominence was probably dependent upon an climatic phase in which the area received greater precipitation than at earlier and later periods. The site may have been abandoned in the 16th century because of water shortages, conflict with the expanding

Inca Empire The Inca Empire, officially known as the Realm of the Four Parts (, ), was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political, and military center of the empire was in the city of Cusco. The History of the Incas, Inca ...

, or epidemics of European diseases. The town (or city) of stone houses was located in a ravine between two mountain ridges, a location possibly dictated by a need for defense. Archaeological evidence indicates Huayari relied upon rainfall harvesting for its drinking water and some of the

irrigated agriculture Irrigation (also referred to as watering of plants) is the practice of applying controlled amounts of water to land to help grow crops, landscape plants, and lawns. Irrigation has been a key aspect of agriculture for over 5,000 years and has be ...

the town needed for the subsistence of the inhabitants.

Description

Huayuri is located about from the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is ...

at an elevation of in Santa Cruz District of Palpa Province in the

. The nearby Santa Cruz River is a

tributary A tributary, or an ''affluent'', is a stream or river that flows into a larger stream (''main stem'' or ''"parent"''), river, or a lake. A tributary does not flow directly into a sea or ocean. Tributaries, and the main stem river into which they ...

of the Rio Grande de Nazca River, the basin of which had been occupied for thousands of years by earlier cultures such as the Paracas and

Nazca Nazca (; sometimes spelled Nasca; possibly from ) is a city and system of valleys on the southern coast of Peru. The city of Nazca is the largest in the Nazca Province. The name is derived from the Nazca culture, which flourished in the area be ...

. A successor to those earlier desert cultures, the culture of Huayuri is called the Poroma by archaeologists. The ruins of Huayuri extend along a ravine between two flanking ridges for about with a maximum width of the densely settled area of about . The ruins have an area of . The entire site, including the terraced slopes which flank the ravine, has an area of about . Among the ruins of dwellings are also enclosed compounds and storage facilities.. Downloaded from Project MUSE. The ruins of Huayuri overlook the valley of the Santa Cruz River at a distance of about . The river valley is narrow in the immediate vicinity of Huayuri, but about a kilometer wide a few upstream. The river is dry most of the year, partially due to the use of its water for irrigation. Downloaded from

JSTOR JSTOR ( ; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary source ...

: 972234 From, ''New Technologies for Archaeology,'' ed. Markus Reindel and Guenther A. Wagner. The stone houses of Huayuri suggest that the inhabitants may have originated in the highlands because the coastal people of Peru customarily built in

adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

while highland peoples built in stone. From ''New Technologies for Archaeology,'' ed. Markus Reindel and Guenther A. Wagner. The location also suggests that the inhabitants wanted a defensible place to live and thus the settlement was located in a ravine, rather than in the nearby valley of the Santa Cruz River with its limited but more abundant water supply and cultivatable land. Huayuri was located along the north–south Inca road (which probably pre-dated the Incas) leading from the extensive irrigated lands of Ica to

. Archaeologists have found evidence that

llama The llama (; or ) (''Lama glama'') is a domesticated South American camelid, widely used as a List of meat animals, meat and pack animal by Inca empire, Andean cultures since the pre-Columbian era. Llamas are social animals and live with ...

caravans visited Huayuri during Inca times, although the llama is better adapted to higher elevations than the coastal desert.

Climate change and rainfall harvesting

The desert coasts of southern Peru and northern Chile are extremely dry. Nazca, the nearest sizeable city to Huayuri, receives less than of precipitation annually and the region is nearly devoid of vegetation, except in river valleys and where irrigation is possible. Archaeologists, however, have found evidence that the climate was less arid in the Late Intermediate Period in which Huayuri flourished. Geoarchaeological evidence points to a climate of the Huayari region during the Late Intermediate Period, with annual precipitation between to . The higher precipitation permitted rainfall harvesting at Huayuri. For rainfall harvesting to be practical, there must be rainfall—which in later centuries is almost totally absent at Huayuri—and it must be fairly reliable. At Huayuri, a substantial infrastructure for harvesting rainfall is present. The water harvesting system at Huayuri was similar to the Khadin System used in the

Thar Desert The Thar Desert (), also known as the Great Indian Desert, is an arid region in the north-western part of the Indian subcontinent that covers an area of in India and Pakistan. It is the world's 18th-largest desert, and the world's 9th-large ...

of India, as well as other locations around the world in dryland areas. The catchment area for water was the rocky upland around the settled area. Terraces were built into the hillsides and captured some rainfall. Additional water was captured and directed through channels and irrigation canals downhill onto a valley plain, enclosed at its bottom end by a bund or low dam. The captured water, its downhill path blocked by the bund, sank into the soil. Crops were planted in the area behind the bund without any additional irrigation. The soil was fertile because it was constantly renewed as the water deposited sediment and at the same time washed away harmful salts. Above and below the bund, rock-lined

cistern A cistern (; , ; ) is a waterproof receptacle for holding liquids, usually water. Cisterns are often built to catch and store rainwater. To prevent leakage, the interior of the cistern is often lined with hydraulic plaster. Cisterns are disti ...

s captured and preserved water which percolated down through the soil and was used for drinking and domestic use. The importance of rainfall harvesting at Huayuri indicates climate change in the Peruvian desert and that the Late Intermediate Period received greater precipitation than the historic era after the

Spanish conquest The Spanish Empire, sometimes referred to as the Hispanic Monarchy or the Catholic Monarchy, was a colonial empire that existed between 1492 and 1976. In conjunction with the Portuguese Empire, it ushered in the European Age of Discovery. It ...

beginning in 1532. However, rainfall harvesting could not create enough agricultural land to sustain a large population. The catchment area for rainfall harvesting is 15 to 25 times larger than the land that can be rendered suitable for agricultural areas. Rainfall harvesting provided only of agricultural land, plus drinking water, to the inhabitants of Huayuri. Assuming that the population of Huayuri was as large as the extensive ruins indicate, most of the food for the population came from irrigated agriculture in the adjacent valley of the Santa Clara River or was imported from elsewhere.

Abandonment

Huayuri reached its maximum population from 1150 CE to 1450 CE. Archaeological evidence indicates that rainfall harvesting began at Huayuri between 1260 and 1290 CE and became impractical in the 16th century, when the aridity of the region intensified and rainfall became extremely rare. Huayuri came under the influence or control of the

in the 1470s and possibly was still occupied when the Spanish conquest of Peru began. Epidemics of European diseases, beginning in the 1520s and killing a large percentage of the

Indigenous people of Peru The Indigenous peoples of Peru or Indigenous Peruvians comprise a large number of ethnic groups who inhabit territory in present-day Peru. Indigenous cultures developed here for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. In 2 ...

, may have contributed to the abandonment of the site.

Footnotes

{{reflist, 2 Archaeological sites in Peru Ruins in Peru Archaeological sites in the Department of Ica Pre-Columbian agriculture History of climate variability and change Rainwater harvesting