Mummies or daddies

Photograph Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty images

Arguably one of Tello´s greatest contributions to archaeology was his work at Chavin de Huantar, and his travels frequently took him through the beautiful Callejón de Huaylas in the mountains of Ancash. The stunning landscape is home to some equally picturesque inhabitants that Hernan delights in describing in the Anecdotes. 

Hernan loved to poke fun at small town manners and conventions. When I arrived in Peru´s capital city many years later things had changed. But when I stepped off the plane and found myself thrust into the heart of what was still, in some ways, a very conservative Andean family, there was still plenty of room for disaster.

Hernan´s hankering for a freer kind of life had launched him on the adventures I was reading about more than half a century later, and his sense of humour, which shone through in stories like this one, was a breath of fresh air.

It felt like I had found a kindred spirit.


Mummies or daddies
In which things get a little saucy at the home of the sisters

On one of his regular visits to the beautiful Huaylas canyon valley, Tello arrived at one of Ancash's many charming country towns. As always, the first thing he did was to set about finding any local archaeology aficionados.

All roads lead to Casma

The river Marañon, a tributary of the Amazon, rises to the north of Lima and flows along the eastern flank of the Andes before turning inland, carving through the mountains and continuing on through the rainforest on the other side.

In 1937 Tello got funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to explore the upper Marañon river basin and in June of that year the team set off north from the capital out onto the coastal desert plain, where they were to begin by exploring the river valleys

Some unexpected discoveries  led  to an unscheduled and highly successful three months stay excavating in the Casma valley, and the expedition was to eventually last an extraordinary six months and take them as far north as Cochabamba and Chachapoyas.

This little adventure occurs early on in their travels. Money, as always, is tight, and Hernan is just beginning to get used to life on the road and Tello´s robust temper.


All roads lead to Casma
In which our young adventurer's heroic undertakings take a wrong turn

When we left to explore the Marañón river basin, there were so many of us that we set out in two cars. Doctor Tello led the group. Then there was Mejía Xesspe, our assistant director at the National Anthropology Museum, and the one who was in charge of logistics and budget, the illustrator Pedro Rojas Ponce, the North American anthropologist Donald Collier and his two fellow students Honour McCreary and Barbara Loomis. As usual I went along as illustrator and Tello’s campaign secretary. 

We started off at Huaral and continued on beyond Sayán, stopping off and excavating wherever we found cemeteries and pre-Columbian ruins. we stayed for several days studying tombs in Lachay and then went on through Vilcahuara, San Nicholas and the port of Supe

At that time what served as a highway was little more than a collection of tracks that changed according to the whim of the dunes and the winds that erased them.  It meant that the drivers had to be very skillful. Ours were good on the tarmac streets of Lima, but they were hard pressed to negotiate such an uneven expanse of shifting desert dunes.

We were making our way toward Casma, descending the long incline just past Las Zorras, when we started sliding all over the place in the sand, struggling to keep the cars on the track. The engines began to rattle worryingly and we decided to get down and push. 

The photographer

Marcahuamachuco - David Almeida, Lima Peru

As I read through the Anecdotes I was struck by the dveloping picture of this band of brothers; their unique individual characters and the bonds that formed as they travelled the length and breadth of the country, working, eating and sleeping together.

In June 1937 Tello took off to explore Peru's northern coastal river valleys and the upper Marañon river basin. The expedition was to become one of the team's most important scientific endeavours, taking a total of six months and yielding a wealth of discoveries, all logged and illustrated by Hernan.

On the way back they stopped off at a hacienda just outside Chilia in the morthwestern highlands. By this time the expedition was reduced to a small core group and it's not entirely clear who the bumbling protagonist of this tale of manners is. But Hernan has some wickedly ironic fun describing ...


The photographer
In which it becomes apparent that archaeologists are not always good diplomats

We arrived in Yanasara, by car from Huamachuco, after having crossed the river Marañón in a basket sling bridge. Three days on horseback out of Yanasara, and we arrived at La Deliciana hacienda. 

Tello (right) and his assistant Mejia Xesspe crossing the Marañón.

 Hernan is seated behind, wearing his distinctive hat.

We were relieved to get to the property which was situated high up in the hills. We had no desire to spend the night further down in the muggy, hot air of the valley. It wasn’t the heat that worried us so much, as the fact that the valley lay in a zone well known for the virulent and debilitating ‘verruga’ disease. 

Death stalks the valley

One of my most treasured memories is of a winter night sat listening to Jesus' aunt Hayde telling tall tales in the garden of their old family homestead in the central Andean highlands. The two hundred year old house sits in a small village in the Mantaro Valley. At that altitude, at over three thousand metres above sea level, the air is pristine : the moonlight, the stars, the sounds of the valley drifting through the stillness of the night,  its a special kind of magic. 

This story describes a similar moonlit night. The place is Cuzco's Sacred Valley. The year 1942. Tello's Urubamba expedition has arrived for their first night at Huiñay Huayna. But the sounds Hernan hears coming out of the darkness turn the magic to fear.

Death stalks the valley 
In which our explorers get a nasty fright


It was the 25th of August 1942, a beautiful calm, starry night, and the first night that we stayed in the Huiñay Huayna expedition hut we had constructed close to the ruins on the edge of the forest.

We retired early as usual at seven o’clock. But for some reason, at ten o’clock, when all the others were sleeping peacefully, I was still awake. 

I was listening to the sound of the crickets and mulling over a thousand memories in my mind when a distant but clear shriek of anguish tore through the silence of the night:

 “Oh my God! God have mercy, Mercy!”

The scream echoed through the secluded valley. I froze in my bed. What on earth was happening?

The boy from Machu Picchu

Tello’s explorers were no strangers to hardship. Many of Tio Hernan’s stories tell of the constant challenges the expeditions faced in finding provisions and eating well on scant resources. On the 1942 expedition to the Urubamba valley (also known as the Sacred Valley of the Incas) located close to Cusco and the ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, they met a young boy who turned out to have a particular flair for making ends meet.

In this story Hernan describes the ingenuity, creativity, and drive for improvement that many Peruvians still pride themselves on today. 

But he also writes about a far less attractive social phenomenon, and the obstacles and harsh conditions that eventually blight the life of a resourceful young man.

The boy from Machu Picchu
In which we learn more about the expedition's young camp cook and his unfortunate fate.

There are some interesting ruins at Corihuayrachina, linked to Machu Picchu by a very well conserved granite paved Inca road. We had just set up camp there when we realized that we were running very low on provisions. So we sent a peon to buy more from the small town which is situated down in the valley near the famous ruins.

The next day climbing back up the hill, burdened with his purchases, came not the peon but a small boy of about fourteen years of age. He explained that his brother had been taken ill, and so he had come himself to bring us our provisions.

The bears of HuiñayHuayna

I had already heard Hernan’s name before I found his Anecdotes. Travelling by train from Cusco along the Urubamba valley on our first trip to Machu Picchu, Jesus pointed up at a grey smudge barely visible amidst the lush green valley covering:  “Look up there,” he said “Those are the ruins my uncle helped discover”.

These days the site is well known, one of the final stops on the Inca Trail before arriving at Machu Picchu. Clinging to a densely forested slope high above the river, the ruins are connected by a long staircase and a series of cisterns or baths.  Hernan gives us his own take on how they came to light, and contemplates their fate.

The bears of Huiñay Huayna
In which, on the trail of the Peruvian spectacled bear, an archaeoogist finds some exraordinary ruins, and how they are named after the orchids that bloom all over them.