Description

Pp. 330, b/w photographs. “Hugh Thompson has made a career exploring the mysterious pre-Columbian cultures of ancient Peru, providing unforgettable accounts of South America’s most strange–but enduring–culture. In A Sacred Landscape, he takes us from the great Moche pyramids to remote sites in the Central highlands that date back to the first millennium BCE–ancient Incan sites of the Andes that remain cloaked in mystery. He elegantly interweaves his account of the rise, decline, and fall of pre-Inca civilization with the story of his family’s relocation to a farm in the Yucay valley, the one-time heartland of ancient Peru. Thompson draws on the year that he spent alongside contemporary Peruvians to explore how things have changed–or failed change–in the five centuries or more that separate contemporary Peru from the civilization that is one of the world’s oldest and most captivating enigmas.”