Dynastic History | Huaca Toledo, Chan Chan — Under the Diggers' Spoil

For a long time Huaca Toledo read as a hill. It is a stepped pyramid, more than twenty metres high and about ninety metres to a side, and it spent centuries beneath the debris that colonial treasure-hunting piled on top of it. The archaeologists working it now say plainly that the historical references to that looting are sparse: the digging happened, the mound was covered, and very little was written down.

From 2015 the Proyecto Especial Complejo Arqueológico Chan Chan, under Peru's Ministry of Culture, opened the structure in seasons. María Elena Córdova Burga directs the project; Jorge Meneses Bartra has been the archaeologist responsible here. What has come out of it is a construction method that does not match the other ceremonial buildings of the Moche valley — cells of stone and gravel, faced with adobe to form the finished steps. Two staircases climb the north-eastern and north-western corners, an arrangement the excavators describe as atypical. And there is no decoration at all: no rainbow arcs, no fish, none of the modelled panels that make the walled compounds legible. Fragments of relief painted in ochre and black turned up in an adjacent courtyard. The building is assigned to the late Chimú phase, roughly 1350 to 1400.

The name it carries is Spanish, like most of the older names on this site. Huaca Toledo stands inside the protected zone on the Huanchaco side of Chan Chan and is not on the visitor route; the ticket takes you to Nik An, about a kilometre to the south-west.

📸 Cover: Huaca Toledo, Chan Chan, Thayne Tuason, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons