Dynastic History | Museo de Sitio de Chan Chan — Where the Portable Part Is Kept

The museum opened in March 1990 on the Huanchaco road, at the eastern edge of Chan Chan's monumental zone: a low earth-coloured building with cactus planted around it. Five rooms take a visitor from early stone tools through Moche and Chimú ceramics to the irrigation that made the valley farmable, the sunken fields cut down to the water table, and finally the origins and expansion of Chimor.

The cases hold ceramics, textiles and metalwork — gold and silver worked in repoussé, ear ornaments, nose ornaments, necklaces, funerary masks — together with the carved wooden figures recovered from Huaca del Dragón and Huaca Tacaynamo. A museum matters here for a particular reason. Almost nothing portable stayed in the buildings it came from. Each of the ten walled compounds had a burial platform in its central sector, and most of those were emptied in the first decades after the Spanish conquest; the belief that gold and silver lay inside the walls and platforms of Chan Chan kept diggers coming through the viceregal centuries.

Peru's Ministry of Culture runs the site through the Proyecto Especial Complejo Arqueológico Chan Chan, and one ticket covers the museum, Nik An, Huaca del Dragón and Huaca Esmeralda. Chan Chan has been on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 1986, the year it was inscribed, and it is still there. The material is mud. The hazards named in the listing are the rain that arrives with El Niño, and looting.

📸 Cover: The Museo de Sitio de Chan Chan, Huanchaco, uranio (Luís), CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons