If you ever get a chance, you must go and visit the Museo de Cao, on a desert peninsula overlooking the sea on the north coast of Peru. Driving past what seem like endless fields of sugarcane, you reach a raised terrace of unirrigated sand. This is the El Brujo Peninsula, where some of the most impressive archaeological remains in the world are preserved in a 1 km2 area. At the suggestion of Rafael Larco Hoyle, Junius and Peggy Bird led excavations at the Preceramic site of Huaca Prieta here in the 1940s. In the 1990s a team led by Régulo Franco Jordán and financed by Guillermo Wiese de Osma, a Peruvian banker and head of the Wiese Foundation, began large-scale investigations of many more aspects of the archaeology of the peninsula. This led to the discovery of the tomb of the Moche Señora de Cao in 2005 and the creation over the last 20 years of an impressive site museum and research facility.
Jeffrey Quilter of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University became involved in this research and in 2002 began work on the colonial-era church ruins embedded in the plaza of the Moche Huaca Cao Viejo pyramid complex. From 2004 to 2012, Quilter and his team undertook multiple seasons of excavation of the colonial church and town; the current volume provides an overview of this work, funded by the NEH, NSF, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Peabody Museum, with considerable in-kind support from the Wiese Foundation.
This volume is made up of contributions by multiple researchers associated with the project, with specialized chapters on different categories of archaeological materials and history. The authors argue convincingly that the church and town are the village of Magdalena de Cao, relocated here in 1578 after the 1560s reducción town in the adjacent valley was flooded. The higher ground of the El Brujo terrace was safe from valley floods, but was also inconvenient for access to water, and the village was largely abandoned by the 1640s. The combination of desert preservation conditions and the abandonment of the town make this site uniquely important to the archaeology of Spanish colonialism.
Introductory and concluding chapters by Quilter provide the context of global and Andean colonialism, setting the scene. Victor Vásquez Sánchez and Teresa Rosales Tham then provide a summary of faunal and floral remains, which show a reliance on caprines, on a wide range of marine resources, and on coastal cormorant populations for food. The plant resources consumed give a picture of the area's early colonial agriculture, whereas the analysis of dental calculus from burials reveals a reliance on manioc that was not reflected in the macrobotanical remains. Next, Catherine M. Gaither and Melissa S. Murphy provide a chapter on the human burials from the church floor and the adjoining cemetery. Looting has been extensive throughout Magdalena de Cao, and many disarticulated human remains were recovered. There were twenty-eight more intact burials excavated, of which six were mostly complete. The authors present important new data for colonial bioarchaeology in coastal Peru on burials of Indigenous, and possibly some mixed-race, inhabitants, using Native shrouds in a church-sanctioned cemetery. One cranium, recovered from a disturbed context, was identified as of African origin, and a separate chapter by Catherine Gaither and colleagues went all out with 14C, isotopes, DNA, and dental calculus, concluding that the cranium is one of the earliest archaeologically recovered examples in the Americas of the remains of a person of African ancestry.
The remarkable collection of textiles analyzed by Carrie Brezine has many examples of local cotton weaves, along with European-style knits, silk fragments from Asia, and spherical buttons decorated with thread. Brezine sees some of the clothing as Indigenous, other pieces as European, and then some examples that may be Andean-made replicas of European, or hybrid, styles. In a separate section, Quilter describes three painted burial shrouds recovered from within the Christian burials; all three shrouds were strongly Indigenous in design and manufacture.
All the main categories of material culture are given chapter-length treatment by an expert, including beads, both Indigenous and imported (by Alexander Menaker); imported ceramics, largely Panamanian (by Parker VanValkenburgh); Indigenous pottery (by Jennifer Ringberg); metal objects including pins, candle cutters, tweezers, and bells (by Andrew Z. Lorey and Jeffrey Quilter); and two silver coins from seventeenth-century Potosí (by Richard Burger). In all cases, the analyses are thorough and will provide excellent comparative data to others studying Andean colonial material culture.
These excavations are best known for the incredible survival of objects made of paper. These are covered by Quilter, Karen Spalding, and Nicholas E. Brown and in a fascinating separate chapter on playing cards by Sarah McAnulty Quilter. The paper objects are mostly from the Dominican church and include page fragments from religious texts, musical scores, and religious indulgences. A jotted list of numerals with associated words is thought to be a transcription of the counting system in the local Quingnam language. Some recovered paper fragments were folded and cut to create decorative pieces and for rolling tobacco cigarettes. Finally, the twelve fragments of seventeenth-century playing cards recovered, along with other early colonial Spanish playing cards excavated at Huaca Tres Palos in the 1970s, are well illustrated, with a thorough discussion of types and styles.
The Magdalena de Cao volume, although not cheap, is a hardcover book with 181 color photographs and diagrams and has excellent production values. All of the authors have done a thorough job of analyzing the materials present and have created a book of great research value to Andeanists and to archaeologists and historians of the Spanish colonies.
