Space Archaeologist Wants Citizen Scientists To Identify Archaeological Looting

An archaeologist has launched a citizen science project that invites anyone with an Internet connection to help look for evidence of archaeological site looting.

The platform, called GlobalXplorer, presents users with satellite images of Earth's surface. "Looting is one of the most common ways archaeological sites around the world are destroyed," explains the archaeologist behind the project, Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

"By marking satellites where you think you see looting, you're helping to protect sites and save our common cultural heritage."

Parcak is a space archaeologist, meaning she specializes in what satellite images can tell us about past civilizations. The GlobalXplorer project is funded with the $1 million TED Prize that Parcak won last year.

She explained early plans for the project to NPR's Ari Shapiro last year.

People who log on to the site are shown square satellite images of the Earth's surface — the current area they are crowdsourcing is in Peru — and are asked to decide whether there is or is not evidence of looting pits on the ground.

A portion of the site of the pre-Columbian Peruvian city of Chan Chan that shows evidence of heavy looting activity.

Looters find an area of interest and then dig numerous large holes or even bulldoze whole areas, the website explains. In so doing, looters in search of valuable artifacts destroy the context that helps archaeologists understand past cultures.

A training video explains how to tell man-made looting pits from other holes in the ground:

  •  Pits always appear in groups

  •  Pits generally have a round or rounded square shape

  •  Pits contrast with the landscape around them and sometimes cast a shadow, depending on the light in the image

  •  Pits are typically 2 to 5 meters in diameter

"Although it may seem like an easy distinction between a large deep hole in the ground and bush, you can actually sometimes be hard to tell them apart," the training video warns.

Parcak also reminds people who join the project that it's good to be skeptical.

"It's just as valuable to mark a tile as negative for looting as it is to identify potential looting because it helps us narrow the search," she explains. The project is set up such that dozens of people will typically look at each image, mitigating the effects of each layperson's impressions.

Peruvian archaeologist Luís Jaime Castillo is coordinating with the Peruvian government about potential findings from the project, should it turn up actionable evidence of archaeological looting in the country, according to National Geographic, which is supporting the project

"Most people don't get to make scientific contributions or discoveries in their everyday lives," Parcak told National Geographic. "But we're all born explorers, curious and intrinsically interested in other humans."

Talara - Peru's Great Ice Age Tar Trap

A few years back, as I ran around the Royal Ontario Museum fossil halls trying to take in as much as I could in the short time I had there, an Ice Age fossil stopped me in my tracks. It was a fossil horse jaw, but unlike any I had seen before. The fossil seemed impossibly black, tooth and bone stained to gorgeous ebony shades.

The beautiful fossil had been excavated decades before from a tar seep in Talara, Peru. I had never heard of this place before. When I think “tar pit”, I think La Brea. (Perhaps because, aside from being the most important fossil site on the planet, La Brea translates directly to “the tar.”) But the exhibits and a quick primer from ROM curator Kevin Seymour introduced me to an entirely different death trap that has produced a wealth of fossils colored by a deeper shade than the La Brea brown of their Californian counterparts.

Much of what’s known about Talara comes from a collection of over 28,000 bones collected from the site from A.G. Edmund in 1958. The vast majority of these fossils – about 63.4 percent of identified bones – are from mammals, and of these more than 79 percent are the remains of carnivores. There are plenty of other creatures represented at Talara – songbirds, amphibians, horses, camels, ground sloths, mastodons, deer, and more – but this place was primarily a deadly draw for the meat-eaters.

Smilodon fossils from Talara at the Royal Ontario Museum. Credit: Brian Switek

Some of the Talara carnivores are still with us. The Sechuran desert fox, wrote Seymour in an overview of the site, is represented by pieces of over 100 individuals pulled from the asphalt and still lives in the area. And when I giddily started pulling open cabinets in the ROM collections on my second day at the museum, Seymour was kind enough to point out a stunning fossil jaguar skull that had previously been mistaken for an American lion. But the biggest of the Talara carnivores are long gone. The site has given up the bones of at least 51 dire wolves and 20 Smilodon.

Many of these animals were juveniles. And while the sample isn’t nearly as extensive as that of La Brea, Seymour notes, the proportion of juvenile animals for the three most common carnivores ranged from 57 to 69 percent. That seems quite high compared to La Brea and Ice Age fossil sites in Florida, and could indicate that either there were more juveniles around at the time the Talara tar seeps were active or that the young animals were more naive and blundered into the trap more often.

All these figures are just the beginning of a new effort to understand the site. After early descriptions and fossil sorting by Charles Churcher and others in the 1960s, the fossils waited in the Royal Ontario Museum collections for a more recent surge of interest that is beginning to trickle out some new details about this sticky Pleistocene bonanza.

And Talara is not the only undersung tar pit around. In another new paper Seymour and Emily Lindsey surveyed several other sites in the Americas ranging from McKittrick in California to La Carolina, Tanque Loma, and Corralito in Ecuador.

Each site its own character and history. Tanque Loma, for example, is superabundant in sloths and has plenty of prehistoric elephants but totally lacks the big carnivores found elsewhere. La Corralito, on the other hand, has a somewhat more even mix of carnivores, sloths, horses, elephants. This is probably because these two sites didn’t kill the animals by suffocation in tar but were places where bones were laid down by rivers and then tar seeped up into them afterwards. There wasn’t the same deadly aroma of rotting flesh that pulled the wolves and sabercats to the tar in Talara and La Brea. For carnivores, those places were truly the pits.

References:

Lindsey, E., Lopez, E. 2014. Tanque Loma, a new late-Pleistocene megafaunal tar seep locality from southwest Ecuador. Journal of South American Earth Sciences. doi: 10.1016/j.jsames.2014.11.003

Lindsey, E., Seymour, K. 2015. “Tar Pits” of the Western Neotropics: Paleoecology, taphonomy, and mammalian biogeography. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Science Series, 42: 111-123

Seymour, K. 2015. Perusing Talara: Overview of the Late Pleistocene fossils from the tar seeps of Peru. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Science Series, 42: 97-109

[This post was originally published at National Geographic.]

Astronomical and Physical Observations Made in the Realm of Peru

Astronomical and Physical Observations Made in the Realm of Peru

Description

Jorge Juan y Santacilia (1713‒73) was born in Alicante, Valencia. A humanist, naval engineer, and scientist, he was one of the most prominent scholars of the Spanish Enlightenment. A versatile man who promoted Enlightenment ideas in Spain, he enjoyed prestige throughout Europe, where he was known as“the learned Spaniard.”  His observations led to improvements in the metric system and helped to determine the exact shape of the Earth, proving that it is not perfectly round. He also played a decisive role in the reform of shipyards during the rule of King Ferdinand VI and in the improvement of the academic education of midshipmen. He was the author of a most important work on the construction of ships,Examen marítimo (Maritime exam), published in 1771, a guide that was translated into all European languages. He measured the longitude of the meridian of the Earth, thus demonstrating that the planet is flattened at the poles. In 1735, together with Antonio de Ulloa, he was selected to join a Franco-Spanish expedition to measure the Equator and determine the degree of flattening at the poles and to perfect a theory on the shape of the Earth. He returned to Spain in 1745. In 1748 he published the book presented here, Observaciones astronómicas y físicas, hechas de orden de S.M. en los reinos del Perú(Physical and astronomical observations made by order of H.M. [His Majesty] in the Kingdoms of Peru), as well as Relación histórica del viaje a la América meridional (Historical account of the trip to South America). In 1751 he was appointed captain of the Midshipmen Company of Cadiz, where the most advanced naval education of the time was provided. Among other initiatives, he founded the Astronomical Observatory of Cadiz and created the Asamblea Amistosa Literaria, predecessor to the Academy of Sciences. During his final years he served as a diplomat in Morocco and as a consultant on various matters to the Ministry of State and the Council of Castile in Madrid.

The Internet of Things Is Coming for Us

The Moche people lived on Peru’s north coast long before the Spanish conquest of the Americas. They grew corn and squash, built monumental adobe temples and were master craftsmen in gold and ceramics.

They never had the chance to sell their wares on Etsy, and yet they anticipated some of our most modern anxieties.

Like us, they saw themselves living in a vulnerable world where the technology created to make their lives better was just as likely to turn against them. While we worry about our baby monitors and home routers being hijacked by malicious hackers, they perceived a world in which everyday objects like jugs and clothes might come to life with ominous consequences.

Moche artists painted scenes of this happening on ceramic vessels and on the walls of their temples. They appear whimsical to us today — items of clothing, weaving implements, weapons, all with arms and legs, hands and feet, some with heads and faces, on parade or engaged in battle — but for the Moche they may have represented a deep-seated uncertainty and fear about the ultimate fate of the human-created world.

In some scenes, the animated objects are docile. In one, bowls piled with food and jugs have grown legs and walk toward human figures participating in a ceremony; some helpful jugs even bend over to pour liquid into vessels.

But other paintings show a world turned upside down, where the objects have taken charge: They fight and defeat human warriors and parade naked human captives.

In an excavation in 1991 near the town of San José de Moro, archaeologists, including one of the authors of this piece, Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, discovered the lavish tomb of a Moche priestess. Her coffin had been anthropomorphized, with a mask representing the priestess’ face on top and with arms and legs fashioned from copper on the sides.

Inherent in the idea that objects have life is the more subversive concept that they also have desires; feel hate and love; seek revenge; and have the capacity to act on their own.

In the modern world, most of the objects that surround us are a result of an impersonal process of production — they come from factories, we buy them in stores or online. For the Moche, objects were not produced — they were created, imbuing them with the ambiguity and mystery with which life is given to animated beings.

Such objects could be either beneficial or dangerous, depending on whether they decided to serve their creators or turn against them, either of their own volition or through the black arts of others.

We now live in a world where objects once again have life. We can talk to them and they can answer back, as is the case with Alexa and Siri and their digital kin. With their help we can control and organize the world around us: We can make sure our homes are safe, turn lights and appliances on or off, summon a taxi or order food from a restaurant. Little by little we are transferring to these technologies the tasks that we used to do ourselves, and at the same time, we are giving them control over our surroundings.

The internet of things is made up of billions of everyday devices connected for convenience to the web. Last fall, hackers attacked this network, commandeering as many as 100,000 of these devices by using malicious software that guessed at their simple, factory-set passwords, and then ordering them to send volleys of nuisance messages to the computers of a company called Dyn, which functions as a sort of switchboard for the internet. That was enough to cripple many major websites, including Twitter and Netflix. We have given life to these things, but now we know that they do not obey only us.

There are alternative interpretations of the Moche ceramic paintings, and some researchers do not see a sinister component. But the paintings have an echo in a myth collected in central Peru in the early 17th century. In the myth, the sun dies, the world is plunged into darkness and household objects and domesticated animals revolt: Mortars and grinding stones eat people, and llamas drive humans.

Andean people before the conquest created a philosophical and spiritual system built around the concepts of duality and transformation — light versus darkness, order versus chaos.

The modern world is full of such opportunities for chaos, often created by humans and the increasing sophistication and technology-centeredness of modern life. A solar flare has the potential to disrupt electrical networks. A tsunami can flood a nuclear reactor. The digitalization of stock markets leads to flash crashes. Russian hackers stealing Democratic Party emails seek to influence an American presidential election.

Order gives way to chaos. The internet of things turns on its makers.

The Moche culture collapsed around A.D. 850. The reasons are not clear, but the collapse was most likely a result of the Moche’s inability to cope with a hostile and perhaps changing environment, including the failure of their technology, knowledge and institutions to help them overcome those challenges. We can be certain that the technology they created did not rebel against them. But neither did it save them when they needed it the most.

William Neuman, the former Andes region bureau chief for The Times, covers City Hall in New York. Luis Jaime Castillo Butters is a professor of archaeology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

Getting High on Cactus and Chasing Away Evil with the Shamans of the Black Lagoon

After photographer Sebastián Castañeda was offered San Pedro, a hallucinogenic cactus used by shamans to open a pathway between the conscious and the subconscious, he was startled when a pack of dogs nearby suddenly began to bark. "They see and feel the spirits," healer Luis Zurita reassured him. "That's why they bark."

This was the first of several nights Castañeda spent with Zurita, a thirty-year-old healer from Piura, a small city in northwestern Peru. Castañeda, a photojournalist from Lima, Peru's capital, had traveled to meet Zurita and document his practice as a healer. He was drawn to the subject partly because of his ongoing desire to explore diverse traditions of faith across cultures, but also out of personal curiosity, having heard stories about the shamans' healing powers. He hoped that a journey into the mountains might help him forget about the girlfriend he had recently broken up with (although he did not initially share this with the healer).

Narratively

Zurita is one of the curanderos, or healers, who practice traditions of shamanistic healing, passed down through generations ever since Incan times. Healing powers run in Zurita's family - his father and uncle are also shamans. These healings use the secrets of the cordillera, or mountains, to harness the power of natural medicine and spiritual rituals. They live and practice in the Huancabamba province, a mountainous region in northwest Peru widely known for its network of lagoons known as "Las Huaringas," which are said to have sacred healing properties. At nearly thirteen thousand feet above sea level, the lagoons attract thousands of tourists and travelers from all over the world, many of whom also seek out the services of the healers for everything from chronic back pain to a broken heart.

Left: the first part of a healing ritual, known as "the table," includes the construction of a small altar, upon which tokens like human remains, shells, wooden swords, limes, and flowers are placed as offerings. Right: Zurita's patient Ricardo Umberto Bernales, 73, with a stone carved by the Incas. Healers use the stone to absorb the body's negative energies. Bernales came to Zurita with a rare disease in his legs, which caused him to tremble so badly that he could not walk or stand. Now, after three months of treatment, Bernales says the shaking has decreased and he walks normally again.

Zurita invited Castañeda to photograph him and his patients, on one condition: that he participate in the rituals as well. Castañeda participated in and photographed several ceremonies meant to expel evil spirits and free patients of negative energies. The patients prayed, drank a concoction made with San Pedro, inhaled tobacco, and were cleansed using ancient stones carved by the Incas. "The room was dark, lit only by candles," Castañeda recalls. "I was a little concerned about the effects of San Pedro, but my curiosity overcame my worries, and it was a very intriguing experience. The night flowed heavy, and we prayed."

The final phase of these rituals was a pilgrimage into the mountains to bathe in the icy water of the Laguna Negra - the Black Lagoon - which hovers at temperatures between forty and 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Although it is more difficult to access than many of the other lagoons in the area, local shamans believe its healing powers to be the strongest of all the lagoons, and therefore consider it to be the most sacred.

Left: After his patient is bathed in the lagoon, Luis Zurita's uncle, healer Joaquin Chasquero Zurita, performs a final ritual to cleanse the body and soul of all evil. Right: After seven dives into the Black Lagoon, a patient is doused with seven buckets of water. Although an apprentice usually cleans the patient, it is up to the healer to decide how many times this is performed.

After they had swallowed the San Pedro concoction, amid the dogs' barking on that first night, Zurita suddenly paused and turned his gaze on Castañeda. "I see a blond woman at your side," he said, shocking Castañeda by referring to his ex-girlfriend, whom Castañeda had still not mentioned. "You will not return to her," he declared.

Castañeda, although discouraged, accepted these words. "I have changed since I experienced the faith people have in the healers of Huaringas," he says. "I came to see that as long as someone has faith in something, that faith will give you powerful hope, which can heal a physical evil, or an evil of the heart or the soul. Faith in voodoo, or in the mountains, is not so different from, for example, the Catholic religion. It is all the same faith, a question of believing in something."

7,000 years after they were embalmed by the Chinchorro people

More than 7,000 years after they were embalmed by the Chinchorro people, an ancient civilization in modern-day  Peru, 15 mummies were taken to a Santiago clinic to undergo DNA analysis and computerized tomography scans.
The Chinchorro were a hunting and fishing people who lived from 10,000 to 3,400 BCE on the Pacific coast of South America, at the edge of the Atacama desert. They were among the first people in the world to mummify their dead, at least 2,000 years before the ancient Egyptians. Now, researchers are hoping to reconstruct what they looked like in life, decode their genes and better understand the mysteries of this civilization.
The 15 Chinchorro mummies, mostly children and unborn babies, were put through a CT scanner at the Los Condes clinic in the Chilean capital. "We collected thousands of images with a precision of less than one millimeter," said chief radiologist Marcelo Galvez. "The next phase is to try to dissect these bodies virtually, without touching them."
The Chinchorro, who apparently had a complex understanding of human anatomy, would mummified their dead carefully removing the skin and muscles of the deceased. Using wood, plants and clay, they reconstructed the body around the remaining skeleton, then sewed the original skin back on, adding a mouth, eyes and hair. A mask was then placed over the face. The result looks like something in between a statue and a person - eerily lifelike even after thousands of years.
Mummification was an intimate process for the Chinchorro, said Veronica Silva, the head of the anthropology department at Chile's National Museum of Natural History. "The family itself would make the mummy," she said. The earliest mummies were unborn fetuses and newborns, she said. The mummies were all made using the same basic process, but each one shows unique "technological and artistic innovations," she said. It was a process that evolved over time. The newest mummies are the most elaborate.
Some 180 Chinchorro mummies have been discovered since 1903. All were found outdoors, placed near the beach. The Chinchorro apparently did not build pyramids or any other structures to house them. In fact, the Chinchorro civilization left no trace besides its mummies.
Surprises have already begun to emerge from the CT scanner. The smallest mummy, it turns out, was not a mummy at all. "There was no bone structure inside. It was just a figurine, possibly a representation of an individual who could not be mummified," said Silva.
Researchers also took skin and hair samples from the mummies to analyze their DNA, in hopes of identifying genetic links with the modern-day population.

Caral entre los más importantes del mundo

La "Dama de los Cuatro Tupus", que data de 4 mil quinientos años, recuperada en el sitio arqueológico Áspero, ciudad pesquera de la civilización Caral, y presentado al mundo en abril de 2016, fue considerada uno de los descubrimientos más importantes por la International Arqueology Americana. 

Se trata de un entierro humano recuperado en el edificio público “Los Ídolos de Áspero”. El cuerpo fue encontrado en posición flexionada con el dorso hacia abajo y colocado en un hoyo cavado en un depósito de ceniza y material orgánico. Fue envuelto con una tela de algodón y una esterilla de junco, sujetado con soguillas.

Los análisis identificaron que se trata de una mujer de aproximadamente 40 años. Del lugar en que fue colocado el entierro y del contexto de materiales asociados al enterramiento se infiere el estatus social que alcanzó este personaje. Durante el ritual de enterramiento, primero, se dispuso una ofrenda conformada por un mate conteniendo fragmentos y semillas de vegetales.

Posteriormente, y como parte del ajuar funerario, fueron dispuestos objetos muy apreciados por la sociedad de Áspero: un collar con cuentas de molusco, un dije hecho despondylus y cuatro tupus con diseños de aves y monos, finamente elaborados en huesos de animales mamíferos.

La importancia de estos hallazgos radica en que nos ayudan a conocer aspectos de la organización social y del sistema religioso de la sociedad de Áspero.

La música también fue una actividad importante en la vida de la sociedad de Áspero, como se infiere del hallazgo de ocho flautas traversas, elaboradas con huesos de animales, depositadas como ofrendas en un recinto ceremonial del Edificio Piramidal Las Flautas en Áspero. El conjunto de flautas traversas fue encontrado en el interior de un envoltorio de tela de algodón, que además cubría material botánico, pequeños fragmentos de cuarzo, diversas cuentas y dos esferas de arcilla.

DNA test results: Paracas skulls are not human

The desert peninsula of Paracas is located on the southern coast of one of South America's most enigmatic countries: Peru. It is there, in this barren landscape where Peruvian archeologist Julio Tello made one of the most mysterious discoveries in 1928. During excavations, Tello uncovered a complex and sophisticated graveyard under the harsh soil of the Paracas desert.

In the enigmatic tombs, Tello discovered a set of controversial human remains that would forever change how we look at our ancestor and our origins. The bodies in the tombs had some of the largest elongated skulls ever discovered on the planet, called the Paracas skulls. The Peruvian archeologist discovered over 300 mysterious skulls which are believed to be at least around 3000 years old.

As if the shape of the skulls wasn't mysterious enough, a recent DNA analysis performed on some of the skulls presented some of the most enigmatic and incredible results that challenge everything we know about the origin and human evolutionary tree.

Skull Deformation: An Ancient religious practice

While several cultures around the globe practices skull deformation (elongation), the techniques used were different, meaning the results were also not the same. There are certain South American tribes that used to 'bind infants skulls' in order to change their shape, resulting in a drastically elongated cranial shape that resembled anything but ordinary humans.

By applying constant pressure over a long period of time with the use of pieces of mood, the ancient tribes would achieve a cranial deformation which can also be found in ancient cultures from Africa.

However, while this type of cranial deformation changed the shape of the skull, it did not alter the size, weight or cranial volume, all of which are characteristic traits of regular human skulls.

Scientists find portals to parallel worlds

An international team of researchers confirmed the existence of portals to parallel worlds on Earth. The scientists conducted a series of tests showing that the gateways to parallel worlds created by ancient civilizations are located, for example, at Stonehenge (UK).

For many years, scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of Stonehenge, the Gate of the Sun in Bolivia and the Gate of the Gods in Peru. The idea of those monuments being gateways to parallel worlds received a development after a curious discovery in Peru, where researchers found the gate seven and two meters high near Hayu Marca mountain region.

Legend has it that a human being would become immortal if he or she would pass through the gate.

The scientists have not found a way to open those portals. Yet, further research may shed more light on ancient mysteries.

The Room of 10,000 Ancient Skulls in Lima, Peru

Indigenous people have lived in Peru since as early as 12,000 BC, leaving Peruvian archaeologists with thousands of years of prehistoric human skulls to examine. The Museum of Anthropology, Archaeology, and History in Lima, Peru contains over 10,000 of these skulls, packed together tightly in the museum's Human Remains Gallery.

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The room is filled with so many skulls that it has been speculated to be the largest ancient skull collection in the world. The collection also includes hundreds of ancient ceramics and stone statues.

Perhaps the most interesting of the museum's 10,000 skulls is the Paracas collection, known worldwide for their stretched, elongated shape. These strange skulls have foreheads that are massively taller than those of normal humans, which many archaeologists suspect is the result of rigidly tying cloth or two pieces of wood around the head to show elite status in society.

The debate over whether the skulls' elongated shapes stem from cultural, genetic, or perhaps alien origin makes the Paracas collection one of the museum's main draws and its most highly disputed exhibit.

Cuzco, Peru: Things Learned During an Eight-Day Visit

When I arrived in Cuzco, a city of 350,000 people known as the Inca Capital of Peru, I had near-zero knowledge about the place. All I knew is that it is home to a famous tourist attraction which most of my friends have kept on their Bucket Lists – forever!

Stepping out of the airport, I wore that moronic look tourists wear when they arrive at a place where the primary language is something they cannot fluently speak. I did a little chicken dance in my mind and silently screamed, as if to remind myself that it’s all real:

“I’m in Peru!”

Eight days following that arrival, I was at Cuzco’s airport – again – wearing a Bobcat grin while repeatedly doing my little victory dance (when nobody’s watching, of course).

Within me a storyteller was dying to share stories…. of awesome Peruvian adventures, and wholesome misadventures…. of dreams-come-true…. of conquered fears… of lessons learned while living life fully and truly on my own terms. Most of these lessons are best kept private, some are better shared, and others are just good to know.

Here are fun things I’ve learned during my eight-day visit in Cuzco, Peru:

ON DRIVING
No, I have not learned how to drive in Peru. Don’t think I’d ever dare to, even if the fate of this planet depended on it! Driving in Peruvian traffic is like inducing a heart attack…. or a brain aneurysm rupture…. or both! Yes, Cuzco’s traffic scene was that awful.

I did learn something about driving in Peruvian traffic: Drivers may honk as much as they want, as often as they want. It is totally acceptable, even when passing through a “No Honking” zone.

In Cuzco, watching Peruvian motorists honking to and fro is free live entertainment.

Wickedly amusing!

THE GUINEA PIG
In Peru, the guinea pig is not a pet.

Stuffed with herbs/seasonings and roasted whole, it is a traditional Andean delicacy reserved for special occasions. Someone said it is an excellent aphrodisiac, but I don’t know that for sure. All I know is that it tastes yummy…. just like the Philippine lechon!

ALPACA
A domesticated species of the South American camelid, alpacas have been around for over 5,000 years. An alpaca looks like a baby llama except, the former has short spear-shaped ears while the latter has long, banana-shaped ears.

Alpacas are valued for the excellent fiber derived from their fur. Often referred to as Andean Gold, alpaca is not just something you’d like to wear — it’s something you’d like to eat, too! Alpaca meat is an important source of protein in Peruvian cuisine. It tastes like beef….

COCA LEAVES
Coca, the plant source for medicinal cocaine hydrochloride and the recreational drug cocaine, is a cash crop native to Peru.

A popular Andean remedy for altitude sickness, coca leaves are served free in most, if not all, hotel lobbies in Cuzco! You may steep some in a cup of hot water and drink it as a tea or, better yet, grab a handful (or at least ten leaves) and chew it like a pro.

Interested in learning more about the 3,000-year-old tradition of coca-leaf chewing? Visit the Museo de la Coca in Cuzco, and feel free to try the coca cookies while you’re there…. It tastes like sweet coca leaves!

Note: In the United States, coca leaf is classified as a Schedule II narcotic drug, making it illegal to buy, sell, or possess without a DEA license or medical prescription.

THE FACILITIES
The locals in Peru do not call it “restrooms.” They use the term “facilities.”

When using the facilities, never.ever.throw.toilet.paper.in.the.commode! Doing so would be a cardinal sin…. and, trust me, it would make you feel like you’re the most horrendous traveler to have set foot in the Andes.

Pee smart, poo smarter: Toilet paper is thrown, not flushed — that’s what those little buckets are for.

BABY LLAMA
While exploring Plaza de Armas, or any other tourist-infested areas, beware of traditionally-dressed senioras & senioritas strolling on the streets with their cute baby llama! Petting and/or cradling those adorable little creatures would cost you “dos soles, o mas.”

“YAPA!”
While buying baked goods and fresh produce at Mercado Central de San Pedro, it would behoove you to say, “yapa.” Say it with an ounce of persuasion and a gob of a smile, then let the power of words play its own magic! A Quechua word, yapa means “a little something extra, given as a bonus; a gratuity, a lagniappe.”

When it comes to shopping on the streets and/or souvenir shops in Cuzco, bargaining is the norm. Most items have no price tag! You may willingly pay the verbalized price of any item, of course; but for me, it’s more fun to see how low can I go….

CORN
Peru grows more than 55 varieties of corn; they’ve got the largest corn kernels I’ve ever seen, and the yummiest corn I’ve ever tasted. Peruvian corn comes in just about any color; but the ones I’ve frequently seen at the farmers’ market in San Pedro were yellow, orange, purple, white, and black.

When in downtown Cusco, stop by El Meson de Don Tomas and try chicha morada, a colorful non-alcoholic beverage made from purple corn. Delicious!

POTATOES
Did you know the potato is native to Peru?

Peruvian farmers grow over 3,800 different types of potatoes. Each year, on the 30th day of May, the entire country observes the Day of Native Potatoes. This nation-wide festivity aims to promote awareness and recognition of this humble crop’s nutritional value.

Potato is an Andean staple; so is Quinoa, another super-food crop native to Peru (and Bolivia).

MACHU PICCHU
Often mistakenly called “The Lost City of the Incas,” and frequently misspelled by omitting the second “c” in the second word, Machu Picchu is a mystical citadel at the pinnacle of the Urubamba River valley.

This UNESCO World Heritage Site is home of intriguing buildings that play on astronomical alignments. Its panoramic views are spectacularly spectacular – a worthy add-on to any savvy traveler’s Bucket List.

The term Machu Picchu, translated to English, means “Old Peak” or “Old Mountain” and its correct pronunciation is MATCH-oo PEAK-choo…. Pronouncing it MATCH-oo PEA-choo is tantamount to saying “Old Penis.”