Press Release
Major New Inca Site Discovered
London 11 a.m. Thursday June 6th,
2002: The Royal Geographical
Society announced today that a major new Inca site has been discovered in Peru
by a group of British and American explorers.
The
discovery of the site, called Cota Coca, comes just months after the National
Geographic announced the discovery of another ‘lost city’. However the constructed area of this new site
is over twice as big and in a far better stage of preservation.
John
Hemming, an international authority on the Incas and a previous Director of the
Royal Geographical Society, commented:
"This is an important discovery.”
The
leaders of the expedition, the American archaeologist Gary Ziegler and the
British writer and explorer Hugh Thomson, went with a team of experts and
muleteers into the Peruvian Vilcabamba beyond Machu Picchu.
Acting
on a rumour that Ziegler had heard from a muleteer on a previous trip, they
made the difficult journey into some of the most remote territory in this part
of the Andes, where the mountains slope down towards the Amazon cloud forest.
What
they found was a substantial and completely unknown site, covered by dense
forestation. Their team of muleteers
used machetes to clear the many stone-built buildings arranged around a central
plaza, so that they could be mapped and studied.
The
Inca site at Cota Coca has been concealed for hundreds of years because it lies
in an isolated valley. Severe erosion by the Yanama
river over the centuries since the time of the Incas has created a steep river
canyon, which is impassable along the valley bottom; the only way the team could reach it was to
descend directly from the mountain above, cutting a trail down though the dense
cloud-forest with their machetes.
Before
the erosion of the valley walls, it appears there may have been an Inca road
along the river linking the settlement with another of the great Inca cities,
Choquequirao. It is likely the Incas
would have used the site in their period of retreat from the Spanish after the
Conquest of Peru in 1532, when they were hiding in the mountains until their
final capitulation in 1572, forty years later.
Gary Ziegler and Hugh Thomson
are two of the most experienced explorers working in this area: Ziegler, a Peruvian trained archaeologist
specialising in Inca research who lives
in Colorado, has been leading expeditions to Peru since the 1960s, while Thomson, based in Bristol, has
recently written a book on the subject, The White Rock (Weidenfeld & Nicolson),
and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Says
Hugh Thomson, ‘the physical geography of South-east Peru is so wild, with its
deep canyons and dense vegetation, that it is possible that there are even more
ruins waiting to be discovered.’
.
Ziegler
and Thomson are planning to return to the Vilcabamba area next year to look for
further ruins.
Background
The
team led by Gary Ziegler and Hugh Thomson included the veteran British explorer
Nicholas Asheshov, who took part in the Brooks Baekeland
Expedition of 1963, and the Australian explorer, John Leivers. Logistical support was coordinated by the
British Consul in Cuzco, Barry Walker, and Peru based Manu Expeditions. The team also consisted of eight mule
handlers, sixteen mules and seven horses, together with field helpers.
Cota
Coca is situated at 1850 metres (over 6000 ft) near the junction of the Yanama and Blanco rivers in the Vilcabamba area of Eastern
Peru. It is on an isolated bench or mesa some two kilometres long, left as
an eroded remnant when the Rio Yanama river cut a
deep chasm near its intersection with
the Río Blanco.
The
valley bottom is hot and semi tropical with a micro climate environment created
by the deep canyon. Like the nearby Inca
site of Choquequirao, the bed rock is an assortment of metamorphic muscovite
schist and fine grained yellow quartzite. A considerable depth of alluvial
deposit swept in by river flooding and canyon breakdown covers the valley
floor. Much of this material is made up of igneous grey granite in the form of
rounded river stones that have been carried downstream.
Cota
Coca contains some thirty plus structures including a seventy-five foot long kallanka (
meeting hall ) grouped around a central plaza.
Outside the central area are more well-made rectangular houses. Two
large walled enclosures (approx 50 x 30 meters, 175' x 100') may have been
holding pens for passing llama trains.
John
Hemming, author of The Conquest of The
Incas and the Director of the Royal Geographical Society for 21 years from
1975 to 1996, commented: "This is
an important discovery, because it is a sizeable centre of good-quality
late-Inca masonry. It also contains a kallanka meeting-hall or barracks, which is a standard Inca
administrative building."
A
main Inca road passed near the site and down the Yanama
valley, which has experienced much flooding and lowering of the water channel
since Inca times. It is unlikely that
the site was visited or known of following the fall of the last Inca, Tupac Amaru, in 1572.
However,
one early explorer, the Comte de Sartiges, passed
nearby in order to reach Choquequirao in 1834.
He refers in his writing to the lower Yanama
Valley “being known as Cotacoca”, although he did not
find the ruins. The dense forestation
means that it would be easy to miss them and he commented at the time that he
“thought it unlikely anyone could have inhabited this narrow valley because of
the numerous and voracious mosquitoes that have taken possession of it. It was impossible to breathe, drink or eat
without absorbing quantities of these insufferable creatures.”
Indeed
it is unlikely that any of the early visitors to Choquequirao found Cota
Coca. Although the sites are only a few
miles distant, they could be a world apart, across a deep canyon whose
connecting Inca routes have long been lost and severed. The new site of Cota
Coca has never been documented, reported or known to the outside world until
this present investigation.
for more information
see also the full report
on Cota Coca
For picture of Hugh Thomson and
Gary Ziegler
