Is it a pyramid or is it a mountain/hill?

yep. Those ones you have on the map are Initial Period or Early Horizon, which is to say the earliest, 1800 BC to 200 AD give or take. But they're not really pyramids, but if you calculated the volume of those monsters, they would be bigger than most pyramids in the world. If you divided volume by available workforce per century, the amount of work per person would probably be the largest at any time in anyone's prehistory.

that same area, in different spots along the coast, saw what we could call pyramids later on. The best known are the Moche, but smaller pyramids are up and down the coast till about Lima (Sican, Vicus, Lurin, Pachacamac etc). That's where you want to go to see pyramids and big monuments, not Cuzco.

The most impressive thing are the ruins of Chan Chan near Trujillo, a big mud brick city that you can see from space. Not pyramids, but still, the Andes really are an incredible place.

 

I hate to say it, but this photo looks doctored to me. Is it an artist representation over the natural area?

It is all one color, very little shadowing. The grass looks like it cuts off a huge rock on the right. Plus the grass immediately around the structure looks different than the grass in the rest of the photo. I think that maybe, their showing you what the "pyramid" would look like under the build up. Or maybe not. It just looks "CG plasticy" to me.

 

Good luck!!

 

That's a great way to quell the uncertainty in this discussion! First-hand accounts always speak more for me than anything else, even if it was a professional's opinion on the matter.

 

That would make it a hole, Marty. Sheesh.

 

no problems, I used to work in Peru so I don't mind. No one really knows too much about those early centers, but some sort of religious function seems probable. You'd think more people would gravitate toward working on it, but the later Moche get the most attention. They are built in a few hundred years, abandoned, and a new one started in a neighboring valley. That happens again and again, almost like if people felt the act of getting together and constructing (rather than using the finished product) was the most important thing.

El Ninos kill coastal Peru. It's all desert, gets very little moisture (just from sea fogs). El Ninos happen every 10 years, dumping some rain. Every now and then in prehistory, big ones would heavily erode the desert and silt over agricultural fields. When it go dry, that silt and sand would get kicked up by the wind and create huge sand dunes that covered over big centers in neighboring valleys. El Nino related problems are what's happening to Chan Chan, plus it's filled with squatters and you will get robbed or stabbed if you go wandering alone. Lots of people were into it in the early 80s, today only a handful. The big palaces (ciudadeles) have all been looted, but there's a lot of opportunity there for a young (and well-armed) archaeologist to study the lower class folks.

 

Nope. The mud-brick walls just slump into piles archaeologists call adobe melt. If oceans continue to warm and El Ninos increase in intensity and frequency, the ancient city will end up looking like a clay tennis court in another 50 years

 

Jumping in here late. Poco, obviously, this is your area of expertise. Do you think that it's possible that thousands of years of weathering and natural growth would obfuscate an actual pyramid. I remember that the pyramid at Cobha in Yucatan looks a lot like just a tall hill, but it's an actual pyramid.

 

It sure would. But in most part of the Yucatan it's pretty flat, so anything that stands up is suspicious. Even little mounds where commoner houses once sat, only a few feet higher than the surroundings, are visible and of interest to archaeologists.

Normally the archaeologists see something on a satellite image or aerial photo and make a trip, only to find a looter trench. With a little clearing of that trench and the base, the pyramids are usually unmistakable, cut stone, rubble fill, inscriptions, stucco masks and so on. The only thing archaeologists could never see on the ground, but in thermal imagery, were vast networks of manmade raised fields, canals, and reservoirs that just look like swampy areas in the jungle.

 

This is not what I was looking for but its interesting nontheless.It pre-dates Incas and is considered to be one of the mother cities which other cultures were derived from

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfJntU5C4yg