High up in the clouds, a lost civilisation

The skeletons were scattered like random pottery shards, rediscovered where they fell centuries ago. Were these ancient people cut down in a long-forgotten battle?

Were they casualties of some apocalyptic reckoning at this walled citadel? Did European-introduced disease lead to their demise?

The “cloud warriors'' of ancient Peru are slowly offering up their secrets — along with more questions.

Recent digs at the majestic site of Kuelap, once a stronghold of the Chachapoya civilisation, have turned up scores of skeletons and thousands of artefacts, shedding new light on one of the most remarkable, if least understood, of Peru's pre-Columbian cultures.

Among the arresting findings: defensive walls incorporating the dead; stone missiles used to repel invaders; and the civilisation's sudden collapse.

While almost everyone knows about the Inca and Machu Picchu, few have heard of the Chachapoya or visited their domain, a swathe of Amazon headlands and breathtaking cloud forests on the eastern slope of the Andes.

This walled settlement, among the largest monuments of the ancient Americas, rivals the Incas' Machu Picchu in scale and grandeur.

Getting there requires a lengthy journey on roads less travelled, near-vertical jeep tracks featuring better-not-look drops of 1,000 yards or more.

The Chachapoya civilisation is believed to have thrived from around 800 to about 1540, the last 70 years or so under the domination of their empire-minded neighbours, the Inca, and then the Spanish.

The Chachapoya, historians say, were a loose confederation with settlements spread across a 25,000-square-mile swathe of north-central Peru and might have numbered 300,000 people or more at one time.

More than traders

Known from colonial chronicles as tall and fierce warriors who long resisted the Inca, the Chachapoya were far-ranging merchants and powerful shamans.

Exotic plumage and intricate shell-carved jewellery found there and elsewhere attest to their position as traders who probably roamed from the Amazon jungle to the Pacific coast. Items bartered included coca leaves, tropical feathers and hallucinogenic plants.

Their archaeological legacy, however, points to something more profound than a mercantile society.

Many stone-built Chachapoya sites have been found — and others probably remain concealed by lush vegetation — but the citadel there, with walls approaching 60 feet in height, radiates an unsurpassed grandeur.

The wall, which varies in height as it snakes along a ridge, is composed of rows of limestone blocks of varying size and shape, all precisely cut and wedged into place in an impressive feat of meticulous construction.

The existence of Kuelap has been known widely for more than a century.

But in contrast to Machu Picchu, which became an international sensation after a Yale explorer, Hiram Bingham, declared its “discovery'' in the early 20th century, Kuelap's isolation long thwarted serious research.

Waves of determined looters carted off bones and other remnants.

Now Kuelap is yielding its mysteries to excavations financed by the Peruvian government and the state of Amazonas.

Inside the 15-acre enclosure, which has the feel of a medieval fortress, researchers have found more than 500 structures, mostly round stone dwellings that once featured conical thatched roofs.

Interior walls feature geometric friezes, sculptured serpents and glaring stone faces — eerie, unnerving visages from a lost era.

Archaeologists armed with shovels, picks, brushes, pens and paper, endeavour to peel back the layers of dirt and debris and unlock the enigma.

“We found these,'' says Modesto Velazquez, who is part of the archaeological team, displaying several ancient deer antlers that served a decorative and possibly utilitarian purpose, an ancient version of coat hooks.

Looming above the scene is the so-called Plaza Mayor, a towering structure shaped like an inkwell that might have been the first construction here.

Evidence such as bones, foodstuff and a miniature condor carved from seashell point to a place were rituals were performed and offerings to deities made.

“We think this was the ceremonial heart of Kuelap,'' said Julio Rodriguez, a supervising archaeologist.

The Chachapoya were keen to keep their dead nearby: wedged into walls, buried beneath the floors of homes, placed in highly decorative mountain sarcophagi.

Most impressively, they practised mummification: A breakthrough in Chachapoya scholarship was the recovery a decade ago of more than 200 well-preserved mummy bundles from a steep cliff above a sacred lake known as the Lagoon of the Condors.

Looters initially found the more-than-500-year-old funerary assemblage, leading to a salvage operation. The mummies were swaddled in cotton bundles, some embroidered with stylised faces.

Sudden death

“The Chachapoya suffered a demographic catastrophe in a short period of time,'' chief archaeologist Alfredo Narvaez said, noting that the population probably dropped from several hundred thousand to perhaps 10,000 by the mid-16th century, after the arrival of the Spanish in Peru.

Evidence of a possible final calamity at Kuelap has been found in a platform near the Plaza Mayor, where excavators discovered scores of randomly scattered skeletons, mixed amid daily utensils.

This was a departure in a culture in which the departed were treated with care and ceremony.

Some researchers have speculated on a climactic battle; others say the remains could be of people who succumbed to disease.

The artefacts are being collected and catalogued — each one possibly a key to unlocking more Chachapoya secrets.