Daily Blog: Chan Chan: Losing Something Important

“During its heyday, about 600 years ago, Chan Chan, in northern Peru, was the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on earth.”

Today, this abandoned city is still largely intact and considered one of the “Ten Must-See Endangered Cultural Treasures” in Smithsonian magazine, March 2009, p. 35.

Estimates of Chan Chan’s population range from 30,000 to 60,000. This five-figure city was the capital of the Chimú civilization – a city filled with “highly-skilled craftsmen” and “the first true engineering society in the New World.”

Six hundred years after its demise, Chan Chan still has a considerable impact on its region. Only two miles outside the modern city of Trujillo, Chan Chan is a major reason why Trujillo enjoys a thriving tourism economy.

Chan Chan stands today as an example of Andrew Curry’s statement, “For countless communities, archaeology can be a source of local identity, pride, and even income.”

As anthropologist Michael Kimbell said, “It may be intangible, but when a community loses its connection to history it loses something pretty important.“

http://www.archaeology.org/0903/etc/climate_change.html