I: Layered Symmetries in Lima

Today we visited Museo Larco in Pueblo Libre, Lima, which had an amazing collection of pre-Incan art from the region of Peru. Each figure had such a striking personality. I mean, just look at this guy!

Our tour guide told us that the oldest buildings discovered in the region were religious temples. She said that, in the cultures of ancient Peru, the priests were all-powerful and served as governors. The cultures generally followed both dualities (understood as codependent, like night and day) and cyclical patterns, and this is reflected in their art. We analyzed a 2500-year-old rug (fatefully preserved in the Peruvian desert) to see how it incorporated both of these patterns. It made me think that ancient Peruvian cities (especially since the first buildings were built with religious intent) would be similarly designed to embody these patterns or logics.

In “Pre-Hispanic Lima,” Vélez writes that, beginning with edicts during the reign of Charles V and Philip II in the 16th century, the Spanish Crown followed the policy of not founding cities amidst pre-existing Indigenous settlements. While this is supposedly the case with Lima, “it so happens that [the region has] an elusive, centuries- or millennia-long heritage, as some of the most ancient (over twelve thousand years old) human settlements known have been discovered in its vicinity” (Vélez 9). Vélez adds that “[s]ome believe … that the promontory of the atrium of the Cathedral of Lima may betray the presence of a small native huaca, or shrine, which was, as was common practice at the time, destroyed prior to the construction of the Christian temple” (Vélez 11). This practice of building settlements upon cultural or religious sites important to previous groups can also be seen in the case of the Basilica Santa María del Mar in Barcelona, likely built upon a Roman amphitheatre, which may have itself been built upon culturally significant neolithic settlements.

In The Lettered City, Rama writes about how the cities that the Spanish founded in the Americas, like Lima, reflected their utopian visions of the future, grounded in their notion of “reason” as the only divine, unerring source of knowledge. These new cities were designed to be “rational” and embody their regulating principles of “unity, planning, and rigorous order reflecting a social hierarchy” (Rama 5). As an anonymous commenter on the 1746 earthquake in Lima writes, “Lima had arriv’d to as great a degree of perfection as a city situated such distance from Europe … the streets were laid-out with the exactest regularity, and adorned with all the beauty which a nice symmetry could give” (Anonymous 47).

These reflections have got me interested in how the patterns or symmetries of the pre-Columbian cultures of Peru might persist in today’s Lima. This could be as small as how the curvature of the plaza around the Basilica Santa María del Mar reflects that of the former Roman amphitheater. I am more broadly interested in how spatial patterns and logics reflect a culture’s religions, philosophies and mythologies, and what it looks like (spatially) when these conflict.