buildings and engineered changes to the environment were useful data that could be transported great distances and shared with the broader scientific community. Such research was part of a broader Spanish Bourbon fever for surveying ancient sites that began during Charles III’s time in Naples (1735–1759), when scholars excavated the great ash-covered cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. By 1777, the Crown was so intrigued by ancient sites that the Royal Cabinet of Curiosities in Madrid put out an official call for antiquities taken from pre-Hispanic tombs and ruins in America.2
Although the only written records of Martínez Compañón’s participation in the archaeological craze of the Bourbon Spanish empire are the inventories of archaeological objects that he sent to Spain in 1788 and 1790, a detailed map of Chan Chan (see Plate 12) in volume 9 of his Trujillo watercolors indicates that he and his assistants spent a good deal of time at this important site, carefully demarcating the foundations of buildings and the location of tombs, as well as houses, piles of metal scraps, the walls that separated the complex from the desert around it, and even an underground tunnel that ran to the hills in the distance.3
Contemporary visitors to Chan Chan find a site that is quite similar to what late eighteenth-century archaeologists would have encountered. Hand-molded walls of golden cascajo (gravel and mud) adobe are shaped into sophisticated high-relief patterns where stylized pelicans, fish, and monkeys play alongside ocean waves. The air within the compound is fresh and cool despite the exterior temperature; the walls ingeniously channel the cooling sea breezes from the nearby Pacific Ocean. In many places, the contours have softened from the torrential rains that torment the region in years of heavy rainfall, wearing away the corners. But still visible are the fading outlines of the delicately spined spondylus shells carved into the wall by Indian craftsmen. The Chimú celebrated these shells as a demonstration of their imperial prowess—the spondylus were harvested in the distant north of their kingdom, in what is now Ecuador, and carried south to Peru.
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