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00:00They were among the last great pyramid builders on the planet.
00:15One of history's most mysterious civilisations.
00:21In an isolated valley in the Andes, the Lambayeque people were gripped by an obsession to build
00:27pyramids.
00:34But that obsession turned to horror.
00:42The city descended into violence and bloodletting.
00:48And then the whole civilisation vanished off the face of the earth.
01:00Only recently has the evidence come to light to explain what brought this great civilisation
01:05to an abrupt end, and to explain the fear that drove these people into oblivion.
01:36In the foothills of the Andes in northern Peru, there's a remote valley.
01:48It's a place still haunted by its past.
01:59Long ago, the people who lived in the Lambayeque Valley came to believe that building pyramids
02:05was essential to their survival.
02:10They built 250 pyramids, one of the most impressive feats of engineering in the ancient world.
02:18A vast valley of monuments that dominated the landscape.
02:26But one day, something terrible happened here, and the civilisation disappeared, along with
02:33all 250 pyramids.
02:36And they were lost to the outside world for centuries.
02:49The outside world finally did learn about them through the work of one man, who arrived
02:55in this valley unaware that he'd entered a lost world.
03:11Hans Brüning was one of history's accidental explorers.
03:16He was an engineer from Germany who'd come here to work with machines for processing
03:21sugar cane.
03:38Never in his wildest dreams did he think he'd stumble across a lost civilisation.
03:44Yet the hunt for this lost world would take over his life.
03:57At the time, treasures from the lost world were regularly being dug up and melted down
04:03in local workshops across the valley.
04:31If you are interested, he can give you a good price on the gold.
04:36For that one, 20 libras.
04:43Silver is cheaper.
04:48When that is melted down, 100 libras.
04:55Tell him... tell him I will give him 200 libras not to melt it down.
05:03Tell him!
05:07Brüning witnessed kilos of gold and silver artefacts being melted down for cash, and
05:14history forever.
05:30Brüning decided to rescue these unique objects from obliteration.
05:44He set off from the sugar plantation on a journey in search of the origin of the artefacts.
05:55He gave up his life as an engineer for that of an archaeologist and explorer.
06:14His travels took him through the Lambayeque Valley, from the Pacific coast to the foothills of the Andes.
06:27He passed through a strange and eerie landscape.
06:36The lost civilisation was all around him.
06:39He just couldn't see it.
06:55And it was on this journey that he was shown the secret of the valley.
07:00My God.
07:10Bricks.
07:14Yeah, the whole mountain.
07:19So this mountain was once a pyramid.
07:30Every mound he had passed was the remains of a pyramid built out of bricks.
07:49Over hundreds of years, they had become heavily eroded,
07:54then vanished back into the landscape, turning into a series of hills.
08:06He began to assemble a museum full of archaeological objects from this lost civilisation.
08:17And his hundreds of photographs brought this valley of pyramids to the attention of the outside world.
08:25Eventually, his journey would take him towards the most impressive group of pyramids this civilisation ever built.
08:37It's down here called El Purgatorio.
08:40Purgatory.
08:42What's there?
08:45At El Purgatorio, there is a mountain.
08:48Dangerous spirits live there.
08:51Dangerous spirits live there.
08:54They are very, very powerful.
08:57No, they can kill a man.
09:01The people there say it is the entrance to hell.
09:06You believe this?
09:09They believe a lot of things.
09:11It is just a name.
09:15Bruning ignored the legend,
09:18heading for Purgatorio and the collection of pyramids today known as Tucame.
09:33There was a line separating the city from the rest of the valley,
09:37which locals feared to cross.
09:45You can take your pictures from here.
09:53Señor Bruning.
10:05Bruning discovered a city of pyramids like nowhere else in the world.
10:15He counted 26 in all.
10:18Ruins towering above the landscape.
10:30This was the last pyramid city built by this mysterious civilisation.
10:37The city of pyramids was shunned by local people,
10:41though still used by witch doctors for strange ceremonies.
10:53But Bruning had no way of knowing the horrific rituals
10:57that had once taken place here in ancient times.
11:06Hans Bruning devoted the rest of his life
11:09to studying the valley and its people.
11:12But he died without learning why they'd built so many pyramids here
11:17and what had happened at Tucame to cause this civilisation to vanish.
11:23That task would fall to others.
11:27A hundred years on, and an international team of scientists
11:31brought the power of modern archaeology
11:34to solve the mysteries that Bruning had been unable to tackle.
11:41Field archaeologists, climate scientists and experts in forensics
11:45all became involved.
11:49Their quest was to find out who these people were,
11:52what drove them to build so many pyramids,
11:55and what had happened at Tucame to cause this civilisation to vanish.
12:05Archaeologists have carefully mapped the pyramids
12:08and found that the pyramids were built by the same people
12:12who had built the pyramids.
12:16Archaeologists have carefully mapped the pyramids in the Lambayeke Valley.
12:21There are so many of them here,
12:23they outstrip most other pyramid-building cultures.
12:28This is the valley of the pyramids.
12:30This whole place is full of pyramids.
12:32You look here, here we are in Tucame,
12:34but look at all these black dots.
12:36Every one of these is a pyramid.
12:38There are about 250 pyramids in this valley.
12:40I don't know anywhere else that's got anything
12:42like this concentration of pyramids.
12:45Across the valley, three great pyramid cities stood out.
12:50Start with Pampagrande, up the valley.
12:52There's only one pyramid there, but it's huge.
12:57It's over 50 metres high and 200 metres wide.
13:03Then we move to the Batangrande complex with over half a dozen.
13:09And then we come to Tucame with 26,
13:11which is unheard of.
13:12There's no other place anywhere in South America that has 26 pyramids.
13:25There had been pyramids before, but one or two or three.
13:28With Batangrande, you've got over half a dozen pyramids, large ones.
13:32And then they move to Tucame, and it just goes crazy.
13:42The people who went pyramid-crazy had no writing.
13:46No-one even knows what they called themselves.
13:49So they'd be named after the valley they lived in, the Lambayeque.
13:55They flourished here around 700 AD.
13:58They were the last descendants of a cult of their own.
14:01They were known as the Lambayeque,
14:03which means the Lamb of God.
14:06They flourished here around 700 AD.
14:09They were the last descendants of a culture in northern Peru
14:13who'd been building pyramids for thousands of years.
14:17But the Lambayeque took pyramid-building to the level of an obsession.
14:26But what were these pyramids for?
14:29And why had the Lambayeque been driven to build so many?
14:36MUSIC
14:41Every culture that built pyramids did it for a very specific purpose.
14:47A purpose that takes us to the heart of everything they believed in.
14:55Over a dozen civilisations built pyramids,
14:58but none of them looked quite like those of the Lambayeque.
15:03When you think about pyramids,
15:05and probably the first thing that comes to mind would be the Egyptian pyramids,
15:08these huge, pointy tombs that were built to house a particular dead ruler.
15:13One purpose, one time, that was it.
15:20When you think of Aztec pyramids, which were built for temples, Maya ones as well,
15:24sometimes they may have had a tomb inside,
15:26but mainly they were the seat for particular rituals.
15:33At Tucumay, the design of the pyramids was different from elsewhere in the world.
15:48There are 26 pyramids of wildly different sizes,
15:52all built around an imposing central mountain.
15:56MUSIC
16:01The site is vast, almost a square mile in size.
16:11But one building stands out,
16:14a giant rectangular platform built into the side of the mountain.
16:19We have what was arguably the world's largest pyramid ever,
16:23sitting in the middle of the site.
16:28It is 700 metres long and more than 20 metres high.
16:36The space on top is the size of seven football pitches.
16:41The pyramids are all solid structures, without rooms inside.
16:52They had the tops cut off to create a series of huge open spaces.
16:57And there was no evidence that they were built to be tombs or temples.
17:02This is something very different from pyramids in other parts of the world.
17:08There was only one way to the top, via a ramp.
17:17This one was 120 metres long and built with rooms inside.
17:22The route to the top then went through a complex maze of closed doorways and passages.
17:29The layout of these pyramids was quite unlike any other in the world.
17:36The pyramids were built in a way similar to the pyramids of Egypt.
17:43The pyramids were built in a way similar to the pyramids of Egypt.
17:49The layout of these pyramids was quite unlike those built by the other great pyramid-building civilisations.
18:08It's clear that pyramids were of such central importance to this society
18:13that they were prepared to commit all their resources to building them.
18:19Slowly, methodically, thousands of people must have toiled all their lives on these buildings.
18:31The bricks are made from mud, baked dry in the sun.
18:37The scale is dazzling. It was like a military operation.
18:41Every brick had a mark showing which factory it came from.
18:46And the valley was crammed with hundreds of brick factories,
18:50each one with its own recognisable mark.
18:56Take a look at some of the marks. You can see the footprint marks,
19:02spirals, T-shapes.
19:06Now, remember, they didn't actually have an alphabet.
19:08They didn't have a writing system.
19:10Nevertheless, they did have symbols that meant something.
19:13But in total, these are over 80 marks,
19:15and they came out of a single segment of wall in one small part of the site.
19:19So there would have been many more marks throughout the entire site.
19:24Something clearly drove the Lambayeki to create a production line for pyramids.
19:31Carbon dating shows that the first pyramid at Tukame was built around 1100 AD.
19:38And for 400 years, they built more pyramids,
19:41and added extensions to the ones they already had.
19:47An ancient architect's model found at the site
19:50showed that the pyramids were built in the same way.
19:54It would have taken 2,000 people a year
19:57just to make the bricks for this one pyramid.
20:04It would have taken another army of people to build the pyramid itself,
20:08and it would have taken another 100,000 people to build it.
20:14And it would have taken another 100,000 people to build it.
20:19It would have taken another army of people to build the pyramid itself,
20:23hundreds more to grow and cook food for the workers.
20:28So it would have taken thousands several years to complete one pyramid.
20:35And there were 25 others at Tukame,
20:38and another 200 across the valley.
20:42So building pyramids must have become an all-consuming task
20:46for the people of the Lambayeki Valley.
20:50The pyramids must have satisfied some overwhelming need.
20:55Whatever that was, it had to be in some way connected
20:58to how these pyramids were used.
21:02And on top of the pyramid, there are clues.
21:05Here, a complex of rooms has been unearthed,
21:08some richly decorated.
21:16Just outside these rooms,
21:18archaeologists found mounds and mounds of food remains.
21:24The pyramids were built in the same way
21:27Archaeologists found mounds and mounds of food remains.
21:31This isn't usually found on top of pyramids.
21:36Among the remains, there were the bones of llamas and large fish.
21:41The food of the wealthy.
21:47We found a very important area,
21:49because it was a space for many kitchens.
21:53In this place, we found formal ovens with a lot of charcoal,
21:56a lot of rubbish like seeds and animal bones,
22:00and fragments of cooking pots, all with evidence of cooking.
22:08As they dug further down,
22:10they found so many layers of rich food
22:13that generations of wealthy people must have lived and eaten here,
22:17on the pyramid.
22:20These facts confirm that people lived in this building
22:24for long periods of time,
22:26and not just temporarily during ceremonial occasions.
22:40And then, on top of the pyramid,
22:42they discovered the remains of a 35-year-old man
22:45who they believed had once lived here.
22:50He was found with the jewellery and the feather headdress he once wore.
22:57The richness of these finds
22:59meant this was a member of the governing elite.
23:05We found very clear evidence
23:07of the status and hierarchy this person had.
23:14So there is no doubt
23:16that the pyramids at Tucumé served as places of residence,
23:20like a palace for the lords who governed the whole area.
23:32So, at Tucumé,
23:34it seems generations of lords had moved in
23:37to live on top of the pyramids.
23:41As with all rulers in the Andes,
23:43these lords must have been treated as semi-gods.
23:47These were men who claimed to have magical powers
23:50to control the world.
23:57Tucumé was a truly bizarre city of 26 lords
24:01living on 26 pyramids.
24:05Archaeologists believe the likely explanation is
24:08the lords on these pyramids were rulers from across this valley.
24:13Something about this one place
24:15drew them all here to build their pyramid palaces side by side.
24:22If you look around all the pyramids at Tucumé,
24:25each one of them would have had some kind of lord living on top.
24:28Perhaps the more powerful lords on the bigger pyramids like this one,
24:31perhaps the less powerful lords on smaller ones,
24:33but there are 26 pyramids here. That's a lot of lords.
24:38And this is how the lords lived on top of their palace pyramids.
24:44To get to the top, you had to climb a series of ramps.
24:49At the centre of the pyramid, on a raised mount,
24:52were the rooms where the lord lived
24:54and met with priests and courtiers.
25:04Behind it were his vast kitchens.
25:07Llama and fish were favourites on the menu.
25:14Nearby have been found the remains of rows of workshops and storerooms.
25:25This must have been a place of constant noise and activity.
25:32But the front of the pyramid served a very different function.
25:36The vast open space was reserved for huge public ceremonies.
25:41CHANTING
25:47So why did 26 lords choose to live crowded together on 26 pyramids in one city?
25:57One clue seemed to be the mountain at the centre of Tucumé.
26:02The mountains in ancient Peru, and today,
26:05constitute very special centres of religious and magical power.
26:13We know from later travellers to Peru
26:15that people here in ancient times
26:17believed the gods spoke the language of the gods.
26:21And that's why the pyramids are so special.
26:25We know from later travellers to Peru
26:27that people here in ancient times
26:29believed the gods spoke through the forces of nature.
26:37Thunder was a voice of a god.
26:39So was lightning.
26:44But the truly powerful gods lived in the mountains.
26:47When they were angry, they could unleash terror on the population.
26:54They also controlled life and death
26:56by bringing water from the Andes.
27:01Without water, the valley would be a desert.
27:06Scientists believe that when the Lambayeque built a pyramid,
27:10they were building a replica mountain
27:12with the same supernatural power they hoped
27:15could control the forces of nature.
27:18If you look back here, you can see the mountain,
27:20the centre of the site of Tucumé.
27:22The mountains in the Andes are power,
27:24the seats of the lords of the supernatural,
27:27the gods of the Andes.
27:29And the pyramids are little mountains.
27:31They capture that power. This is a power to protect.
27:35So this was the logic of the valley.
27:38The people would toil to build pyramids.
27:41They believed had the magical power of mountains.
27:47And just as the gods lived on the mountains,
27:50the lords would live on the mountains.
27:53And the gods would live on the mountains.
27:56And the lords would live on the mountains.
27:59And the lords would live on the mountains.
28:02And just as the gods lived on the mountains,
28:04the lords would live on top of these pyramids
28:07to protect the people from what they most feared.
28:15But what was it in this valley they were so afraid of?
28:19And why did they need so many pyramids to protect themselves?
28:32They may have discovered the answer
28:34in the ruins of the three great cities in the valley.
28:42The carbon dates from the cities showed something surprising.
28:48These three cities hadn't existed at the same time.
28:52Each one was only built after the previous city was,
28:55for some reason, abandoned.
28:59Pampa Grande had been built first,
29:02then, a few hundred years later, suddenly abandoned.
29:08Immediately after this, they'd built Batan Grande,
29:11and then that had suddenly been abandoned.
29:17Finally, enormous effort had gone into building the vast city of Tucumay,
29:22and it too was abandoned.
29:25That was the end of this civilisation.
29:31There were strange things linking the abandonment of all these cities.
29:37Just before each city was deserted,
29:40the very tops of the pyramids had been set on fire.
29:56The evidence for this is clear in all three cities.
30:00Here in the palace on the main pyramid at Tucumay,
30:03there was a two-metre thick reddened lair caused by the fire.
30:14The colour of the walls that we can see here is the product of a very intense fire,
30:19a fire that was so strong that it not only burnt the outer surface of the wall,
30:24but it melted the stones.
30:29This fire was so intense it would have been visible for miles.
30:36There's no evidence of battles or invasions
30:39to suggest these fires were lit by an attacking army.
30:43Instead, it looks like the people of the pyramids
30:46had, for some reason, done it themselves.
30:50So here they come, they spend 100 years building this really big site,
30:54this really important site, and then, boom, it's abandoned.
30:57That's it. They burn the top of the pyramid, they go away and they never come back.
31:03To willfully destroy what the whole community had toiled so hard to build
31:08seems unfathomable.
31:11But if you understand the logic of the valley,
31:14it begins to make a sinister kind of sense.
31:20Because fire is used throughout northern Peru
31:24to purify places considered touched by evil.
31:33Fire is a very important element.
31:36It purifies sites.
31:38It cleans away all the bad energy or negative elements
31:42that could be present in a place.
31:46And across the region,
31:48scientists have found evidence of the supernatural force
31:51the ancient people of the valley most feared.
31:55When it struck, it drove them to purify their cities by fire
31:59and abandon them forever.
32:06This region has been subject to several attacks.
32:11This region has been subject
32:13to some of the most extreme climate disasters on the planet.
32:17Disasters the lords and the pyramids themselves,
32:20the source of magic and power,
32:22were supposed to protect the people from.
32:31Archaeological layers from the city of Batangrande
32:35show it had been hit by a great wall of water
32:39and the nearby pyramid complex of Moche
32:43had been hit by a wave of sand which covered the city.
33:02These are the remains of the city of Batangrande,
33:07These disasters of biblical proportions
33:10were caused by the violent climate upheavals,
33:13known as El Niños.
33:17They still strike in the region today.
33:22It seems this must have been the supernatural force
33:25that the people in the valley so feared,
33:27because for the Lambayeque,
33:29these climate disasters could only be understood
33:32as the wrath of the angry gods.
33:37RUMBLING
33:45So once the gods had struck,
33:48the pyramids and the lords who lived on top of them
33:51were shown to have failed to protect the people.
33:55These events keep happening and they're extreme events.
34:01There would have been rains, it would have washed away the fields,
34:04there would have been nothing to eat, there would have been diseases.
34:07It would be a good time to wonder
34:09if your lords and your pyramids were doing the right job
34:12or if it was time to abandon them and to find new ones.
34:15And, indeed, that seems to have happened.
34:20This was the obsession that ruled the valley.
34:24When the pyramids failed to protect against catastrophe,
34:27it was as if they were cursed,
34:29so they had to be purged by fire and abandoned.
34:35RUMBLING
34:37And new ones built to replace them.
34:42It suggests this is why the valley is littered
34:45with the ruins of so many abandoned pyramids.
34:53CRASH
35:05But when it comes to the last pyramid city built in the valley,
35:09Tutukame, things are different.
35:13There's no evidence here it was struck by an overwhelming climate catastrophe.
35:26Something else must have happened
35:28to cause the people of Tutukame to set fire to their pyramids.
35:34And for this civilisation to disappear forever.
35:52A dramatic new discovery has recently revealed
35:55what may have happened at Tutukame in its final days.
35:59It has allowed archaeologists to recreate the likely course of events
36:03that brought about the end of this great pyramid city
36:06and the entire civilisation of the Lambayeke Valley.
36:14It all began when archaeologists first noticed
36:17the remains of a two-laned walled walkway that once led into the city.
36:25The walkway took a series of right-angle turns on its way into Tutukame.
36:30Something about it was designed to take visitors past this one spot in the city.
36:38This small, unassuming building turned out to be a temple.
36:51This was the ritual heart of Tutukame.
37:00At times of crisis, this was where the people came
37:03to make offerings to appease the angry gods.
37:13A series of ritual offerings has been found at the temple dig site.
37:25The stone at the centre of the temple
37:27represented the mountain and its powerful gods.
37:37In a world without science,
37:39this ritual was how the people of Tutukame believed they could control the world.
37:49But in the final days of this civilisation,
37:52the temple became the scene for a much darker series of offerings.
37:57TUTUKAME
38:16In the summer of 2005,
38:18scientists were called in to investigate human bones found outside the temple.
38:28This discovery revealed the sinister turn this civilisation took in its last days.
38:40One specific indicator with this particular skeleton
38:43that suggests that something is not right with this individual
38:46is the fact that the body, the thorax and the upper arms are in a normal position,
38:51but the head is twisted and out of place.
38:54And what we're going to do now is we're going to lift the head up.
39:10The head and the top two neck vertebrae
39:13have been severed from the rest of the spinal column.
39:25So what we have here is the first cervical vertebrae
39:28and this is where the head sits right onto this vertebrae
39:31and then this vertebrae sits right onto this one.
39:34These are the two that were found still attached to the head,
39:37separated from the rest of the neck and the spinal column.
39:40And when we turn them up like this,
39:43what we can notice on the base
39:46are very, very clear signs of cut marks
39:49going across the inferior articular facets of this vertebrae.
39:56But when you see cuts reaching very far back,
39:59you can see this is the space where your spinal column goes.
40:02They were cutting all the way through the spinal column
40:04and in fact they're even cutting into here and the back of the vertebrae.
40:09So they're going all the way through.
40:12This is clear evidence that the head was decapitated.
40:20This is evidence that the head was decapitated.
40:28It was now clear this individual had not died a natural death.
40:33This was ancient homicide.
40:40Altogether, 119 bodies were found outside the temple,
40:45including women and children,
40:48decapitated.
40:52All the evidence indicated this was human sacrifice.
40:57It makes Tucumay one of the biggest sites of human sacrifice
41:01ever found in the ancient Andes.
41:07It seems that human sacrifice
41:09is always reserved for a time of greatest need.
41:11When something is going wrong in the world,
41:13in which it can't be explained,
41:15the only way out to deal with these problems
41:17is to try to appease the gods.
41:25The bodies had been buried in five lairs.
41:28Most were in the top, the most recent lair,
41:32dated to the final years and days of Tucumay.
41:40The increase in number of human sacrifices in front of the temple
41:43suggests that there must have been something going on
41:45that required more sacrifices, more offerings.
41:48They needed to communicate with the gods
41:50in a way in which just a single offering was not enough.
41:55It seems something so terrible had happened towards the end of Tucumay
41:59that the only way to deal with it
42:01was to offer the gods what was most precious.
42:06The blood of men, women and children as young as five.
42:14It looked like the number of sacrifices
42:17had increased towards the end of Tucumay.
42:24Archaeologists believe the increase in human sacrifice
42:27and the end of the city were connected.
42:34And with this new discovery,
42:36archaeologists now believe it's possible
42:40to tell the likely story of the final days of Tucumay
42:44and how and why this pyramid civilisation vanished.
42:54They believe it all began in 1532,
42:57the year the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru,
43:01far to the north of the Lambayeque Valley.
43:10These alien men stalking the land,
43:13riding strange four-legged beasts,
43:16seemed like the ancestral gods returned to walk the earth.
43:23So when the news of the Spanish invasion
43:25eventually reached the Lambayeque Valley,
43:28it would have created shock and incomprehension.
43:32The conquistadors themselves did not come here and destroy Tucumay.
43:37But just the stories of their presence in Peru brought fear.
43:44Although they did not directly come to Tucumay,
43:47the Spanish were greatly feared by the people
43:49as it was known that they were in the region.
43:52They came with different kinds of animals,
43:54like horses, that were unknown in the continent.
44:01From artefacts found at the site,
44:03it's clear that by the time the Spanish arrived in South America,
44:07the Lambayeque Valley had fallen under the control of the Incas.
44:13The Incas and the Lambayeque shared a belief that the Spanish,
44:17these violent invaders, were a sign of the anger of the gods.
44:24So now the gods must be appeased.
44:33But within a year of the Spanish arrival,
44:35truly terrifying news would arrive at Tucumay.
44:40The invading Spanish had captured and killed the Inca god-king
44:44far away in the highlands.
44:49This news would have set off a riptide of fear in Tucumay.
45:04So now the people of the valley had to start offering the gods
45:08something more precious.
45:11Human beings.
45:24Once the victims had been chosen,
45:26we know in detail from the archaeological evidence
45:29and from the later Spanish chroniclers
45:31how the sacrifices would have been performed outside the temple
45:35during the last days of Tucumay.
45:40The high priest talked to the sacred stone,
45:43to the god of the mountain.
45:46Another priest to the god of thunder.
45:49Another to the god of lightning.
46:02For the sacrifice to work, it had to follow a strict ritual.
46:12The elite Lambayeque lords and the Inca governor
46:15gathered around the temple.
46:32The high priest blew coloured powders over the stone.
46:39This is exactly what archaeologists found there.
47:02By putting on a mask, the high priest would have shown
47:06he had assumed the role of a god.
47:11The killing was soon to begin.
47:23The 119 skeletons themselves give us a detailed description
47:28of what it would have been like to be ritually executed outside the temple.
47:38When you think of the violent way in which these individuals were killed,
47:42it'd be natural to assume or to guess that they must have struggled or resisted.
47:46However, when I look at the skeleton, I really don't find evidence of struggle.
47:52First of all, there's no signs of perimortem trauma
47:55that would indicate in any way that they had been, for example,
47:58subdued by being hit or beaten.
48:00Secondly, the cut marks across the throat and neck region
48:03are smooth, single slices,
48:05and there doesn't seem to be any evidence of chatter marks
48:08where the knife would skip along and bounce along the bone
48:11as though an individual were struggling and the bone was missing its mark.
48:16And finally, the arms were often gently placed by their sides
48:19or crossing the bodies, not tightly fixed together,
48:22nor was there any evidence of any ropes or ligatures.
48:27There was no need to tie these victims up
48:30as they'd been drugged with a seed called amala.
48:37These amala seeds were found outside the temple.
48:40They contain a drug that paralyses the body but leaves the victim conscious,
48:46able to understand everything that's happening to them.
48:53We can therefore come to a simple conclusion,
48:56and this is the current hypothesis,
49:00that the people who were taken to be sacrificed in front of the temple
49:04didn't put up any resistance to their death
49:07because they had previously consumed a large quantity of amala.
49:16It must have been a terrible fate.
49:19To be aware of impending death, but powerless to resist.
49:35Now the sacrifice victim would have been brought to the temple.
49:41He would already have been given the drug amala.
49:44So every muscle in his body was paralysed.
49:47He could neither struggle nor run,
49:50yet he remained aware of what was about to happen to him.
50:15Exactly what happened next is revealed by the skeletons themselves.
50:21Of the 119 individuals that we recovered from this small area,
50:25almost 90% of them show cut marks in the area of the throat and neck region.
50:30These patterns are very consistent across the group,
50:33suggesting that it was almost a systematic execution.
50:45In each skeleton, the same pattern had been repeated.
50:56And from the cut marks,
50:58scientists can piece together exactly how these people were sacrificed.
51:05Blow by blow.
51:07Based on the patterns of the cut marks,
51:11Based on the patterns of the cut marks,
51:13their location, as well as the angle in which the bone is being struck by the knife,
51:18this suggests that most likely the individual was cut in an upward motion.
51:23Now, based on the location of the cuts across the front of the throat,
51:26there would be a great deal of blood that would be generated from these initial cuts.
51:30So it's not likely that the sacrificer would be in front,
51:33because they would probably be covered with blood.
51:35Looking at the cut marks,
51:37it suggests more likely that the sacrificer was behind the victim
51:40and that they were cutting most likely from left to right across the body.
51:44The angle of the cut mark upward suggests that the victim was most likely
51:48in a prone position, face down,
51:50and the sacrificer would have been behind them, perhaps holding their head,
51:53making the cut mark across the front of the body.
52:00But even after the throat had been cut and the head hacked off,
52:04the ritual was not over.
52:08Looking at the skeletons, I began noticing right away
52:11that there's very distinctive patterning in the cut marks.
52:14For example, across the left clavicle,
52:17this bone here has seven distinctive cut marks going along the front of it.
52:24Another bone is the manubrium here, right in the centre of the chest,
52:28and we can see that a fragment of it, the left side,
52:32has been completely sliced off.
52:34And finally, there's some fractures
52:36that appear to have occurred around the time of death.
52:39And here we have the first rib, and this rib has been fractured.
52:45These cut marks are consistent with sawing up and down,
52:48trying to open the chest cavity.
52:57The final moment of the human sacrifice ritual
53:01The final moment of the human sacrifice ritual outside the temple
53:05saw the victim's heart being ripped out.
53:10So, over and over again, this is what was happening
53:14outside the temple in the final days of this great civilisation.
53:23The priest approached the drugged victim with a ritual copper knife.
53:28One has been found at Tukame.
53:34This was the weapon of sacrifice.
53:45The most important thing in this ceremony was blood.
53:53We know from later chroniclers
53:55that the gods who controlled the world were seen as living beings
53:58and that human blood would nourish them.
54:25The ritual copper knife was used to cut open the victim's heart.
54:43Finally, the victim's heart was hacked out.
54:56But the sacrifice didn't stop the Spanish advance.
55:12It must have seemed as though the gods needed ever more blood.
55:16As the fear grew, the violence spiralled out of control.
55:20Tukame's leading archaeologist believed
55:23that in the last few days of the city's existence,
55:26the sacrifices must have been repeated, day after day.
55:35And the only way that this chaos could be controlled
55:38was to offer an increasing number of human sacrifices.
55:42Probably in very few days, dozens of sacrifices were made.
55:50The human sacrifices were carried out simultaneously
55:53so that this state of crisis could in some way be controlled.
56:08Before the end of the Lambayeque civilisation,
56:11the bodies piled up outside the temple.
56:15But the mass of human sacrifices had failed to stop the Spanish.
56:20It seemed that once again, the pyramids and the lords
56:23had failed to protect the people or bring the world back under control.
56:33The pyramids had lost their supernatural powers.
56:36They were tainted.
56:38And so the logic of the valley,
56:40the same logic that lay behind the building of the pyramids,
56:44dictated what happened next.
56:47The people who'd built the pyramids began to purge them.
56:54Just before the end of the civilisation, the burning must have begun.
57:01They carefully set fire to the palaces on top of the pyramids.
57:09The temple was deliberately set alight.
57:12The cursed city had to be purified by flames.
57:28After Tupame is abandoned, that's it for pyramids.
57:31No more.
57:33The end of this pyramid-building tradition
57:35that you could trace back for maybe 3,000 years, it's over.
57:39That's it.
57:46After the city of Tupame was burned,
57:49the city was completely abandoned.
57:52It's a mystery, really, as to where the people went after this event.
57:59The Lambayeque fled the city, hoping to start again.
58:04The Lambayeque fled the city, hoping to start again.
58:09To build a new city of pyramids.
58:12But the Spanish ruled Peru now.
58:15There'd be no more pyramids, no more lords.
58:19The Lambayeque civilisation melted away into the valley.
58:34Tomorrow night, the lost city of Hattusha,
58:37capital of the mighty Hittite nation,
58:39that disappeared from history for almost 3,000 years.
58:43Lost Cities of the Ancients concludes tomorrow at nine.
58:48Coming up next tonight, have I got old news for you.