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Learning Andean landscapes through travel 
Review by Mark Aldenderfer 
 
Incidence of Travel: Recent Travels in Ancient South America.  
Jerry D. Moore. University Press of Colorado, 2017.  
 
Keywords: South America, Andes, landscapes, archaeology, travel narrative. 
 
 
Some people are said to have a special affinity with certain species of animals and have the 

ability to understand their feelings and even what they think. These people are known as 

whisperers, and among the best known of these are horse, dog, cat, and even ghost, whisperers. 

Alright, the latter is the title of a now-cancelled television show, but I hope you get the point. 

Some people just understand animals and yes, things. So, I think Jerry Moore is a landscape-

whisperer. I mean this with all respect so please let me explain. He understands landscapes at a 

deeply personal level and shows a remarkable ability to describe them and their cultural nuances 

to people who might otherwise find them wholly alien. Incidence of Travel: Recent Travels in 

Ancient South America amply displays his whispering abilities. 

 

Moore has had a long and distinguished career as an academic archaeologist. He is broadly 

interested in South American prehistory, has published widely in the journals of the field, edited 

one of the premier regional journals (Ñawpa Pacha) and has authored a very important (and 

successful) textbook—A Prehistory of South America: Ancient Cultural Diversity on the Least 

Known Continent (2014).  

 

In this book, however, he forgoes a purely academic or technical presentation and swerves 

personal, adopting a narrative style. The result is a mélange of his experiences, aspects of his 

career, and his finely-honed insights into the past. He clearly defines his vision for the book: 

“…(it) is about journeys and what I have learned in the course of travel about the archaeology of 



South America, particularly by looking at the creation of ancient cultural landscapes. My 

journeys are lines of movement—sometimes planned, often diverted by unforeseen events—that 

intersect with the lives and acts of other humans, past and present” (5).  

 

The result is a combination of autobiography, memoir, and travel narrative. The book is unusual 

because, at least in my experience, there are relatively few similar books written by 

archaeologists. There are, of course, plenty of autobiographies penned by our intellectual 

ancestors. Prominent examples among many include Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s (1966) Alms for 

Oblivion: An Antiquary’s Scrapbook; Mary Leakey’s (1984), Disclosing the Past; and Michael 

D. Coe’s 2006) Final Report: An Archaeologist Excavates His Past. Memoirs are somewhat less 

common. Although the line between autobiography and memoir is often blurred, a memoir 

usually does not have a fairly strict chronological ordering and tends to emphasize personal 

experience and emotional reflection on a set of themes. Jesse Jenning’s (1994) Accidental 

Archaeologist has been reviewed by colleagues as a blend of memoir and autobiography. A more 

recent example of a memoir that is thematically organized is Anna Marie Prentiss’ Field 

Seasons: Reflections on Career Paths and Research in American Archaeology (2012). The 

archaeological travel narrative, however, remains quite elusive but one that compares well to 

Moore’s book is Denis Byrne’s (2007) Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast 

Asia. Byrne, a specialist in archaeological heritage conservation, focuses his attention, as does 

Moore, on the intersection of landscapes and people.   

 

Understanding these literary variants helps to place Moore’s book into a fuller context and shows 

just how unique it is. This book is a pleasure to read because it is a deftly written travel narrative 

about Andean landscapes that wraps around deep scholarship about these places and which is 

leavened not only with personal reflection but anecdotes, some funny, others tragic, that most 

field archaeologists will find familiar.  

 

In nine chapters Moore takes us traveling through the present and the past. In Chapter 1 we are in 

central Peru at the Qoyllur Rit’i pilgrimage; Chapter 2 finds us in northern Peru via a discussion 

about archaeological research on mound cultures in central Chile; we return to a ritual procession 

in Ecuador in Chapter 3 which he uses to discuss ancient pilgrimages in the Andes; in one of my 



favorite entries (Chapter 4), Moore takes us to the Cueva de las Manos in Patagonia to discuss 

how foragers in the region inscribed their identities in it more than 10,000 years ago; the 

geoglyphs of northern Chile and southern Peru are the subject of Chapter 5; we swing to northern 

Colombia in Chapter 6, which is devoted to his long, arduous journey to visit the famous 

“Ciudad Perdida” of that region; Chapter 7 takes back south again to the volcanic zone of 

Ecuador where Moore describes how eruptions over the millennia shaped the cultures of the past 

and those of the present; once again starting in Ecuador we veer south to Cusco in Chapter 8 

where Moore describes the ceque system of sacred stones of the Inca and relates a narrative of 

the differences between how the Inca in the 15th C and  French scholars in the 18th C attempted 

to measure the cosmos; Chapter 9 has us back in Ecuador but eventually returns us to the Cusco 

of the Incas via the Qhapac Ñan, the Inca imperial road which Francisco Pizarro followed in his 

effort to conquer the Inca polity.  

 

Finally, in the Epilogue, one of the most engaging chapters of the book, Moore concludes his 

travels on the continent with a delightful but rather trying story of a recalcitrant Land Cruiser 

which only seems to favor moving when in reverse and an epic odyssey to seek a mechanic or 

anyone else who can repair the vehicle. He failed to find one but in so doing, that failure offered 

an insight, one that he characterized thusly:  “I drove in reverse toward La Paz, the past was there 

in front of me, but the future of this particular journey was invisible and behind me—as it always, 

actually is” (269). For Moore, the journey is how he has made himself a landscape-whisperer. His 

journeys and travels molded both his intellectual rigor as an academic while simultaneously 

expanding his empathy to think about how meaning has been various inscribed across the continent 

over thousands of years of prehistory. He makes no claim to know how these ancient peoples 

thought, but through his stories and tales, he invites us to reflect on the past and how these reflections 

can help us understand our common humanity.  

 

I don’t know of a single archaeologist who does not have tales to rival those that Moore describes. 

But I think few of us can emulate his skillful narrative and the way in which he has woven his 

experiences, reflections, and stories into a readable and deeply engaging tapestry of Andean 

landscapes and their meanings, not only for those people who live upon them, but for readers who 

seek to catch a whisper of their pasts.  

 



Byrne, Denis 2012. Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia. Worlds of 
Archaeology Series, AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland.  
 
Coe, Michael D. 2006. Final Report: An Archaeologist Excavates His Past. Thames and Hudson, 
London. 
 
Jennings, Jesse. 1994. Accidental Archaeologist: Memoirs of Jesse D. Jennings. University of 
Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah. 
 
Leakey, Mary. 1984 Disclosing the Past. Doubleday, New York. 
 
Moore, Jerry 2014. A Prehistory of South America: Ancient Cultural Diversity in the Least 
Known Continent. University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. 
 
Prentiss, Anna Marie. 2012 Field Seasons: Reflections on Career Paths and Research in 
American Archaeology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, Utah. 
 
Wheeler, Robert Eric Mortimer, Sir. 1966 Alms for Oblivion: An Antiquary’s Scrapbook. 
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.  
 

 

Mark Aldenderfer is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and the Edward A. Dickson Emeriti 
Professorship Endowed Chair at the University of California, Merced. Although his current 
archaeological research is the Himalayas of Nepal, he worked in the highlands of southern Peru 
for more than 20 years.  
  

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
  

© 2020 Mark Aldenderfer 


