Hugh Thompson has made a career exploring the mysterious pre-Columbian cultures of ancient Peru, providing unforgettable accounts of South America's most strange--but enduring--culture. In A Sacred Landscape, he takes us from the great Moche pyramids to remote sites in the Central highlands that date back to the first millennium BCE--ancient Incan sites of the Andes that remain cloaked in mystery.

He elegantly interweaves his account of the rise, decline, and fall of pre-Inca civilization with the story of his family's relocation to a farm in the Yucay valley, the one-time heartland of ancient Peru. Thompson draws on the year that he spent alongside contemporary Peruvians to explore how things have changed--or failed change--in the five centuries or more that separate contemporary Peru from the civilization that is one of the world's oldest and most captivating enigmas.