Beneath the coastal sands of northern Peru, archaeologists have unsealed a cluster of Chimu kingdom tombs that centuries of plunder somehow passed over — an almost unimaginable preservation in a country where the pre-Columbian past has been systematically stripped away. The Chimu built one of the great Andean empires before falling to the Inca in the 15th century, yet until now their burial world has been known largely through what thieves left behind. In finding these tombs intact, researchers have recovered not just objects but context — the silent grammar of how a civilization arranged its