About 25 miles from Chan Chan in the foothills of the Andes on the easternmost edge of the Kingdom of Chimor sits ancient Collambay, a small village where excavations have unearthed, an especially sunny area between the coastal valleys and the highlands that is the only place on the western slopes of the Andes suitable for growing coca, one of Andean peoples’ most precious crops. “Everyone needed access to coca for ritual, political, and social purposes,” says archaeologist Alicia Boswell of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
