This volume contains re-editions of articles from different periods of my 40-yearlong research activity in Peru, from the first expedition to the Huaura River Valley, up to the most recent research on the Central Coast.

When I first came to Peru in 1972 as an engineering geologist commissioned to document coal reserves, I had already had quite a good knowledge of the archaeology of this region, since I had been interested in it for a few years. I spent the first few months in a mountain town of Oyón in the Lima Region, where I worked in a team developing a geological map of the upper basin of the River Huaura. This region turned out to be extremely rich in pre-Columbian historical sites: ruins of fortified settlements and cemeteries. It would be futile to search for any mention of them in the literature of that time. I owe it to the inspiration and kindness of Dr Josefina Ramos de Cox, director of Seminario de Arqueologia del Instituto Riva-Agüero in Lima, that I started researching and documenting these sites. She allowed me to do fieldwork under her patronage, to present the materials at meetings in Seminario, and later on also to deposit them there. On similar terms, an archaeological research in the following year, this time in the north of Peru, in the upper part of the Chicama Valley (La Libertad Department), was carried out. It yielded so much material, that I used them to prepare and defend my doctoral thesis in archaeology at Warsaw University, entitled: “Pre-Columbian settlement patterns in the basin of the River Alto Chicama, northern Peru.”

Another stay in Peru in 1977 was connected with my participation in a Polish expedition studying agriculture in various Andean countries, which also served to prepare for the arrival of the first Polish research team.

This was the Polish Scientific Expedition to the Andes, which from 1978 on implemented a long-term and multidisciplinary project called Huaura-Checras. I returned to the region I had first visited six years before and devoted myself to studying it for nearly a decade, until 1987. A team of archaeologists, ethnologists and geographers working under my supervision conducted research on settlement in this high-mountain region since pre-Hispanic times up to the present.