There are little shops in Peru where you can buy Inca pots along with your groceries. There are shelves of soft drinks and snacks and, if you ask the man nicely, he'll pop out the back and return with a relic from a long-lost civilisation. For much cheapness, no doubt. Despite supermarkets' forays into clothes, electrical goods and financial services, I am yet to see an ancient artefact on sale in Sainsbury's. Unless you count the video of the Rolling Stones in Concert.
The looting of tombs and burial grounds, which is how these shops obtain their supplies, is a cancer, according to a Peruvian archaeologist in Royal Inca Mummies (Channel Five). And there is no cure. But looting is the least of the archaeologists' worries at Tupac Amaru.
Outside Lima, there is a town blooming on top of an Inca burial ground. Before the builders move in to dig sewers and lay plumbing, the archaeologists have a limited amount of time to excavate what they can. Archaeologists must, by their nature, be terribly patient people. They use a paintbrush where most of us would be in there with a shovel, sifting when most of us would hire a mini-bulldozer. Time being of the essence, therefore, suited them less than it might.
And yet, before the metaphorical Countdown jingle sounded, they pulled, under the watchful gaze of local children, incredible discoveries from the dusty soil. Clearly used to seeing skulls in elaborate headdresses and perfectly mummified bodies in the playground, the children were thoroughly non-plussed and kept kicking their football into the archaeologists' trenches. Not even the unwrapping of a whole family from a giant, haggis-like mummy encouraged any awe at all. Kids today, eh.
There was plenty of awe to be had, however. Even though the soaring helicopter shots of Machu Picchu looked like library pictures, the reconstruction of "the coming of the Spanish" was inevitably cheesy, and the whole enterprise was a little cheap and a bit simple, Royal Inca Mummies was a reminder that empires rise and fall and all that remains can end up between the rice and biscuits on the rickety shelves of village shops.