The huaqueros use a combination of magical and vernacular techniques to locate burials and their artifacts in the ruins of pre-Columbian pyramids and necropolises known as huacas.
According to Andean tradition, these sacred sites are people. The huaquero must therefore enter into a reciprocal relationship with these “other-than-human” existences in order to win their good graces, and thus gain access to their treasures, including ritual ceramics, metal ornaments and textiles.

If the huaquero’s aim is to sell some of the objects found, he operates within a complex network of intermediaries including forgers, collectors, museums, healers, shamans and rural communities. After their digs, huaqueros visit a curandero to be “cleaned”, sometimes offering an object from the huaca in exchange. These transactions go beyond the purely speculative and financial, since during these collective healing ceremonies (mesas curanderas), the artifacts exchanged are reintegrated into the ritual and sacred circuit, and once again become agents in the transmission of pre-Columbian knowledge.
The huaquería – clandestine excavation – could therefore be seen as a form of resistance to colonization and the rational reading of the world, by ensuring links with the past. In this way, traditions, spirits and ancestors remain alive.

The huaquero is considered a specialist in Andean communities, a kind of empirical archaeologist. If, from a legal point of view, his activity is illegal, the question then arises of his legitimacy as a member of the local community. Indeed, the huaqueros, driven by necessity and post-colonial control, helped and advised Western archaeologists on exploratory missions in the 21st and 20th centuries, themselves in search of the precious pre-Columbian artefacts hidden in the huacas.
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It is said that “the huaca cries” when tears of sand begin to run down the edges of the exhumed tomb, and it threatens to collapse and swallow the clandestine diggers. Perhaps we can equate her weeping with a form of catharsis, liberating both living and dead from the suffering of colonial memory.