What a crazy story! I suspected this was, under the surface, the tale of a douchey foreign archaeologist pissing off the locals, but no. Ruth Shady Solis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Shady) is Peruvian, and teaches at the National University of San Marcos in Lima.
The "family of squatters" who bring in a backhoe kind of sounds like Ammon Bundy's clan.