The Ancient Central Andes

Jeffrey Quilter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000584196
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Ancient Central Andes presents a general overview of the prehistoric peoples and cultures of the Central Andes, the region now encompassing most of Peru and significant parts of Ecuador, Bolivia, northern Chile, and northwestern Argentina.

The book contextualizes past and modern scholarship and provides a balanced view of current research. Two opening chapters present the intellectual, political, and practical background and history of research in the Central Andes and the spatial, temporal, and formal dimensions of the study of its past. Chapters then proceed in chronological order from remote antiquity to the Spanish Conquest. A number of important themes run through the book, including: the tension between those scholars who wish to study Peruvian antiquity on a comparative basis and those who take historicist approaches; the concept of "Lo Andino, " commonly used by many specialists that assumes long-term, unchanging patterns of culture some of which are claimed to persist to the present; and culture change related to severe environmental events. Consensus opinions on interpretations are highlighted as are disputes among scholars regarding interpretations of the past.

The Ancient Central Andes provides an up-to-date, objective survey of the archaeology of the Central Andes that is much needed. Students and interested readers will benefit greatly from this introduction to a key period in South America's past.

1 Backgrounds

DOI: 10.4324/9781003038252-1

At Cajamarca

On the morning of November 16, 1532, 260 Spanish soldiers of fortune surprised and captured Atahualpa Yupanqui, Emperor of Tawantinsuyu, in the highland city of Cajamarca, Peru, slaughtering and dispersing hundreds of his soldiers and retinue in the process.¹ The event was the beginning of an ending and the ending of a beginning: the first page in the last chapter of the making of the modern world. For after the conquest of Peru, no state entity strong enough to prevent European expansion remained in the Americas. Vast regions and their peoples took chaotic, irreversible steps toward integration in global affairs in which both the Old World and the New were radically transformed. The Inca would have called it a pachacuti, an overturning, a term that refers to social revolutions as well as earthquakes.²

Cajamarca is a story filled with drama: the Spanish struggle up the Andes in a race to beat the Inca to the city; the anxious hidden soldiers; the pomp and pageantry of the Inca retinue’s grand entrance, unknowingly marching to its doom; the confrontation between a lone priest and an emperor in a vast plaza; the surprise attack; the desperate battle and slaughter; the capture of a king and a kingdom.

Everyone likes a good story, and this is one of the best whether viewed as a Spanish triumph or an Inca tragedy. But the tale of the “Men of Cajamarca” is only one moment in a much longer and more complex narrative. The invasion of Peru by the Spaniards was years in the planning and had included scouting expeditions by Francisco Pizarro, the conquistadors’ leader. So too, Atahualpa’s arrival in the plaza that fateful day was the result of a complicated chain of events.

The conquest of Peru was not done in a day’s work or even in that of a generation. The pivotal event in Cajamarca was followed by weeks, months, years, and centuries in which natives and invaders wrestled with one another and with new realities. Indeed, in the years stretching to millennia prior to Cajamarca, both the Old and New Worlds had been enmeshed in complex cultural and social dynamics of their own and so, whether to understand the specifics of Spanish and Inca interactions or the greater implications for world affairs, knowledge of both conqueror and conquered is necessary. Yet, most people educated in institutions of the Western European Tradition know considerably more about ancient Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe than they do about the New World.

It is a sad state of affairs that many people in Europe, the United States, and even Latin America, when asked about the ancient Americas can barely muster the querulous response of, “the Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca in Peru?” That is roughly the equivalent of asking someone about Western European history and hearing “the Romans in Italy and the Vikings in Scandinavia?” This is not the place to launch into a critique of the state of historical knowledge by populations in various parts of the world today, but it is the purpose of this book to offer an easily read, comprehensive introduction to the ancient peoples and cultures of the Central Andes, the academic term for the region formerly incorporated by the Inca Empire (see Figure 1.1).

In this chapter, I briefly review how Europeans encountered and tried to understand the peoples of the Central Andes from that first moment of contact in Cajamarca onwards. While many modern tourists only know of the Inca, the Spaniards encountered an empire that included a great diversity of peoples, cultures, and languages. They fought and dealt with the Inca because it was they who were in charge but the Spaniards came to realize that many different peoples were living and had lived in the Andes over the centuries. Sixteenth-century Spaniards’ ideas of the past, even that of their homeland, were radically different than the way in which we understand events today, however, and so issues of how we have come to develop chronologies and how we have identified past peoples are important to review. Indeed, much of this book will discuss how we have come to learn things as well as discuss those understandings in and of themselves.

Those first perceptions of the peoples of the Andes through understanding the Inca and their subjects were and remain for better and worse. Better, because knowing about the Inca provides a basis from which to try and understand other, earlier societies; and worse, because by serving as a starting point, understandings of Inca society can predispose us to falsely interpret other societies through an Inca lens when, in fact, they may have been quite different than that last prehispanic civilization.

Almost all our understandings of the past are through Western European concepts. Even if we learn about Andean ways of knowledge, we interpret them through our Western notions and languages. The tension between understanding different ways of thought while constricted by our own mental templates is a fundamental aspect of anthropology. Ultimately, we simply must decide that trying to understand very different ways of life than our own is worth the trouble, time, and effort, whether or not we can fully achieve that goal.

Early Views

The Spaniards who came to the New World in the sixteenth century were not much interested in the distant past nor even in the customs of their New World contemporaries excepting such knowledge as could help them gain gold or glory or aid in missionizing pagans. With a few exceptions, the conquistadors were ill-educated and illiterate. They interpreted what they saw in terms of references already available to them. Thus, they commonly referred to temples as “mosques” because many conquistadors had been involved in wars against the Moors. Similarly, they often referred to local lords as “caciques,” a Caribbean term learned a generation before, whereas Andean people spoke of curacas.

Figure 1.1 Map of the Central Andes showing the extent of the Inca Empire, modern national boundaries, and some modern cities and towns mentioned in the text.

While, for the most part, the conquistadors were rapacious in their outlooks, intents, and actions, there were a few among them who occasionally stopped and marveled at the civilizations into which they had swaggered or stumbled. While their attentions were focused on gold and silver, they often could not help but appreciate other achievements. They sometimes saw the exquisite craftsmanship of gold ornaments, but they also noted the intricacies of a beautiful textile or the engineering triumph of a temple with perfectly fitted stones. Some might have denied it but others recognized that they were confronting highly organized societies with complex social systems and elaborate court rituals. They encountered landscapes completely transformed by human hands: the very word “Andes” derives from the Spanish andenes, referring to the hillside slopes that had been converted into broad terraces for agriculture. It was not simply a “New World” but an entirely “Other World” that they encountered, a term employed by Columbus himself.³ It is this complex, rich, different way of living, with a deep historical past built on highly varied solutions to the basic human issues of survival, reproduction, and the search for meaning to life and the world, that intrigued at least some conquistadors to various degrees, and subsequently drew explorers, scholars, tourists, and citizens into long-term study of the past.

Although the conquistadors generally did not have historical bents, they wrote reports of what they saw and did, and these accounts are important for scholars because they describe indigenous politics and customs relatively unaffected by European influences. Granted, disease had preceded the military men, throwing the Inca Empire into the turmoil of a civil war due to a disruption in royal dynastic succession, so that European influences were present long before face-to-face confrontations. Nevertheless, the eyewitness written accounts from the first Europeans in the New World are extremely valuable today because they provide a sense of what independent indigenous societies had been like.

Different kinds of documents were produced. Some were letters written close to the time of the events they discuss, such as by men who accompanied Pizarro in the first days of the conquest. Others are narratives written well after events had transpired, such as the account of Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, one of the last living conquistadors whose testimonies were copied down 40 years after the conquest.⁴ Still others are official documents written for various political purposes by Spanish authorities or individuals with their own agendas.

Extended narratives of the conquest of Peru with descriptions of native life as the Spaniards saw it were mostly written by those who came after the first wave of invaders. One of the earliest is that of Pedro Cieza de León, the most important solider-chronicler of the early conquest years. He left Spain at about the age of 17, spending several years in New Granada (now, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador) and arrived in Peru among troops sent to put down a revolt (1544–1548) from Spain by Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco’s brother. Cieza de León was literate and had been writing down observations long before he arrived in Peru. He traveled throughout much or Peru and parts of Bolivia and augmented his writings through accounts he heard from those who had been elsewhere, such as Chile. He returned to Spain in 1550, published the first part of a planned four-part account and successfully went into business but died in 1554, at a relatively young age. The rest of his writings were only discovered and published in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵

Another frequently cited chronicler is Garcilaso de la Vega, often known as “El Inca.” Some conquistadors took an Inca princess as a wife or concubine and Garcilaso was the product of such a union. He grew up in Cuzco, the Inca capital, hearing stories from his native relatives about life before the conquest. By the age of 21, he was in Spain, but he did not publish his Comentarios Reales de los Inca until 1609, when he was 70. While that volume and a later one, posthumously published in 1617, were extensive, Garcilaso was at pains to put the Inca in a good light, understandable given his background and his desire to have his Inca bloodline given equal status to that of European royalty.⁶

Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala is another example of the diversity of voices which told of the past in the Colonial Period. He was the scion of a high-ranking native family from the southern highlands of Peru and he learned Spanish as well as other native languages. At some time between 1600 and 1615, Guamán Poma wrote a thousand-page letter to the King of Spain complaining of the injustices and cruelties of the Spaniards toward the Indians. He also took a swipe at a friar, Martin de Murúa, for whom he had worked as an illustrator on the cleric’s own history of Peru. Gumán Poma’s missive apparently never reached the Spanish King, and the document remained unknown until it was discovered in the Danish Royal Library in the first decade of the twentieth century. Since then, the almost 400 drawings the author created for his letter have become popular for posters and lecture slides among modern Andeanists and are widely known and appreciated in modern Andean countries as well as the illustrations that Guamán Poma did for Murúa which were only fairly recently discovered (see Figures 1.2, 10.4, and 10.5).⁷

These various authors are but a few of many different accounts of the conquest of Peru, histories of the Inca Empire, and discussions of Andean life. There are many other writers, each with their own voice and agenda in taking quill in hand. In addition to letters and chronicles written to argue specific cases, many other documents were less consciously written for posterity. They include numerous court records and other legal documents. Court cases in which an indigenous community petitioned the Spanish authorities for rights to certain lands, frequently in conflict with other indigenous groups, often reveal many aspects of native society.

Historian Steve Stern states that the various ethnic, political, and linguistic groups in sixteenth-century Peru did not perceive themselves as sharing a common identity until the 1560s, when they were plotting to overthrow the Spaniards.⁸ The Inca gods were seen as having been defeated by the Spanish deity, so the old, pre-Inca gods, the huacas, were called upon to rise up and expel the Europeans. Imploring the old gods for help is emblematic of the highly unstable times of the Conquest Period, lasting into the 1570s, when Viceroy Toledo captured and executed the last Inca emperor in the line of the ancient kings, consolidated Spanish rule, and instituted administrative reforms. There were many revolts against the Spaniards and such unstable times were not conducive to contemplations of the past; there was too much at stake in the present.

The eighteenth century brought the age of the Bourbons, and Enlightenment ideas and ideals made their way to Peru where colonial rule was firmly established. While there were still many injustices and revolutionary movements, the waves of violence and disease that had engulfed the Andes in the first two generations of the conquest had diminished. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the Archbishop of Trujillo, Martínez de Compañón, compiled an encyclopedic report on the North Coast of Peru for King Carlos III. Although most of the volumes have been lost, a preserved tome of illustrations depicts ancient ruins, burial customs, and the daily lives and special celebrations of Peru’s eighteenth-century North Coast peoples, often mixing old ways with new (see Figure 1.3).

The travels and writings of Alexander von Humboldt were extremely important in stimulating European interest in Latin America. Together with other scientists, his studies and writings about an expedition from 1799 to 1804 made important advances in a great variety of disciplines including biology, meteorology, and geology. It is for Humboldt that the cold-water current off the coast of Peru is named, although recently it has more commonly been known as the Peru Current. The expedition did not specifically study antiquities but German scholars subsequently became interested in the ancient Andes, birthing a scholarly tradition that continues to the present day.⁹

It was not until the 1830s that an interest in archaeology resembling modern concerns began in the Andes. In the late 1830s through the 1840s, the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi and the Peruvian, Francisco de Rivero, traveled to visit various ruins and artifact collections. In 1851, they published the first scholarly discussion of Peruvian antiquities: Antegüedades Peruanas. Their travels and studies were soon emulated by a number of other scholars who published the results of their own explorations and described ancient ruins and other remains.¹⁰

Figure 1.2 Detail of an illustration by Guamán Poma (redrawn) of a quipucamayoc, a quipu master, originally drawn circa 1559.

Figure 1.3 Illustration by Martínez de Compañón of a North Coast woman weaving on a backstrap loom in the late eighteenth century.

Figure 1.4 Illustration from Squier’s Incidents of Travel… The author is likely pictured at left, gazing at architectural elements at Tiahuanaco, Bolivia.

In the 1860s, Ephraim George Squier, who had formerly investigated ancient ruins in Ohio, was traveling in the region and soon published Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Inca in 1877, gaining wide acclaim among English-reading audiences (see Figure 1.4).¹¹ Slightly later than Squier, German geologists Wilhelm Reiss and Mortiz Alphons Stübel continued ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Image Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 Backgrounds
• 2 Space, Time, and Form in the Central Andes
• 3 The Early and Middle Preceramic Periods, 16,000–9000–5000 BP
• 4 The Late Preceramic Period, 5000–3800 BP
• 5 The Initial Period, 1800–800 BC
• 6 The Early Horizon, 800 BC–1 AD
• 7 The Early Intermediate Period, AD 1–650
• 8 The Middle Horizon, AD 650–1000
• 9 The Late Intermediate Period, AD 1000–1450
• 10 The Late Horizon, AD 1450–1540
• 11 The Conquest and Colonial Periods AD 1532–1570–1821
• References Cited
• Index