Andes by Michael Jacobs

Author:Michael Jacobs [Jacobs, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582438818
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

‘The Incas could be much crueller than the Spaniards,’ said Julio Soto Valle, the man whom several people had recommended as the best guide to take me the next day to Kuélap. He was a fresh-faced enthusiastic man in his mid-thirties who had studied history and archaeology and worked variously as a taxi driver and tour guide. I located him in a dark restaurant whose only other client was an old man slurping his soup.

Julio, assuming rightly I was a relative novice in ancient Peruvian history, summarized the various pre-Inca civilizations that made Peru one of the most archaeologically complex areas of the world. The first Peruvians, according to him, were descendants of the migrants who crossed over to the Americas from Siberia during the last Ice Age. Though evidence of human occupation in Peru dated back to around 20,000 BC, the first great Peruvian civilization was the one responsible for the pyramids at Caral, on a stretch of coastal desert just north of Lima.

Then came the Chavín cult, a religious movement which developed at the same time as agriculture and village life were established, between 1200 BC and AD 200. The most important known site related to this cult was in the Cordillera Blanca, about three hundred kilometres further south down the Andes; but jaguar and other jungle motifs incorporated in Chavín art could imply that the cult began in the Amazon and then spread to the Andes along the upper Marañón River.

Julio paused. The slurping noise in the background seemed to be getting louder.

‘Possibly other Andean civilizations had their origins in the Amazon, the Incas for instance, or even the Chachapoyas, who also appear to have worshipped the jaguar. There is a new theory that the whole of the Amazon was densely populated in pre-Columbian times, before western illnesses took their toll.’

He briefly went back to where he had left off in his rapid exposition of Peru’s early cultures, continuing with the coastal ones of the Mochica and the Nazca, famed respectively for their realistic pottery and mysterious lines in the desert. Over this same so-called ‘Classical Era’, between AD 200 and AD 1100, there evolved in the Andes the agriculturally highly sophisticated Tiawanako civilization, which began around the shores of Lake Titicaca, extended south into present-day Chile and most of Bolivia, and then, in their later more military phase, allied itself to the Huaris in the north to reach well into Ecuador. The decline of the Tiawanako – Huari civilization at the beginning of the twelfth century coincided with the emergence of the Incas, whose main rivals by the time their empire had begun expanding dramatically, from the 1440s onwards, were the Mochica’s successors, the Chimus.

‘The Chachapoyas were nonetheless a force to be reckoned with,’ added Julio. ‘They had dominated this area since at least the eighth century, and put up fierce resistance when the Incas seized their territory in 1470.’ Cieza de León wrote about them as a tall fair-skinned race, whose warriors were famously ferocious and whose women were prized for their beauty.

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