Tuesday 29 October 2013

THE SACRED VALLEY OF THE INCAS IN PERU: A MEDIEVAL WORLD SUCCUMBS TO RENAISSANCE IMPERIALISM

George King

Even if we have taken little interest in the history of pre-Columbian American civilizations, most people will be aware of the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans and perhaps one or two others of these legendary peoples active during the period roughly corresponding to Western medieval times. Not all may know, however, that the Peru region in South America is recognized as one of six global areas with an independent, indigenous development of civilization – one of two such areas in the Western Hemisphere (the other is Mesoamerica).
George at the Sun Gate (Intipunku) with
 Machu Picchu in the background.

Like many others, I was unaware of this when my wife and I made a fascinating but all-too-brief trip to Peru’s Sacred Valley of the Incas and Machu Picchu earlier this year. On returning to South Africa I came across Hugh Thomson’s A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru. While Thomson is not a scholarly authority in the field of archaeology – his book is intended for the layman rather than the specialist reader – he has travelled in Peru on and off over a period of twenty-five years. He also spent a year with his family in Urubamba in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, about 50 kilometres from the city of Cuzco. He has got to know most of the archaeologists working in the region, accompanying several scientific expeditions to various parts of the country. With ten pages of bibliography and fourteen pages of notes, his book provides a reasonable bolstering of academic paraphernalia. His book stimulated my own interest in learning more about this part of the world.

Thomson tells us that the impetus for his book came from his investigations at the Inca site of Llactapata – just across the western valley from Machu Picchu – where ongoing exploration continues to reveal discoveries shedding new light on its more famous neighbour. But in doing so he became aware of the difficulty of understanding the Inca mindset ‘without a fuller understanding of the thousands of years of Andean culture that preceded the Incas’ (Thomson 2006: xv). Thus the reader is made aware of a history of several civilizations stretching over a vast period in this part of the world. He deals with the Nasca people and several other examples of Andean settlement. 

Once in Peru, you don’t have to go far to realize just how much the (distant) past pervades the landscape, urban as well as rural. Right in the heart of Miraflores in the nation’s capital, Lima, lies the extensive archaeological site of Huaca Pucllana with a huge 22-metre-high adobe pyramid. One of Lima’s ‘don’t miss’ sights, Huaca Pucllana is well known for its evidence of successive settlements from AD 200 to AD 700. Chief among these was the Huari (Wari) culture, a political formation that emerged around AD 600 in the central highlands of Peru and lasted for about 500 years. As recently as late October 2013 the world was informed of yet another major find at the site: two intact mummies, thought to be up to 1 000 years old, were discovered during a recent excavation (Chase 2013). According to dig director Gladys Paz, tests to determine their age will take another four to six months. ‘By May [2014], we’ll know how old the two mummies were, what illnesses they may have suffered from, what positions they held, and even if there’s a family connection between them’ (Chase 2013).
Built of clay bricks, the Great Pyramid at Huaca Pucllana
rises to 22 metres  in the heart of Miraflores, Lima.
The Huaca Pucllana site is large, occupying an area of about 5 hectares. The Great Pyramid itself is 500 metres long, more than 100 metres wide and 22 metres high, built entirely on filled land and small adobes. In addition, the site is surrounded by a set of small rooms, passages, ramps and courtyards, usually finely finished plastered with mud and, in some cases, with traces of yellow paint (Huaca Pucllana 2013). Adjacent to the site but still within the grounds is a museum and a first-rate restaurant, one of Lima’s best. You can sit on the restaurant’s broad patio and enjoy the finest Peruvian cuisine, including famed national dishes such as ceviche (marinated raw fish) and cui (roasted guinea pig), along with the freshest of local produce – all this seated only metres from thousand-year-old ruins (and with no intervening fence), surely one of the most impressive settings for a major restaurant.
Life-size figures at Huaca Pucllana give
visitors an idea of pre-Incan culture.
But it is the spectacularly significant discovery at the Sechín pyramid at Norte Chico on the Peruvian desert coast that sparked off a major rethink on ancient Peruvian history.  As Thomson (2006: 74) points out, until quite recently civilization in that part of the world was thought to have started around 800 BC.  The results of further investigations by a number of archaeologists at Sechín confirmed a dating of 1500 BC. Thomson tells us the delay in investigating the Peruvian pyramids was the result of the abundance of rich archaeological sites such as the Inca cities, the great lines across the desert at Nasca and the monoliths around Lake Titicaca, coupled with the considerable financial and human resources required for excavating a pyramid. Here’s Thomson’s description of what followed (2006: 74-76):
The discovery of Sechín’s antiquity sent the archaeological world into a feeding frenzy. As archaeologists started to examine and date some of the other great pyramids along the coast, they found the same thing: they were all far older than had previously been thought.
In the year 2000 came the most extraordinary discovery of all. A Peruvian archaeologist called Ruth Shady had for some time been investigating a large pyramidal mound in the valley we were driving into, at a place called Caral, which had never been excavated before. .… 
… Ruth persuaded the Peruvian army to help her dismantle the surface of the hill. Under the rubble they found a sophisticated building of a vast size; the largest platform was approximately the length of two football fields, nearly as wide, and five storeys high. Moreover the building was made out of stone, not adobe, a sign of civilised monumental architecture. And there were other such pyramids near by.
The dating of the building was derived from some woven bags of shicra (reed) which workers used to carry rocks for building the platform. Eventually it was determined that Caral was built from around 2700 to 2100 BC, over a millennium earlier than the other pyramids at Sechín. Some other sites close to Caral, in the Norte Chico area, were dated even earlier, to 3000 BC.  ‘In just a few years,’ Thomson (2006: 77) tells us, ‘the horizon of the birth of Peruvian civilization had been rolled back by two millennia’. 

That the late medieval culture of the Incas rests on a substantial historical background dating back several millennia might come as something of a surprise to visitors to Peru, as it did to me. And even more remarkable, as Thomson (2006: 77) points out, Peruvian civilization is the most ancient in the Americas by a long chalk. It is indeed ‘one of the most ancient in the world, comparable to India, Egypt and China’. And, more significantly, as he puts it bluntly, ‘there was no such thing as the “New World”. Civilization, an emotive concept, had developed in the Americas at the same time as in the so-called “Old World”’ (ibid.).

Our own journey through the Sacred Valley of the Incas (the valley of the Urubamba River) which as Bauer and Covey (2002) put it encompasses the heartland of the Inca Empire began, as it does for most visitors, in the Inca capital of Cuzco (Qosqo), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is a thriving city lying at 3400 metres above sea level and comprising a population today of well over 350 000. It was largely rebuilt and developed by the great Inca king Pachacuti (the name means ‘he who shakes the earth’ in Quechua) who reigned from 1438 to 1471. Apart from the notable ruins of Sacsaywamán lying outside Cuzco, there are many reminders in the central city of the its Inca past; none are more striking than the ruins of Coricancha (Qorikancha) – the Temple of the Sun – and the most important temple in the entire Inca Empire. Spanish reports from the time of the conquest in the early 1530s tell us that the walls and floors were covered in sheets of solid gold, each containing on average 2 kg of gold when melted down and that the opulence was ‘marvellous’ (Hemming 1993: 64-65). The Spanish colonists demolished the temple and built the church of Santo Domingo on the site, incorporating some of the Inca stonework into the new building. Despite major earthquakes, these stone walls resisted major structural damage, though some cracks are visible today. The site as a whole, where you can spend a profitable hour or more, now includes a museum with displays of Inca and pre-Inca cultures; it is a curious architectural jumble of Inca stonework and Spanish colonial, topped with a modern roof and upper walkway along one side, protecting some of the exhibits from the elements. 
Superb Inca stonework in the curved 6-metre wall at
Coricancha (the Temple of the Sun) in Cuzco,
originally lined with solid-gold sheets, and
subsequently plundered by the conquistadores. 

From Cuzco we travelled to Písac, a village with notable Inca ruins on top of a hill, lying at the head of the Urubamba Valley. There the Inca constructed a series of curving agricultural terraces which are still in use today. The ruins include some well-preserved temples as well as ceremonial baths. Following the course of the Urubamba River north-west in the relatively constricted Sacred Valley we then came to Ollantaytambo, a small town boasting a series of seventeen magnificent terraces leading steeply up to a splendid ruined Inca fortress. In Hemming’s words (1993: 207): 
The great ruin still stands with its superb Inca masonry almost completely intact. Below the citadel is the town of Ollantaytambo in the bed of a small tributary valley. It is one of the few surviving examples of Inca town planning, with the wall foundations and grid of streets intact … [T]he original Inca homes are still occupied.
The young prince Manco Inca, crowned ruler of the Inca by Francisco Pizarro in Cuzco in 1534, at first cooperated with the Spanish but soon realized he was being used as a puppet ruler. He managed eventually to escape from Cuzco in 1536 and put together an army of about 200 000 in order to retake the Empire from the Spanish. Though he marched on Cuzco and besieged the city, the price was a heavy one: many of his warriors succumbed to smallpox. The survivors retreated to the fortress of Ollantaytambo where the battle of Ollantaytambo was fought, marking one of the worst defeats of the Spanish conquistadores. 
Centuries-old agricultural terraces of the Písac ruins
at the head of the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

The Spanish commander Hernando Pizarro and his men were resisted by a great onslaught of Inca sling shots, hurled boulders and assault of arrows by jungle tribes recruited from the Amazon, all commanded by Manco Inca (1516-44). As one of Pizarro’s troops recorded, the Indians were fighting the Spaniards ‘from three sides: some from the hillside, others from the far bank of the river, and the rest from the town’ (Hemming 1993: 208). The final blow delivered by the Inca was the flooding of the plain by water diverted from the Patacancha River along prepared channels. The Spanish horsemen were unable to manoeuvre in the sodden ground and Pizarro was forced to order a retreat, although he later succeeded in defeating Manco Inca, thus completing the conquest of Peru by the Spanish.
Looking up at the magnificent
Inca fortress at Ollantaytambo.

An Inca street in Ollantaytambo,
Sacred Valley of the Incas,
with original stone work and paving.



The Incas ‘succeeded in cutting and polishing
their stones with dazzling virtuosity’
(Hemming 1993: 121). The photo shows
a stretch of wall at Ollantaytambo
about 1 metre wide.


Looking down from the Inca fortress on the steeply-raked terraces at Ollantaytambo, where the Spanish conquistadors were defeated by Manco Inca.
Travelling by train from Ollantaytambo to the disappointingly touristic town of Aguas Calientes (also called Machu Picchu Pueblo these days) along the ever-narrowing Urubamba River valley, and after a comfortable night’s sleep, we took an early-morning bus up the steep, switchback road to the bus station below the famed fifteenth-century Inca settlement of Machu Picchu near the top of the mountain.  

Machu Picchu as seen from Intipunku, the Sun Gate
on the Inca Trail. Machu Picchu rests on a ridge
 between two valleys, each over 400 metres deep,
carved by the Urubamba River.  
They say the best way to see Machu Picchu for the first time is from Intipunku, the Sun Gate, about one and a half kilometres from the site itself and considerably higher, at 2737 metres above sea level. After several hours exploring the Machu Picchu site we made our way uphill along the Inca Trail (‘the most famous ancient roadway in the world’, as one guidebook puts it) away from the ruins to Intipunku. The combination of a steady incline, increasing altitude and spectacular vistas takes you the better part of about 50-55 minutes. So, like true trekkers approaching the site after four days of slogging it up Andean passes and through lush cloud forest, we were able to look back and take in that breathtaking view before returning to Machu Picchu. 

But our first view of the place, much earlier that morning, was in gentle predawn light, and from the vantage point reached after a zigzag climb through cloud forest from the ticket gate. With other members of our group we stared intently and disbelievingly, taking in a view we were all so familiar with from photographs and the posters in our hotel at Aguas Calientes down in the valley, yet which caused gasps of amazement and awe at the beauty of the setting in situ. 

Detail of the ruins at Machu Picchu,
looking towards the Sun Temple.
Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Machu Picchu is described on the UNESCO website in these terms (Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu):
Embedded within a dramatic landscape at the meeting point between the Peruvian Andes and the Amazon Basin, the Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu is among the greatest artistic, architectural and land use achievements anywhere and the most significant tangible legacy of the Inca civilization. Recognized for outstanding cultural and natural values, the mixed World Heritage property covers 32,592 hectares of mountain slopes, peaks and valleys surrounding its heart, the spectacular archaeological monument of “La Ciudadela” (the Citadel) at more than 2,400 meters above sea level. Built in the fifteenth century Machu Picchu was abandoned when the Inca Empire was conquered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. It was not until 1911 that the archaeological complex was made known to the outside world.
The approximately 200 structures making up this outstanding religious, ceremonial, astronomical and agricultural centre are set on a steep ridge, crisscrossed by stone terraces. Following a rigorous plan the city is divided into a lower and upper part, separating the farming from residential areas, with a large square between the two. To this day, many of Machu Picchu’s mysteries remain unresolved, including the exact role it may have played in the Incas’ sophisticated understanding of astronomy and domestication of wild plant species.
John Hemming’s masterful survey of the fall of the Inca Empire at the hands of the Spanish conquistadores (1993, first published in 1970) gives the diligent reader a wealth of detailed information and interpretation. This is a major source for those wishing to explore the history of the interaction between two major cultures, one an avaricious early Renaissance empire based in south-western Europe, the other a civilization of the Western Hemisphere doomed to eventual subjugation, partly by inferior firepower, despite being ‘the last advanced civilisation completely isolated from the rest of mankind’ (Hemming 1993: 18). By the early 1570s the conquest was complete: the Inca family had lost its power for good (Hemming 1993: 438). 

Yet the mystique of the Incas remains and their romanticizing continues: as recently as 2011 a golden statue in fibreglass of the great Inca king Pachacuti (reigned 1438-71) was erected in the central Huacaypata or ‘place of tears’ (now the Plaza de Armas) of his capital city Cuzco. According to Knowlton (2011), the decision of Cuzco’s mayor to add the statue to the fountain in the main city square amounts to ‘a kind of “Incanizing” of a colonial and republican – creole – space that was once the ceremonial heart of the Inca Empire’. This, says Knowlton, is an indication of a general ‘resurgence of indigenous identity which involves a revitalization of festivities and a re-invention of symbols and rites’ in the southern Andes. 

For those who would rather explore the broader picture of ancient peoples in this richly settled part of the world, as well as indulge the thrill of discovering evidence of these civilizations that has only recently come to light, Thomson’s book remains a firm recommendation. His tale reminds us that the medieval civilization of the Incas and its clash with the Renaissance world of Spain rests on the evidence of a prehistory of successive cultures reaching back much further in time than anything we know of in Western Europe. Visiting just a few of the Inca achievements in person is a deeply thrilling experience, made more rewarding still by becoming aware of their rich antecedents.

REFERENCES
(This is only a fraction of available source material)

Bauer, Brian S. and L. Alan Covey. 2002. ‘Processes of State Formation in the Inca Heartland (Cusco – Peru)’, American Anthropologist 104(3): 846-864.
Chase, Rachel. 2013. ‘Huari Mummies Discovered at Huaca Pucllana in Lima, Peru’, Peru This Week, 24 October 2013. <http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-huari-mummies-discovered-at-huaca-pucllana-in-lima-peru-101237> accessed 28 October 2013.
Hemming, John. 1993. The Conquest of the Incas. London: Pan Books. Orig. publ. 1970.
Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [website] <http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/274> accessed 28 October 2013.
Knowlton, David. 2011. ‘Inca, a Statue and a Struggle’, Cuzco Eats [website] <http://www.cuzcoeats.com/2011/07/inca-statue-struggle/> accessed 29 October 2013.
Museo de Sitio Huaca Pucllana [website] <http://huacapucllanamiraflores.pe/ english/> accessed 18 October 2013.
Miraflores Perú: Huaca Pucllana [website] <http://www.mirafloresperu.com/ en/tourist-miraflores-lima-peru/huaca-pucllana.php> accessed 19 October 2013.
Mann, Charles C. 2006. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books
Norte Chico Civilization [website] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norte_Chico_ civilization> accessed 20 October 2013.
Shady Solís, Ruth. 2005. Caral Supe, Perú: The Caral-Supe Civilization: 5,000 Years of Cultural Identity in Peru. Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura.
Thomson, Hugh. 2006. A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru. Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press.