The Course of Andean History

By Peter V. N. Henderson

The only comprehensive history of Andean South America from initial settlement to the present, this useful book focuses on Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, the four countries where the Andes have played a major role in shaping history.

Although Henderson emphasizes the period since the winning of independence in 1825, he argues that the region’s republican history cannot be explained without a clear understanding of what happened in the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras Henderson carefully explores the complex relationship between the Andean peoples and their land up until the fall of the Inka Empire in 1532 before addressing the Spanish conquest and the colonial aftermath, emphasizing the syncretism often unwillingly forced upon the original inhabitants of the region. His account of the nineteenth century discusses the attempts of the Andean elite to fashion modern nation-states in the face of many divisive factors, including race. The final chapters carry the story from 1930 to the present as the Andean countries debated different ways to create a more inclusive and prosperous society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780826353375

Peter V. N. Henderson

Peter V. N. Henderson is professor of history and former dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota. His most recent book is Gabriel García Moreno and Conservative State Formation in the Andes.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

EVER SINCE I BEGAN TEACHING ANDEAN HISTORY MORE THAN A DECADE ago, students have requested a comprehensive textbook covering the history of the region chronologically from initial settlement to contemporary times. This volume is a response to that demand. Earlier syntheses of the region’s historical evolution are long out of print. During nearly every decade from the 1940s to the 1980s, an eminent historian (Arthur P. Whitaker, Frederick Pike, Magnus Mörner) sought to fill this void, as did a well-known journalist (William Weber Johnson). Each of the four selected a central theme for their book, themes that because of the passage of time no longer seem as relevant for students taking an undergraduate course about the region in the twenty-first century. A more recent volume by a distinguished scholar of Latin American literature (Jason Wilson) is not intended to provide a historical overview of the Andes but instead takes readers on a country-by-country trek through the mountains, excerpting information, including the occasional historical nugget, from the writings of foreign visitors, novelists, and poets. Thus, the absence of a current synthesis of the region’s historical development, coupled with the explosion of research on the area since 1970, speaks to the need for a new text suitable for student use. What follows, then, is a chronologically organized yet thematic survey of the basic trends in Andean history that also details the differences in each country’s development.

On the first day of class, I ask students a question, the answer to which leaves the five above authors in disagreement: What countries should be included in the study of the Andean nations? Students quickly rattle off the names of all those nations touched by the enormous mountain chain: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and even Argentina. Viewing the region from outer space, one could observe metaphorically that the Andes look like the spine of South America. If a political map could be superimposed from this vantage point, one would see that for some South American countries the Andes are endogenous while for others they are exogenous, a skeletal backbone external to the core of the nation. Therefore, this text will focus on those four countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia) where the Andes Mountains have played an integral role in shaping their historical development. Venezuela and Chile will only receive occasional attention, and Argentina will be mentioned even less frequently. Further, excluding these latter three nations has additional logic because of their own national focus. Venezuela for the most part looks outward on the Caribbean, while Chile and Argentina are the core nations in the distinctive Southern Cone.

The Andean world fascinates students and travelers today because it offers a spectacular blend of landscapes and peoples. This volume will provide a greater understanding of this diverse region, which is quite different from other parts of Latin America. First and foremost, the book will emphasize the period since the winning of independence in 1825. Yet the region’s republican history cannot be explained without a clear understanding of what happened in the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras. The first three chapters explore the complex relationship between the Andean peoples and their land until the fall of the Inka Empire in 1532. The next four chapters study the conquest/encounter and the colonial aftermath, emphasizing the syncretism forced upon the often unwilling original inhabitants of the region. The following seven chapters analyze the long nineteenth century and discuss the attempts of the Andean elite to fashion modern nation-states in the face of many divisive factors, including race. The final six chapters carry the story from 1930 to the present, as the Andean countries have debated different ways to create a more inclusive society as well as prosper economically.

This volume would not have been possible were it not for the work of the many outstanding scholars in several disciplines who, especially since 1970, have labored in the archives and in the field and produced many important scholarly books and articles, as reflected in the list of readings following each chapter. In addition, all of us who study the Andean world should thank the university presses who have remained true to their institutional missions and published our scholarship even when the prospects for profits seemed dim. Because of the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of Andean studies, this text will draw upon the writings of archaeologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and economists as well as scholars of literature and the fine arts whose works have added immeasurably to this work.

Finally, during the time in which I have worked on this text, I have incurred many intellectual debts. First, I would like to thank my undergraduate mentor, J. León Helguera of Vanderbilt University, who first introduced me to modern Colombian history. At the University of Florida, Michael Moseley’s course on Peruvian archaeology provided a foundation for further studies on the pre-Hispanic past. As the beneficiary of an NEH grant on the Andean Worlds, I am most grateful to the faculty who shared their expertise with us: Richard Burger, Tom Cummins, Frank Salomon, Christopher Donnan, Walter Alva, and Rolena Adorno. Kris Lane, now of Tulane University, helped this neophyte navigate Ecuadorian archives and taught me much about that beautiful country during our many conversations. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at the University of Texas–Austin, especially Ann Twinam, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Seth Garfield, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Jonathan Brown, Henry Dietz, Matthew Butler, Michelle Wibbelsman, and Lina del Castillo, who shared their expertise of Latin America with me. I would also like to thank John Sanbrailo of the Pan American Development Foundation, Guillermo Bustos, Fausto Flores, the late Jorge Salvador Lara, and the many other Ecuadorians who taught me so much about their country’s history. Other scholars who shared their current research with me include Gabrielle Kuenzli, Nicola Foote, Erin O’Connor, Hayley Froysland, Marc Becker, George Lauderbaugh, and Jason McGraw. Jeff and Eileen Marston and Doug and Nancy Brown offered generous hospitality during my research visits in Washington and Nashville, respectively. Thanks to my mother, Sydney Henderson, who provided an idyllic setting in Cape Neddick, Maine, during several summers to write, and to my sister Anne Finucane and her husband Brendan, who added necessary levity on those occasions. My kind colleagues in the history department at Winona State University have been extremely supportive over the years. I also would like to thank Provost Nancy Jannik and President Judith Ramaley for providing funding that enabled me to collect the illustrations for the text and for encouraging my scholarly efforts. Thanks also are due to my students at UT–Austin during the spring semester, 2011, and my students at Winona State who field-tested earlier versions of this text. Their invaluable feedback greatly improved the final version. Finally, thanks especially to Chuck Walker and Lyman Johnson, who provided wonderful suggestions to improve the final version.

The production of this book would not have been possible without the sage advice of W. Clark Whitehorn and the editorial staff at the University of New Mexico Press. I am also grateful to the librarians at the Nettie Lee Benson Collection at the University of Texas–Austin, especially Margo Gutiérrez and David Block, who helped me with a number of research questions. Michael Hironymous of the same institution did his usual expert job with the reproduction of many of the photographs that grace this book. Stella Vilagrán of the Columbus Memorial Library, Marion Oettinger of the San Antonio Museum of Art, and Kristi Finefeld and Beverley Brannan of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, as well as the staff at the Kimbell Museum and the Denver Museum of Art, provided other photographs. I would like to thank Angie Kronebusch of the graphics department at Winona State for her careful reproduction of several maps, and our office administrators, Barb Nascak and Ann Kohner, who word processed early versions of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to offer special thanks to Alisha Syrmopoulos, who not only word processed the final version but also helped immeasurably with the maps and the photographs.

Suggested Readings

Johnson, William Weber. The Andean Republics: Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru. New York: Time, 1965.

Mörner, Magnus. The Andean Past: Land, Societies, and Conflicts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Pike, Frederick B. The United States and the Andean Republics: Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Whitaker, Arthur P. The United States and South America: The Northern Republics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948.

Wilson, Jason. The Andes: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Map 1.

Andean region within South America, Winona State University Graphics Department

CHAPTER 1

From Hunter-Gatherers to Fishermen and Farmers

TIMELINE

OUR JOURNEY TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF ANDEAN HISTORY sensibly begins by revisiting the famed historian Arnold Toynbee’s explanation for the development of civilization. He argued that the sophisticated societies of the ancient world emerged in locations where human beings responded to the challenges posed by the environment. For example, the annual floods of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers challenged early peoples to harness the flow and irrigate rich delta soils to sustain large populations. Most students of antiquity would agree that no portion of the globe posed more obstacles to the emergence of a sophisticated society than did the Andean region’s physical geography; yet some of the ancient world’s greatest civilizations arose there. This chapter will begin with a description of the varied terrain that the ancient Andean people subdued. What makes this Andean story unique is that three quite different environmental ecosystems challenged these earliest settlers, yet the regional civilizations shared many common characteristics.

To face these environmental challenges, early Andean peoples invented unique social and economic systems that were eminently practical. Belying the Inka myth that they alone brought civilization to the Andes, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of civilizations that predated the Inka by thousands of years and provided the solid foundations for the Inka Empire. Not only did the Inka organize their society and economy in a tried and true fashion, but their religious and cultural beliefs were also derived in large measure from their predecessors. Hence this chapter will also examine some of the principles early Andean peoples discovered that enabled them to cope successfully with the region’s difficult terrain.

The Physical Geography

Broadly speaking, each of the Andean nations studied in this text can be divided into three geographical regions: the mountains, the coastal plains, and the Amazonian rain forest, each of which posed a different challenge to early settlers. Of course, this description significantly oversimplifies the picture, as any citizen of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, or Bolivia would tell you. Professional geographers would point out multiple variants in that pattern that help to explain the prevalence of regionalism both in antiquity and in the modern world. People settled in the highland valleys and plateaus but also took advantage of the steep slopes of the Andean mountain ranges that run from the Caribbean Sea to the southern tip of South America. Likewise, the terrain and climate of the narrow Pacific coastal plain vary dramatically from north to south, and like the mountainous region (the sierra), house numerous microclimates. The Amazon region presents greater uniformity of climate, but its steamy temperatures, humidity, and verdant undergrowth generally deterred both the pre-Hispanic peoples and the Spaniards from venturing there. However, two important principles override otherwise logical assumptions that outsiders might make about the Andean region’s geography and its effect on human beings. First, rainfall, seasonal or otherwise, is not the sole determinant of what is possible agriculturally in a particular geographical location. Second, mildness of climate and average temperature depend on latitude much less than on altitude.

Colombia, the northernmost of the four countries, is unique in that it enjoys both a Caribbean and a Pacific coast. Although Colombia’s Caribbean coast is the location of several large cities, its Pacific coastline, like most of Ecuador’s, experiences heavy downpours throughout the year and so houses only a small portion of Colombia’s population. Most Colombians reside on upland plateaus, which because of their altitude sport semitropical or temperate climates. Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and Medellín, historically its chief industrial city, offer very hospitable temperatures. As in Colombia, pre-Hispanic Ecuadorians farmed in highland basins, here situated between two Andean ranges that formed the so-called Avenue of the Volcanoes. As elsewhere in the Andes, seismic activity in Ecuador has complicated human settlement. Along the coast, abundant rainfall gives way to more moderate showers as one travels further south, which, coupled with fertile soil, encouraged the early development of indigenous civilizations and later the export of tropical agricultural products. In fact, Ecuador’s rich volcanic soil and usually moderate rainfall produce an enormous variety of fruits and vegetables, allowing its inhabitants an easier means of survival than those who settled in Peru and Bolivia and had to make more extreme adjustments to the landscape to secure an adequate diet.

Peru’s and Bolivia’s drier climate and increasingly mountainous terrain as one travels south posed far greater challenges to human survival. Coastal Peru relies on thirty or more westward-flowing small rivers that moisten the desert, creating alluvial plains where ancient civilizations would flourish when productivity could be expanded by irrigation. Peru’s coastline becomes increasingly desiccated as one moves south; the cold Humboldt Current flowing adjacent to the shore creates rising air currents that prevent rainfall on the coast, instead depositing water on the mountain slopes. Yet the current provides other types of abundant resources, namely seafood, which are available for emergent civilizations. Today, Peru’s largest city, Lima, lies in this semiarid zone, as does the prosperous north coast. Other ancient peoples flourished in the rich interior valleys, especially around Cuzco, that separated individual mountains. But much of the remainder of both Peru and Bolivia is an uninhabitable wasteland. Bolivians tend to live in the high plateaus or altiplano, or in lower and more productive valleys. To survive in such a treacherous land, highland Peruvians and Bolivians rely on a system of agropastoralism in which herds of llamas and alpacas graze on fallowed fields and provide fertilizer in return. Lake Titicaca, on the border between Peru and Bolivia, lies at 12,500 feet and, as one of the few viable sources of water in the high plains, provides irrigation and fish to a large population. In short, the indigenous peoples of highland Peru and Bolivia have been particularly challenged to survive and feed themselves in light of limited rainfall and extreme altitude.

Humans Arrive in the Americas

Any discussion of the modern Andean republics must take into account the earliest history of indigenous peoples because certain aspects of their social and cultural traditions continue to be practiced in the region today in modified forms. Although writers have not always agreed about the origins of civilization in the Americas, archaeologists today concur that the most likely scenario suggests that central Asian hunter-gatherers pursued large game across a land bridge over what is now called the Bering Strait, linking Siberia to Alaska during the final Ice Age sometime between 20,000 and 12,000 BCE. The method of transport remains in dispute. Because the glaciated North American continent trapped so much water within its ice mass, sea levels were considerably lower than they are today, creating dry land where ocean waters now lap against island shores. While most archaeologists argue that the hunter-gatherers followed their prey down hills and in valleys between mountains of ice, others theorize that these people skirted the glaciers by constructing boats and fishing their way down the coast. In either case, humans rapidly dispersed throughout the Americas over the next few thousand years and certainly inhabited the Andean region by 9000 BCE.

Despite the often inhospitable topography, these people soon accommodated themselves to the tropical extremes of the Amazonian rain forest, to the coastal plain from Colombia to northern Chile, and to the cooler, windswept valleys, basins, and altiplanos of the Andes themselves. Over the centuries, indigenous communities living in each of these regions would develop their own responses to the challenges of their environment. In addition to the geographical difficulties, however, the highlands, the jungle, the coast, and the Pacific Ocean also offered great riches. Although the large game that had originally attracted people to the Americas was quickly exterminated, alternative resources provided the new arrivals with ways to survive and flourish. The new settlers displayed remarkable ingenuity in overcoming geographical obstacles.

When the Spaniards arrived in the Andean world in the 1530s, the sights that unfolded before their eyes astonished them. Huge cities, monumental architecture, and sophisticated social and political systems bespoke of advanced civilizations. How had this come to be in such remote places and in the face of such challenging environments? They, as well as many early archaeologists centuries later (and a few today), believed that the inspiration for the great Andean civilizations must have come from elsewhere. These writers, the so-called diffusionists, argued that civilization’s core values originated in one or two central locations, often the ancient Middle East, and thereafter were dispersed around the globe. Because the debate between the diffusionists and the isolationists, who argue that the world’s great civilizations emerged independently, still has currency today, the topic merits further discussion.

Diffusionists tend to get more press because they swim against the tide of near consensus among professional archaeologists. One of the most famous diffusionists, Thor Heyerdahl, penned a best-seller promoting the idea that early Egyptian technology was sufficiently sophisticated for the construction of reed crafts capable of plying the Atlantic (as Heyerdahl himself did in the 1950s), bringing to indigenous innocents concepts such as monumental architecture, hierarchical societies, and the Sun God. For years, Ecuadorian archaeologists believed that their earliest civilization, Valdivia, had been profoundly influenced by Japanese voyagers who settled on the coast, because of marked resemblances between Japanese and Valdivian pottery and stone figures. Erich von Däniken outraged professional archaeologists with his claim that visitors from outer space had influenced indigenous peoples. He argued that from afar some of the Nazca figures from southern Peru resembled spacemen in helmets, while the parallel lines extending across the Nazca Desert had served as runways for spacecraft. Although recent archaeological research has diminished the credibility of these three diffusionist claims by demonstrating that the great Andean civilizations had local roots, the fourth diffusionist argument has proved the most durable.

Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just after the time of contact and conquest, Christian missionaries and other observers noted surprisingly familiar practices in indigenous religion. An unseen omniscient creator god, the practice of pilgrimage, widespread use of cross-like symbols, and a number of other parallels to Christian practices, including oral confession, convinced these early friars that Saint Thomas (the wandering apostle) or one of the other disciples must have proselytized in the Andes. The missionaries believed that over time, the omnipresent devil had perverted and twisted Christian doctrine among the innocent Andean peoples to such a degree that Christianization needed to begin all over again. (More will be said about the battle for souls in chapter 6.) In the minds of these missionaries, the diffusion of the rudiments of Christianity proved that the civilizing influence in the Americas had come from elsewhere. At its heart, the diffusionist theories are fundamentally racist, arguing that Native Americans lacked the intelligence to create their own culture absent external influences.

Figure 1.

Nazca lines: landing runways for spacecraft? Columbus Memorial Library of the Organization of American States, Washington, D.C. (hereafter CML)

By way of contrast, isolationists contend that civilization in the Andes evolved independent of external influences, just as it did in India, China, and Mesoamerica. For the isolationists, great ideas such as monumental architecture, a supreme being, and hierarchical political organizations are natural and universal responses to environmental stimuli. The isolationists further argue that from the rudimentary hunter-gatherer societies that crossed the Bering Strait, human instincts drove men and women to strive for a more comfortable and secure existence; hence irrigation and land-use systems came into being. When populations grew, humans naturally created more complex forms of social organizations. No longer did everybody need to perform identical tasks. As societies grew in size, powerful leaders emerged to redistribute goods and labor. As in other ancient civilizations lacking scientific explanations for natural phenomena, the Andean people turned to religious beliefs. Today, almost all archaeologists agree with the isolationist school, especially as each year they uncover more evidence about the progression of these civilizations from the hunter-gatherers, proving that the highly sophisticated Andean world matured independent of external influences.

From Hunter-Gatherers to Maritime Civilizations

As previously noted, the earliest settlers in the Americas wandered southward, pursuing large game, and eventually arrived in the Andes. Living in small bands, they divided responsibilities along gender lines. While the men hunted, women gathered plants and seeds, raised the children, tended the fire, made the clothes, cooked, cleaned, and did other assorted chores. According to some scholars, women secured more calories for the group than men did hunting. The earliest universally accepted date for a hunter-gatherer settlement in the Andes is at Monte Verde, Chile, around 9000 BCE, but periodically, new discoveries push the time frame even further into the past. Presumably, similar societies existed all over the Andes, with each group displaying some individuality, particularly in the way they fashioned their tools and weapons. For the most part, these groups lived at lower elevations, where greater varieties of game flourished. Even at Monte Verde, groups had begun to domesticate some plants to supplement their diets. As these groups grew larger and game grew scarcer, highland groups took the risk of becoming increasingly reliant on agriculture and domesticated animals like the llama (for food and transporting goods) and the alpaca (for wool), enabling them to become fully sedentary around 1800 BCE or later.

Traditionally, domesticating animals and wild plants has been thought to be the key that unlocked a brighter future for hunter-gatherers. Archaeologists working in the ancient Near East uncovered what they regarded as a universal pattern of human development: the agricultural revolution provided the security that allowed for a sedentary lifestyle and created the surpluses that freed select individuals from the drudgery of food production. While some of these liberated individuals became skilled craftsmen, others led their society, while still others ministered to its spiritual needs. Eventually, advanced polities emerged. But the Andean world discredited the universality of this hypothesis. Along Peru’s southern coast and the north coast of Chile, sophisticated societies emerged around roughly 5000 BCE in an atypical manner. Because the cold Humboldt Current running close to the coast of Peru hosts one of the world’s richest fishing grounds, sedentary groups of people could live almost exclusively and quite healthily on maritime resources. In fact, early coastal agriculture centered on the production of cotton, used for nets to capture the ubiquitous anchovy, and reeds for the construction of boats. People’s physical stature increased, and this healthy food made for strong bones and teeth.

As the maritime societies grew in size, they expressed their appreciation for the gods’ bounty by constructing temples. To do so required the development of a system of shared leadership that could organize and direct manual laborers, whose basic task was to fill woven bags with stone and dirt and pile them one atop the other in predetermined shapes. Presumably, such activity was accomplished as a result of the cargo system, a communal labor arrangement still in use throughout the region to the present day. Traditionally, Andean societies had two cargo systems: one for political leadership and the other for overseeing religious activities. Communities chose village elders for the two leadership posts annually, rotating the responsibilities among the leading men over time, thereby purposefully eliminating hereditary leadership roles. The cargo system required families to participate equally. Remarkably, there is evidence of monumental architecture, especially platform mounds, created under the cargo system in nearly egalitarian fishing communities up and down the Peruvian coast, with the earliest such settlement at Paloma around 4500 BCE.

Over time, the fisher-folk began exchanging maritime products for agricultural foodstuffs grown in the sierra, both to meet the needs of an expanding population and to provide a more varied diet (after all, how long can one enjoy eating nothing but anchovies three times a day?). In addition, merchants from these fishing communities began trading for Ecuadorian Spondylus shells, which became the jewelry that adorned high-status individuals as a more differentiated class structure slowly emerged. In Ecuador, traders from regional kingdoms offered these purple-colored, deepwater shells in exchange for a variety of goods. Around 1800 BCE, parts of the Peruvian coastal populations began to move inland and cluster along the narrow river valleys that run from the sierra to coastal Peru, and to cultivate crops full time. With increasing populations, these groups could mobilize a labor force that would dramatically increase the quantity of arable land surface through irrigation. In coastal Ecuador, with its more benevolent climate, people turned to agriculture even sooner. As early as 4000 BCE, the previously mentioned sophisticated culture at Valdivia enjoyed a mixed diet of agriculture and maritime products, made ceramics, and constructed large temples.

Figure 2.

Traditional reed fishing boat still used on Peru’s coast, author’s photo

Like human beings, plant species have difficulty surviving at some altitudes while thriving at others. To make the mountainous landscape productive, farmers learned to pursue different activities at different altitudes in a system known as verticality. In the windswept paramo (the Ecuadorian term) and puna (the Peruvian and Bolivian term) above twelve thousand feet, herds of camelids (llamas and alpacas) thrived. At a slightly lower level, farmers could grow crops like quinoa, a nutritious grain that makes an excellent fortified soup, and potatoes. Below nine thousand feet, the staple of the Americas, maize (corn), flourished, and at still lower levels one could raise beans, squash, aji (chili peppers), and coca. To take advantage of the system, communities habitually sent members as colonists to different altitudes to plant and tend different crops or herd camelids. Not only did this arrangement provide the village with a balanced diet, but it also protected them from famine in the event that one of the crops failed. The colonizers who farmed elsewhere retained their rights in their home communities and were viewed as vital contributors to the general well-being.

As populations increased, these societies needed to produce more food. Larger populations also facilitated corporate (community) labor on common, beneficial enterprises, such as irrigation systems. Both on the Peruvian coast and in the sierra, fast-moving streams made irrigation canals an absolute necessity so that water could be captured to irrigate potentially fertile lands nearby. Communities needed plentiful workers not only to construct such irrigation systems but also to maintain them. The annual snow melts caused floods and rapid runoff, clogging ditches with mud and hindering the dispersal of the water in drier moments. Thus, intensive agriculture required constant communal labor. Nevertheless, agriculture that took advantage of verticality offered a more secure life than hunting and gathering. Archaeologists often date the completed transition to agriculture at around 1800 BCE, when ceramics used for storage and cooking came into widespread use. With the coming of the ceramic era, the indigenous people of the Andes could create increasingly complex societies.

Implicit in the widespread reliance on agriculture is the notion that these societies encouraged further specialization of tasks, which caused additional modifications of the basic Andean social entity, the ayllu. The ayllu, a kinship unit, resulted from the understanding that the entire clan descended from two individuals who had lived in the distant past. The ayllu divided itself into two moieties called the hanan and hurin, one descended from the male ancestor and the other from the female, with the former representing herders and the latter agriculturalists. In an era when people seldom moved from their birthplace, one naturally chose a marriage partner from among neighbors, in this case a member of the other moiety. Consequently, an individual would likely have many relatives within the scattered community: cousins, uncles, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces, all of whom could be counted on to contribute to necessary labor. To make verticality successful, some ayllu members labored at different altitudes, where they could help balance the community’s dietary needs through an arrangement called reciprocity. Reciprocity within the community also required an equal exchange of goods and labor. To use an example from U.S. frontier society, if the community helped one farmer to build a barn, that farmer would be expected to labor on a neighbor’s barn at some later date. Ayllus redistributed the use of their communally held property on an annual basis, thereby providing for needs caused by population shifts within families. Without a doubt, the ayllu lay (and continues to do so today) at the heart of the community, both for civic and religious purposes.

Figure 3.

Sacred Mount Illimani in Bolivia, Nettie Lee Benson Collection, University of Texas–Austin (hereafter Benson)

Reciprocity also required a contribution of labor for the greater good of the community. In addition to laboring on irrigation canals, members of ayllus worked on religious monuments. In these early societies, religion played a powerful role, answering questions about the mysteries of the universe and ultimately providing a rationale for growing social distinctions. Like people around the globe, the Andeans wanted to celebrate their relationship to their many gods, and so they built ceremonial sites for worship. During the ceramic era, these societies created larger examples of monumental architecture, culminating in the U-shaped platform. The U shape of these platforms suggests that the structure’s open end could channel the spiritual powers flowing from an object worthy of veneration, usually a mountain called an apu, a term that may also refer to the spirit that inhabits the mountain. In any event, these U-shaped platforms dominated large Peruvian sites such as Sechín and El Paraíso that flourished before 1000 BCE.

Conclusion

Physical geography, particularly in the ancient world, often shaped human history. Nowhere is this generalization more accurate than in the Andean nations under consideration in this text. To complicate matters further, each of the three different topographies (coast, highland, and jungle) required different responses to the environmental challenges they posed. Especially with regard to the first two regions, ancient Andean peoples responded with remarkably practical insights. For example, early inhabitants of the Peruvian coast chose to organize a sophisticated society around fishing and used products they grew to reap the riches of the Humboldt Current. Elsewhere, early Andean folk recognized that controlling the flow of water and fashioning their agriculture to different altitudes provided the keys to a viable and productive agropastoral civilization, and so they developed complex irrigation systems and unlocked the secrets of verticality. These societies improved their prospects by sending ayllu clan members to raise crops at different altitudes, thereby securing a more varied diet. Herding wool-bearing animals high in the mountains provided meat, wool, and beasts of burden.

As these societies grew in size and complexity, they developed additional principles that have come to serve as foundations of Andean society. The concept of reciprocity functioned both in the simplest social circumstance, where it meant helping neighbors with tasks, and in the most complex, where it meant providing labor to the larger political system in exchange for protection and spiritual intervention with the gods. The early cargo system expressed the need for all members of society to contribute to the well-being of the community by participating in local projects such as festivals, or by constructing and maintaining irrigation canals. Whether constructed as platform mounds or U-shaped temples, religious monumental architecture invoked the spiritual powers of the breathtaking Andean landscape. Although these achievements often astonish modern observers, the Andean peoples devised these accomplishments absent influence from any other civilization. Remarkably, people throughout the region shared similar values and beliefs. Such principles ultimately led to increasingly sophisticated cultures that occupied larger portions of territory, as the next chapter will demonstrate.

Suggested Readings

Dillehay, Tom D. Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Grieder, Terence, et al. La Galgada, Peru: A Preceramic Culture in Transition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

Heyerdahl, Thor. The Ra Expedition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.

Lynch, Thomas F. Guitarrero Cave: Early Man in the Andes. New York: Academic Press, 1980.

Meggers, Betty J. Ecuador. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966.

Moseley, Michael E. The Incas and Their Ancestors: The Archeology of Peru. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

———. The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings Publications, 1975.

Poindexter, Miles. The Ayar Incas. New York: Horace Liveright, 1930.

Posnansky, Arthur. Tihuanacu: The Cradle of American Man. New York: J. J. Augustin, 1945.

Quilter, Jeffrey. Life and Death at Paloma: Society and Mortuary Practices in a Preceramic Peruvian Village. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1984.

Rick, John W. Prehistoric Hunters of the High Andes. New York: Academic Press, 1980.

Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? New York: Putnam, 1969.

Von Hagen, Adrianna, and Craig Morris. The Cities of the Ancient Andes. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

Map 2.

Principal pre-Hispanic civilizations, WSU Graphics

CHAPTER 2

Before the Inka, 800 BCE to 1400 CE

TIMELINE

DURING THE APPROXIMATELY TWENTY-TWO HUNDRED YEARS BETWEEN the beginning of the Early Horizon and the ascent of the Inka, several civilizations fashioned lasting cultural, religious, and political patterns that in their general outlines have persisted to the very present. The purpose of this short survey is to focus on the durable accomplishments and technological advancements that marked the most important of these pre-Inka civilizations. Archaeologists have created a chronology for the south Andes (Peru and Bolivia) around moments when a particular idea or belief system unified much of the Andean region within a horizon, in contrast to the moments in between horizons, called intermediate periods. Of course, none of the civilizations discussed in this chapter fit neatly into a single time period; often their influence extended further chronologically in both directions. Similarly, readers should be aware that many other highly advanced cultures that will not be discussed in this chapter existed between 800 BCE and the rise of the Inka around 1400 CE, many of which have been the subject of recent archaeological digs.

Particularly for the earliest of these societies, religion played a paramount role in daily life, just as it had for the earlier inhabitants of the region. Given the harsh landscape, it is not surprising that natural forces, particularly those that provided sustenance for life, took on supernatural powers. Andean people saw everywhere in their sacred landscape evidence of the workings of supernatural forces. Surely the towering mountains, which delivered streams of fresh water to irrigate their otherwise parched crops, were home to apus, or mountain spirits. Smaller objects that were associated with some extraordinary event or experience or that were unusual in shape, or locations that were the resting place of important ancestors, became deified as huacas. For the Andean people, the gods played a role in daily life and, as stern taskmasters, deserved appropriate veneration. Similarly, the Andean people believed that their ancestors, often preserved as mummies, served as intermediaries between this world and that of the gods. Of course, each civilization studied in this chapter possessed their own unique beliefs, but for the most part they embraced the general concepts described above.

The Early Horizon: 800–200 BCE

Founded around 800 BCE in northern Peru on the eastern slope of the cordillera at the confluence of two rivers (a propitious location for Andeans), Chavín de Huantar, the community that was the spiritual center of the Early Horizon, is best known as a sacred ceremonial site. Its supreme deity, the Staff God, perhaps identifiable as the creator god, served as the chief religious icon for all the Peruvian Andes and perhaps beyond during the Early Horizon. The Staff God, who is portrayed holding a Spondylus shell (a bivalve and also the female symbol) in his left hand and a strombus shell (a conch variety and the male symbol) in his right, wielded the authority to maintain social harmony and promote the Andean ideal of gender complementarity, in which men and women shared responsibilities for important activities such as agriculture. In addition to the potency of the Staff God, no doubt Chavín de Huantar appealed broadly to Andeans because its pantheon of gods represented all three of Peru’s geographical regions: jaguars and anacondas from the jungle, condors from the highlands, and fish from the coast.

Pilgrims, usually community representatives who gained prestige by making the journey, traveled to Chavín de Huantar from all over the Andes to witness mysterious rituals. Under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, essentially mescaline derived from the San Pedro cactus, priests claimed that they could transform themselves from human beings into jaguars, in which guise they could visit the spirit world before returning to human form again. Stone sculptures protruding from the walls of the Old Temple at Chavín de Huantar portrayed step-by-step the priests’