Separate chieftaincies controlled the coast of Peru in the Late Intermediate period, from 1000 to 1500 AD. We have already seen in Lima how the temple mounds and cities of the Lima people, 1500 years before the present, were later used by the Wari 3oo years later. After the Wari, and for five hundred years of so before the coming of the Inca, different regions had their own ceramics and textiles, though there were cross links and similarities. In the central coast there were the Chancay, north of Lima, and to the south there were, successively, the Collique, the Ychsma, Chilca, Huarco, and Chincha peoples and their customs.
The Huarochiri Manuscript, as we have seen, tells us the mythical history of a region between the coast and the Sierra, located in the present day provinces of Huarochiri and Yauyos. It is focused on the lives and rituals of the present day inhabitants, placed in the context of their predecessors, the founding fathers, their children and the coming of the Inca and the Spanish. It is essentially the tale of the arrival, celebrations, rituals and eventual destruction of the children of Paria Caca, who dwells amongst the snow capped peaks to the East.
Paria Caca drove out Huallallo Caruincho, though he in turn had replaced huacas named Yana Ñamca and Tata Ñamca. There was, too, an earlier, more powerful huaca, Cuni Raya, who “…fashioned all the villages. Just by speaking he made the fields, and finished the terraces with walls of fine masonry. As for the irrigation canals, he channelled them out from their sources…” . This is also then a story of migration, conflict, and transition.
Cuni Raya seems to have close links with mythical sites round Pachacamac, the temple beside the Pacific used successively by the Lima, the Wari, the Ychsma and the Inca, which was an oracle centre two thousand years ago. This is a long and complex history.
And then the Manuscript tells us how the people of Paria Caca took control of the mountain heights, a mythical event in the distant past for the writers of 1608.
“Huallallo Caruincho got inside the cliff and hid there. Paria Caca, in the form of lightning, blasted it again and again. He and his five brothers shot lighning bolts so violently the almost demolished that rocky mountain, and from there they again forced Huallallo Caruincho to flee…..”
“Huallallo Caruincho had no power left and so he fled towards the Anti [southern] lowlands…Paria Caca left one of his brothers, the one named Paria Carco, at the pass into the tropical Antis “Watch out in case he returns!” he said. Paria Carco remains there today in the form of a heavily snow-capped peak.”
Having driven the away the monster, Paria Caca and his brothers settled below the snowy peaks.
“After he finished his conquest, they say, he returned with his other brothers to Paria Caca mountain…But they say Paria Caca himself lived a little further down, inside a cliff. Paria Caca and his brothers entered this crag and made it their home, saying “Here I shall dwell. From this place you must worship me. “
It was his sons who extended their territory towards the lowlands.
“These people [Paria Caca’s children]…since they were all brothers to each other, travelled into battle as one. Because he was the oldest of the all, the one called Choc Payco travelled in high honour on a litter. But Tutay Quiri was the strongest, excelling beyond all the others.”
“Planting his staff as a curse on the Yunca, and saying…”The Yunca will extend to this district”, he set it in place. (That mountain where he planted his staff is now called Unca Tupi Capari Caya).
“His other brothers went ahead, climbing up the old road by which we go from Tupi Cocha…When they heard someone say “Tutay Quiri has already finished conquering everything:” they turned back, from the spot where we can see to the outskirts of Limac [Lima].”
“So they descended through the Huaro Cheri district toward the vicinity of Lower Caranco. Once more it was Tutay Quiri who led the way on the descent. One of Chuqi Suso’s sisters waited for him in her field thinking to beguile him by showing off her private parts and her breasts.”
“Rest a while, sir; have a little sip of this maize beer and a taste of this ticti,” she said.”
“At that moment, in that way, he fell behind….His other brothers likewise stayed behind, carrying the conquest only as far as the place called Pacha Marca in Lower Allauca.”
“If this wonan had not beguiled them, the Huaro Cheri and Quinti fields would now reach as far as Lower Caranco and Chilca.”
Huarochiri historian Aroldo Eguavil says that before the coming of the Inca, the highlands around Pariacaca were divided into two, Lurin and Hunan Yauyos. This division, sometimes translated as Upper and Lower, was a feature of Inca settlements, as Garcilaso de la Vega struggles to explain, in reference to Cusco.
“Hanan Cuzco was founded by our king and Hurin Cuzco by our queen, and that is why the two parts were given these names, without the inhabitants of one possessing superiority over the other…there existed only one difference between them…that the inhabitants of Upper Cuzco were to be considered as the elder, and those of Lower Cuzco as the younger brothers…All the cities and the villages in the (Inca) empire were subsequently divided in this way into upper and lower lineages, and upper and lower districts.”
Like so many other aspects of Andean life, this is deeper and older than the Inca. So called-dualism is evident at Chavin de Huantar, nearly 3000 year BP, at Cardal, the 3300 year old U-shaped mound up the Lurin valley from Pachacamac, close to the Pan d’Azucar hill and the Fountain of Eternal Youth at its foot, and at the Highland site of Kotosh which dates to five hundred years earlier.
Within the region, the populace was reckoned in huarangas of a thousand families or dwellings, of which Eguavil deduces there were 11 in Lurin Yauyos. Each of these consisted of about twenty Ayllus in five or six towns and villages. An Ayllu was (and is today) an extended family group. A further twenty huarangas occupied the valley of Cañete and other rivers flowing into it. This would suggest a population of 30,000 households throughout Yauyos.
In 1534 Francisco Pizarro seized the encomienda of Yauyos and gave it to his Spanish colleagues Hernando de Soto, Hernando Ponce de Lion, and Diego de Aguero. It was divided into five. This division was later the basis of the Corregimiento of Diego Dávila Briceño. During his forty years there, thirteen of them as Corregidor, more than two hundred original settlements were regrouped into just 39 Spanish style towns.
Four parishes, each with its curate, were created in Yauyos as centres of colonial religious administration. People from Huarochiri were sent to Lima as forced labour to work on the building of the new city of Lima. During this time the invaders implemented policies, more political than religious or economic, to systematically destroy the culture of the Yauyiños. On the point of discovering the Americas, the Spanish had just driven the moors from their lands after a crusade of centuries: the spirit of this holy war against the heathen was brought to the new territories.
This stage has been called by some Peruvian historians, almost all of whom come from the dominant Spanish lineage of inherited power, one of transition, sincretisation, mixing. But it was a domination and persecution of the native peoples, with appalling acts, led by the church and state, so that a working male population of fifteen thousand men in Huarochiri at the coming of the Spanish was reduced to a mere five hundred.
In 2018 the publicity arm of Congress announced 12th October as the Dia de la Raza, Race day or Day of Ethnicity.
“ In this date we recall the discovery of America on 12 October 1492. And we commemorate the birth of a new cultural identity as a consequence of the fusion of the indigenous people with the Spaniards.”
And a journalist replies on Twitter, “Fusion? For god’s sake study your history. What happened was an invasion and pillage. A flattening of our native peoples and a spoiling of their culture and identity. What ignorance, demonstrated once again, we have in congress.”
Walking ten kilometres back from the stones past the iron bridge I pass 70 modern houses, 40 of them in and around La Capilla, the limit of the newly tarred road. Above, the road is still good gravel, with trucks and lorries collecting the boxes of apples, and farmers and their wives and children heading up by motorbike to work on their chacras, the apple and pear orchards that now form the dominant agriculture of the valley. Many of the buildings are simply used for storing tools, for daytime shade for the workers, or for occasional overnights at the busiest periods. They are farm buildings more than permanent residences. The workers and owners live lower down the valley, in Mala or San Antonio, where they have intermittent provision of running water, electricity, cellphone coverage, and access to shops.
Walking for two hours down from the piedras I pass not a single shop. One or two places display faded signs offering to sell water, marcianos, gaseosas. They are deserted.
But this same valley is full of dead villages, their walled houses, their public squares, and above all their burial niches, their corpses, their bones and skulls, scattered on the ground.
The farmland is largely between the road and the river. On the uphill side of the road, by contrast, I pass five villages, ancient, ruined, each with dozens or hundreds of houses. There was a substantial village every 2 kilometres along the length of the valley.
Looking upriver from the stones, there is a shoulder of hillside from the east which hides a settlement over the far side, Huancani. An ancient pathway heads up the dry valley.
A few kilometres down river from the stones are the remains of a village that runs down to the road. It has been said to be an Inca dominated site, because of its large open area, a Kalanka, and the impressive stone roofed buildings to one side. Here as at most such sites, I walk past holes filled with bones. The ground is scattered with fragments of burial cloths, signs of the historic raiding for treasures. Many of the burials seem to have been under the floors of the buildings, in pits lined with stone and covered over with flat stones.
The next deserted village, Coyahuasi, is at the junction with a dry river valley, down which have flowed, at one time or another, torrents of water carving out a deep sandy ravine. There have also been huaicos, fast moving slurries of mud, rocks and water. Here a giant wall of slurry remains, solidified, like a rough skinned yellow snake down the centre of the valley, as high as a house and as broad as a highway.
Towards the road, a new bridge has been built to take it over the dry river and the road cuts through the end of the village, taking the corner of a house and leaving a great island of untouched land between the route of the old road, and that of the new.
This island was a burial area, and running through it close to the old surface, but now just above my eye level as I view it from the road, is a line of cloth, rope, human bones, and hair. Much has dropped towards the roadway, and here I see fragments of cloth, whole swathes of cloth, vegetable matter, fragments of coloured yarns of red and yellow. Part of a leather bag, soft and flexible, lies in the road, another piece hangs out from the strata above.
Across the road, two burial niches, neat cubes of mortared stone roofed with cane and clay and another stone layer, have been undermined. Bones lie on the road. A skull remains in one niche, thigh bones protrude from the dirt. Winding cloths fall down the incline. When I came here with Alla she found a simple scallop shell, pierced with a hole so that it could be mounted on a thong to hang as a pendant. Plaits of fibre, beginning broad and thinning to a thin end, lie at the side. These were the binding cords to secure the burial cloths round the corpse. A tiny jawbone and part of the skull are also in the niche, a child burial.
A further hour downriver, where the tarmac road ends, is the settlement of La Capilla, with restaurants by the river and an ancient road climbing up the opposite hillside.
La Capilla itself, the little chapel, is an overhanging rock face like dripping wax where a catholic shrine has been created, the rock rubbed down and painted blue, electric sockets built in, and three Peruvian saints painted in oils on the rock.
Across the river a farmer is extending his orchard into the edge of a pre-Inca site, at the foot of the ancient roadway as it descends to the level of the river. Four stones stand at the entrance, marked with cupules, cup marks, like a counting system, facing South. A fifth stone, directly in view of the first four, faces the river, and is marked with seven finely ground round holes. Further in against the hillside there is a dry ravine, which appears to have been a quarry of a fine black stone.
Where the farmer has dug his holes and planted his apple saplings, moving aside rocks and digging under, he has broken open niches where were interred mummies wrapped in cloth, and the bones, the cloth fragments litter the ground. Ceramic fragments are visible, together with simple vessels made of hollowed out calabazas, gourds.
The ruins of eight major settlements have been identified in the middle part of the valley – from Huayinta Alto and Bajo and Checa Alto and Bajo, to Limon Grande, Minay, Huancani and Coyahuasi – all above La Capilla, where now are mostly isolated houses. The modern settlement of Checa has a nucleus of perhaps twenty houses, whilst the ruins of Checa Alto standing on a shoulder above had upwards of one hundred. Hauyinta was a similar size, where there is now no modern town. La Vuelta and its cemetery or burial area approaches the size of modern day Calango.
It is evident on the ground that the population of this once culturally rich and thriving valley has been literally decimated – cut to a tenth of its size. Those numbers agree with estimates of historians who point to disease, warfare and colonial exploitation, which turned an economically productive valley into a wasteland populated by empty ruins within one hundred years of the invasion.
The initial invasion, the civil wars, the brutality of the invaders who believed they had a mandate from god to exploit and abuse the pagans, the horrors of forced labour in the mines, all played their part in the drastic decline in the populations, leading to today’s valleys filled with ruined towns and ransacked graveyards,with their staring skulls and scattered bones. But the most deadly gift of the Spanish was most probably disease.
The Inca king, and his eldest son and expected heir, both died of an unknown disease in 1528. Smallpox may have been introduced to the country around 1524. This was just when Pizarro and his gang of raiders first landed in Northern Peru, scouting the territory, and seizing natives before returning to Panama to prepare an invasion force.
When they came back in 1532, with 168 men and 62 horses, they discovered the land was devastated by disease and in a state of open warfare between two Inca princes whose father had split the growing empire between them.
What is well documented is a smallpox epidemic in the Spanish colonies of Hispaniola (Haiti) six years earlier. According to 19th century Spanish historian Ovieto who lived many years in Haiti, “there occurred [in 1518] an epidemic of smallpox so virulent that it left Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba desolated of indians.” The island of Hispaniola was managed for the Spanish king by a religious order, the Hieronymite Fathers, who wrote to Spain in January 1519 to say that 30% of the indians had died (a few Spanish had been slightly afflicted though none had died) and the disease had spread to Puerto Rico.
In the central Andes, this first smallpox epidemic is thought to have killed 40% of the population. An outbreak of measles later took 30% of those who were left. At the end of the century, from 1585 to 1591, the two diseases ravaged again taking from 30% to 60% of the population. Over 90% of the population was killed by diseases to which they had little resistance, in 70 years.
The deaths continue today whenever people who have been living in isolation in the Amazon meet invaders – loggers, gold miners, missionaries or tourists.
In 1604 Damien de Jera, the Protector of the Indians, wrote “the mortality of indians has principally occurred in the valley of Jauja, caused by the work in the shafts…[this valley was] amongst the best populated of Peru… and today … it is destroyed and almost razed and almost without people and the few that are there are so poor….such poverty has been caused by the illnesses and deaths of so many indians, and ransoms to be free of the shafts.”
Buenaventura de Salinas y Cordoba, born in Lima, was vicar of the Franciscan Missionaries. In his “Memories of the History of the New World of Peru” (1630), he wrote
“Aqui dan voces las provincias del Peru antiguamente pobladas de infinitas gentes de indios poderosos, tan ricos, opulentes y llenos de tesoros…y ahora de pobres y asoladas. Aqui lloran lagrimas de sangre y solamente los valles de Jaujal las provincias de Yauyos y muy grande poblaciones, porque se acaban sus indos en la opresion, trabajos and agonias, que pasan porciles, violento no tanto en las minas cuanta en la detencion que les hacen los mineros, y viendo las madres cuan poco ganan sus hijos y los immensos trabajos que padecen hasta llegar a la muerte, los mancan cuando nacen, los hacen corcovados, les sacan los ojos y les entronchan los pies, para que pidan limosnas y queden con estos libres de la servidumbre en que los ponen los que pasan de Europa y otros reynos, puesta la mirada solo en volverse ricos.”
“The provinces of Peru, formerly populated by countless numbers of powerful Indians, once so rich, opulent and full of treasures … and now poor and desolate, are crying out.”
“They cry tears of blood and lament [in] the valleys of Jauja [and] the provinces of Yauyos and in the large towns, because their Indians meet their end in forced and violent oppression, labour and agony… when mothers see how little their children earn and the immense work they suffer until they reach death, they mark them when they are born, they make them hunch-backed, they pull out their eyes and they mangle their feet, so they can ask for alms and remain with their mothers and free from the servitude in which they are put by those who travel from Europe and other kingdoms, looking only to become rich.”
…Go back to 102b – Five Day Fiesta 2……
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