Seventy kilometres south of the Rio Mala lies the river valley of Cañete, running down to the coast at the modern town of the same Spanish name. The river is one of the largest on the central coast and comes from Ticllacocha, 220 kilometres inland in the land of the Yauyos near Tanta, at 4600m metres above sea level. I had recently heard of the “discovery” of a petroglyph close to the town Lunahuana, and seen just one image from the rock, something like a rodent or a squirrel. Like the bird images of Cochineros, it was beautiful and highly stylised, as if copied from a woven textile or a ceramic.
The major town is located in the centre of a broad fertile plain irrigated with water from two river valleys. It is sufficiently large that I had to take a minivan from the bus station on the coastal road to the other side of town, twenty minutes side winding through every back street district, to Nuevo Imperial, the junction for traffic up the valley. Forty minutes later, I climbed off the bus to be greeted by a line of youngsters waving placards at me and shouting “canotaje!”.
The town of Lunahuana is more of a village, four blocks wide by three blocks long. Many former houses still lie in ruins after the earthquake of 2007. It stands on the left bank of the river, high above the irrigated fields. Down by the river bank, in the summer, inflatable rafts come in one after another, every minute, after shooting the rapids. White water rafting, or canotaje, is one of the attractions of the town that brings daytrippers or weekenders from Lima. It also offers ziplining, across the foaming river and back, quad biking and horse riding up the valley, and rapelling. You can reach Lunahuana in two or three hours with your own car. Some time after 9, the tour agencies open their doors, start up their big screen promotional videos, and stand in the street with hand made signs ready for the tourists.
I had already passed several interesting sites in the bus from Canete. On a large hillside north of the road, marking the border between the broad irrigated coastal lands and the narrow river valley above, was a fortress town with multiple walls, the Ungara fortress. Further up the valley, there were intermittent signs of a historic road clinging to the hillside. And then the bus swings past Incahuasi, a large complex of adobe buildings with obviously Inca characteristics looking down on the road below Lunahuana.
At the northern edge of the valley there is a 150 hectares hillside settlement called Cerro de Oro, the Hill of Gold, which was occupied for 1600 years until the Spanish came. Giant embankments stand close to the hill, broad enough for modern farm roads that run along the top, suggesting defensive fortifications. A little to the south is the temple complex of Vilcahuasi, “place of the holy”, an unexcavated group of up to twenty platform mounds. Close by the beach at Cerro Azul, the Blue Hill, is a fortress, described by Pedro de Cieza as”…the most beautful and ornate citadel to be found in the whole kingdom of Peru, set upon great square blocks of stone, and with very fine gates and entranceways…from the top of this royal edifice a stone stairway descends to the sea.” Little remains. But the fortress was a post conquest Inca addition to large complex of ceremonial and administrative buliding belonging to the Guarco who occupied this land.
The Lunahuana road stands high above the river and couples lean on the white wall watching the zipliners take off from a wooden deck built out over the drop. Four flights of steps zigzag down to the river bank below the deck. Further down the road was a freshly painted signpost announcing the graven stone. Below the signpost a field of maize stretched to the river, and the upper surface of a boulder could be seen rising above the two metre stalks.
A steep footpath down a dusty slope of scree crosses an upper irrigation channel and heads down the side of the field. The field is a series of terraces held up by andennes, ancient stone walls two metres high and constructed of river pebbles. On the edge of the third andenne was the large river-smoothed rock, one side level on the top of the wall and the other dropping steeply to the lower level. Like the stones in Cochineros, it was a hard and grey, polished smooth in wavelike contours by the historic scouring of the river flood waters, though its upper surface now stood three metres or more above the highest level of the current river.
The upstream face, crossed by veins and cracks, is sloping, so that from the north, you can clamber up the stone to its peak, where drops away steeply on the other three sides. The eastern side, away from the river, has complex geometric patterns, zig zag spirals, llamas, but the southern and Western side are free of images, apart from a couple of modern scrawled graffitis. The real excitement is on the upper face, the ramp, which is filled with imagery which becomes more complex as it reaches the top. Like the Pariacaca stone, there are panels facing the river, descending steeply above a drop of several metres, that are almost impossible to see clearly without climbing equipment. And here are some of the most beautiful images – Chimu birds, Chancay birds, stylistically related to the three fabulous birds of Cochineros, but more mundane. They are familiar from textile patterns, one of the commonest of all images, and yet of the more than twenty bird images on the rokc, no two are alike. This is a an exercise in imagination where the Tumis of Cochineros were, largely an exercise in repetition. And there is much more than just the birds.
Peruvian archaeologists have recently discovered revealing Spanish colonial documents housed in Madrid, such as records of court hearings in the early years after the invasion. In order to lay claim to land or water rights, the native peoples presented their ethnic and territorial histories before the courts, revealing a great deal about their movements and interrelations, before and during the Inca period. These suggest that there were two groups in the Cañete valley prior to the Inca invasions. The Guarco occupied the coastal end of the valley, farmed the fertile lands there intensively with a sophisticated network of canals, and also had communities of fishermen. The Runahuanac were located higher up the valley from 400 to 1000 metres above sea level. Inca military conquest of the area of the coast close to Lima began around 1470, just 50 years before the Spanish invasion. It seems that the upper valley, and the Runahuanac, were conquered first.
The valley of Cañete is briefly and inconsistently mentioned in the writings of the early chroniclers. According to Garcilaso de la Vega, the Inca forces, a few years after overcoming the Chincha to the south, returned with fresh troops to conquer “the beautiful valley of Runahuanac” as well as the adjoining Huarcu.
The valley at that time “…was very populous, as was also the Huarcu valley that prolongs it toward the north; indeed there were, at that time, thirty thousand inhabitants in this region which, today, is nothing but desert.”
These and the Mala and Chilca valleys further north “…were united under the authority of a lord named Chuqimancu…(who) did not put up as great a resistance as be might have, in the idea that he would do better to attack the imperial forces further down in the Huarcu valley. He had cause to rue this decision for, less than a month later, the Incas, having conquered the whole beautiful Runahuanac valley, came and attacked him in Huarcu, where the fighting became exceedingly cruel.”
The fighting lasted eight months and the Incas had to renew their forces three or four times, says Garcilaso.
The Spaniard Pedro de Cieza de Leon tells how the Inca forces suffered under the hot coastal sun and so withdrew back to Cusco after the first season of fighting, and the neighbouring peoples who had previously submitted to the Inca began to rebel. So in a second campaign Tupac Inca Yupanqui built en emblematic New Cusco at “…the head of the valley of Huarco, on the slopes of the Sierra”.
This is assumed to be the site of Incahuasi, seven kilometres downstream from the town of Lunahuana and 18 kilometres up from The Ungara fortress. It was apparently intended to illustrate the Inca domination of the area and provide a long term base for their army, and there are still visible 248 square storage rooms, neatly arranged around a drying yard.
For three years, according to Pedro Cieza’s informants, the struggle continued, with Topac Inca returning to Cusco each summer and returning with fresh troops in the autumn. Finally the Huarcos accepted a peace treaty and left the fortress. According to some reports, they had invited the Inca to join them in an annual fishing festival. The Inca ordered his troops to kill them all.