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I head back to Mala, without Alla, hoping to get a better perspective on the stones. From the riverside terrace of La Capilla restaurant, I can look over the balcony at the river below. In late August or September it is a limpid green pool in whose clear waters you can see fish swimming. Raising my eyes to the opposite bank I see a path ascending, crossing an increasingly steep incline, and continuing towards what seems an impassable rock face. This is the ancient trackway that threads up the valley, contouring sheer rocky hillsides, rising and falling.
The modern road runs along the south eastern side of the valley, a little higher than the river, often through orchards and groups of houses. In places an older road can be seen, narrow between stone walls, following a similar path. But the ancient track is on the opposite side of the river, apparently built into the cliff face high above the river. In places the line of stonework is clearly defined, tidy dry stone walling built upon steep rock faces to support the road surface. In other parts it disappears.
There is a finely preserved short section on the left bank of the river, high above the Puente San Juan, facing the ruins of Corre Viento just two kilometres below Calango. It reappears higher up, rising from the remains of a substantial village to 260 metres above the river, then descending down the hillside in a series of zigzags to the river facing present day Calango. There may have been a bridge over the river here – one is shown in a hand drawn map dated 1586.
Certainly the road re-appears on the opposite side of the river five kilometres higher up. At La Capilla it rises from the remains of a settlement, amongst whose walls and stones a piggery now stands. A vineyard is being planted amongst the ruins, and bones, gourds, pieces of cloth and broken ceramics lie scattered amongst the vines. Several of the boulders around are marked with cupules, small round depressions of uncertain purpose, a centimetre or two in diameter and a centimetre deep. One rock has a fan of three lines of cupules, another has four or five on the shoulder of the rock looking across the river, whilst a third laid flat has twenty or thirty round holes.
Walking up the valley upstream from La Capilla on the modern road, I can follow the track of the path on the far side, climbing from the modern bridge, crossing the rocky face of the mountain as a thin line before dropping towards the river again. It appears intermittently, at times clearly visible with foundations of layered stones, then disappearing as it reaches impossible cliffs, or perhaps climbing higher and away from the river to cut across the mountains where the river bends.
Following on Google Earth I see the track climb and then edge round the sheer cliff, only to vanish. There are dozens more paths visible here, following the ridges of the hills on either side of the valley. They head off south and north towards parallel valleys, a network of paths, apparently left by people and their grazing animals, with the particular pattern of multiple tracks contouring along a slope. At times there are also circular enclosures, like corrals for penning animals, sometimes two or three together, where paths join. The road is evident again on the same side of the river, the north and west, approaching Checas, upstream from Cochineros. So it seems likely that it passed by the riverside stones set in level ground.
The track up the valley was probably used to transport goods by trains of llamas, from the coast to the highlands and vice versa. Goods have been moved this way in Peru for thousands of years.
The Incas are frequently credited with creating one of the wonders of the ancient world in the Qhapaq Ñan, the road network stretching 5000 kilometres from present day Colombia to Chile and Argentina, the length of the Inca empire at its height.
A main highway along the Sierra, the highlands, was paralleled by another along the coast of Peru down to Chile, with interconnecting routes down the valleys. The network is said to total 40,000 kilometres of roadway, through coastal deserts, over ravines on rope bridges, up stone stairways over mountain passes at a breathless 5000 metres, across marshes on pontoons, and through humid tropical forests.
But the Incas created their own history, and whether it was stonework, irrigation, metalwork, weaving, or road-building they synthesised or transferred skills across their empire. Their talent was managerial, they made things happen, but it was not all their own invention. The roads are as old as trade.
The chroniclers, such as Garcilaso Inca de la Vega and Pedro Cieza de Leon, are ardent in their praise of the engineering that went into the road network. Garcilaso was an Inca born just 17 years after the Spanish invasion from an Inca princess and a Spanish fighter. He starts his masterwork by describing how his mother’s relatives would visit. “On these occasions, the conversation turned almost invariably to the origin of our kings and to their majesty. It also concerned the grandeur of their empire, their conquests and noble deeds, their government in war and peace.”
So his is not an independent voice, but he is honest about his sources, and his writing runs through with both pride and a sense of loss. “Being but a child, I came and went freely among them, and I listened with the rapt attention with which at this age one listens to fairy tales”.
When he comes to describe the Inca roads, he chooses to quote others. “These two roads constitute such a gigantic achievement, that no single description suffices to describe them.”
Augustin de Zarate describes how Inca Huaina Capac constructed “…a great wide highway, all along the the cordillera. To do this meant razing peaks and crests, or elevating the roads above chasms and valleys, by means of stone walls that sometimes reached fifteen or twenty stades [one stade being two metres]”.
And on the coast “…the indians cleared all…obstacles and succeeded in building a road that was perfectly uniform and continuous, well banked on both sides, and forty feet wide…one had to pass through vast stretches of sand constantly being shifted by the wind…” The indians marked out the road through the sand by poles planted at intervals. “Today most of these poles have disappeared, because the Spaniards used them to make fires, but the roads the indians built across the valleys are still there.”
And Garcilaso can not resist adding his own poignant commentary.
“None of all this has resisted the ravages of time and war, and today almost nothing remains. Along the coast too, the only things left, the merest memories of the great highways of old, are the poles protruding here and there from out the wind-driven sand, to guide the traveller and keep him from losing his way.”
This is wonderful, sonorous stuff, and there are, in places, the tracks of the roads to demonstrate all that was said. But they were of course not all made by the Incas, who only created their empire in the hundred years before the Spanish arrived to destroy it. There were thousands of years of different cultures and peoples, on the coast and in the highlands, before the Inca, each with their own ceramics, architectures, gods and rituals. And the archaeological record – ceramics, textiles, and petroglyphs – shows us that the ideas, the icons and the technologies of these disparate peoples and cultures over five thousand years were spread and shared.
Five thousand years ago, Caral traded not only with coastal fishermen a day’s journey away but also high into the Andes. Further north, and the four thousand year old temple at Ventarron reveals ceremonial offerings including a parrot and a monkey from the humid forest on the Eastern slopes of the Andes, 200 kilometres to the East over 4000 metre mountain passes. Almost three thousand years ago the Chavin style is evident from temples close to Lima on the coast, up to the defining stone temple at Chavin de Huantar, perhaps located here in what is still today a remote valley of the Cordillera Blanca because it straddled one of the simplest routes from the coast to the jungle. The people there ate clams and shellfish from the Pacific. They also reared llamas.
It is clear enough that roads, trading routes and extensive links between coast and highland existed long before the Incas, so the trackway contouring the cliffs of the Mala valley is of indeterminate age. But it was most likely a route for llama trains heading up the valley, two metres wide, and it passed near a group of giant black boulders, smoothed by historic river waters.
There is a ridge of solid ground heading directly north through the northern part of the orchard at Cochineros, used as a footpath today. It passes on the uphill side of the stones and the burial niches and is several metres wide. If it was once a road, its continuation has now been swept away by the erosion of the river just upstream from the stones. A riego or water channel below it is now left hanging over a drop to today`s river channel. It might be possible to see the construction of such a track where the river has cut away its foundations.
Here by the stones, on level ground close to the river, may have been a suitable place to rest and feed the llamas in the afternoon. And here on the rocks are repeated images of llamas or camelids, some individual, other in groups of three of four, many of them with a human figure.
There are more than a hundred llama figures, spread across fifteen stones. There are fourteen lines of llamas, three or four, walking nose to tail. Several are led by a human figure. The camelids are unmistakable, and, many of them, beautifully drawn, though there are different styles of drawing. What is not clear is why they are here and, dare we ask, what do they mean? Perhaps there are clues here to who used the road. Perhaps the road can tell us something about who drew on the stones, and when?
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8th December 2016. Education Minister Jaime Saavedra is called before Congress to answer questioning about his record, prior to a vote on whether to call for his removal.
The night before, Hector Becerril revealed that false email and Whatsapp accounts had been set up in the name of the Educational Infrastructure Programme to mislead regional governors and solicit funds from them.
His information came from an official Education Ministry announcement which also said that they had been alerting regional governors and mayors to the problem for over a year and had recently issued a denuncia penal for those responsible.
One of Jaime Saavedra´s achievements has been the introduction of the PISA test to Peru.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a triennial international survey run by the OECD which aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students from all member countries on the same scale. 72 countries and economies took part in 2015.
Peru joined PISA in 2009 and in a comparison with 65 countries was third from the bottom in reading, third from bottom in mathematics, and and second from bottom, above Kyrgyzstan, in science.
Its scores were 370, 365 and 369 respectively, against OECD averages of 493, 496 and 501.
In 2012, Peru had the worst PISA scores of the 65 countries. The Peru scores in reading maths and science (with OECD mean scores in brackets) were 384 (496), 368 (494) , 373 (501).
In 2015 Peru was placed above Lebanon, Tunisia, Kosovo, Macedonia and the Dominican Republic, with scores of 398 in reading (mean 493), 387 in maths (mean 490) and 397 in science (OECD mean 493). There had been a clear improvement.
In the proceedings in Congress to oust Jaime Saavedra, FP member Segundo Tapia said the only reason that Peru had risen in the PISA rankings was because five new African countries had joined the international tests. These countries, he continued, are Algeria, Macedonia, Panama, Georgia and Moldavia. Another congresista said Jaime Saavedra had paid the OECD to give better results. A third FP member, who sits on the Congressional Education Committee, raised his concern about “a disease called Alzheimers’ which is caused by excessive studying and reading”.
22nd December 2016. The Congress votes to oust Jaame Saavedra with the 70 votes from Fuerza Popular and 10 from Apra, plus three others.
” The Economist” called the move by Fuerza Popular “A small act of national suicide by Peru”.