A health warning; these notes have to be treated with caution as they are based on a three week visit and some reading (The Incas and their Ancestors written by Michael Moseley and published by Thames & Hudson). Also, Peru is divided into three geographic regions, the arid foreshore, the high plateau and the rain forest - my comments are restricted to the first two.
We are used to thinking of the Scottish highlands, the high Alps or the Texas Panhandle as desolate. These are lush compared to the Peruvian foreshore. Nothing grows, nada, zilch - the driest place on earth. The desolation is broken by the occasional oasis fed by a river off the Andean highlands. It is in these oases that the original settlers in about 10,000 BC scratched their living. The river flows are either a trickle or a flood. The rainy season is short, December to April. Drought periods lasted from 900 to 800 BC, 400 to 200 BC, 10 to 300 AD and 1100 to 1450 AD. Annual variations in precipitation arising from El Nino are large. Survival required large irrigation schemes, extensive communal work sharing for construction and maintenance, grain storage technology, and much prayer. (It is now thought that the Nasca Lines are signals to the gods made in the 1100-1450 dry period indicating the traditional water sources and promising enticements for the ending of the drought.) These people learned how to build resilient structures, how to share food when in short supply, and how to live in strong mutually reliant tribal groupings.
They also moved into the mountains where conditions were (and are) further complicated by altitude (Cuzco is at 11,500 ft) and earthquakes (one magnitude 7 episode per decade). They had to learn complicated agriculture (every 100 feet up has a new microclimate; they have 3,000 hybrids of maize) and robust construction (earthquake resistant terracing, houses and grain stores - the Inca walls stand when earthquakes cause the Spanish Churches over them to fall). One of the archaeological sites (Moray) is a pre-Inca agricultural research station based on a 30 metre deep natural sink hole used for the hybridisation of maize - there is a full 15 C temperature difference between the bottom and the top - intermediate terracing allowed for the full range of microclimates for the development of the required hybrids.
All this was pre-Inca. The Incas came late to the party, about 1400 AD, and their genius was administration. Like the Romans, they ruled a vast empire, Columbia to Chile, but without writing or money. They added their administrative structures to the robust cultural norms and strong religious traditions of the subject people - they were the high priests of the Andean population. They built 25,000 miles of roads, thousands of temples and a vast civil service. Everything else was already there. And then the Spaniards ousted the Inca, by a combination of smallpox and inter-Inca strife; they plundered their gold (which was anyway valued only as ornament), installed a new civil service, and planted (literally) the Catholic Church over the Inca Church; but nothing underneath changed.
And it is all still there (excepting the gold). The remains of the temples (hundreds) still stand, the miles (thousands) of irrigation channels and terraces are still maintained, the land is still ploughed by oxen, the crops are still rotated, the people still venerate (we are told) the old gods of the mountains.
The question is how long you will be able to see the old ways and wander among the ruins of the temples. Like our village in Scotland, the inhabitants are made up of children and older people but no teenagers or young marrieds; the young are moving to the towns to live off the tourists and the twentieth century. The visitors are becoming so numerous that the temples will shortly surely need protection and exclusion. It is a bit like Stonehenge; when I was a boy, you could picnic among the stones and wander among the circles; now you can get no nearer than 440 yds.
If you are interested in all this, go to Peru soon - it is turning into a museum.
No comments:
Post a Comment