Category Archives: History

Myth and Reality Slug It Out in the Glorious Vilcabamba

By Nicholas Asheshov

As seems to happen every 500 years, the Vilcabamba is on the move. Once the redoubt of the last Incas, this stand-alone world, the size of a small European country, of deep jungle valleys and aloof cordilleras in Peru’s south-eastern Andes, has become a home to drug runners, and their clandestine airstrips, terrorists, Texas oilmen, Chinese and Italian electricity engineers and, clinging to its eastern gorges, a flood of a million international tourists.


The oilmen are new, on the edge of the Vilcabamba in the Amazon lowlands at Camisea, on the Urubamba. Their pipelines, essential to 21st-century Peru, run west to Lima across the northern Vilcabamba, the Ayacucho highlands. What is new today is there are more, a lot more, of each group, and they are crowding closer together.

The Sendero terrorists work with the drug people, and they also demand and get protection money from the oilmen, kidnaping pipeline workers, killing soldiers and policemen, and dynamiting helicopters. Tourists can no longer feel safe off the beaten track. But even the most dramatic of these, say the shooting down last year of a police helicopter, piloted by a brave woman captain, is a blip compared to the epic violence and calculated cruelty of the events in Vilcabamba half a millennium ago, when young Manco Inca and Kura Ocllo, his beautiful and brilliant sister-wife, were separately tortured and assassinated. Likewise, Spanish friars just as blameless were unbearably tortured by the Vilcabamba Incas for days before dying dreadful, martyrs’ deaths.

The Pizarros and finally Viceroy Toledo in 1572 sent in savage Castilian bounty hunters, who ran Inca Tupac Amaru to earth after a chase through the jungle. Once captured, he was dragged up to Cuzco and summarily beheaded in the Plaza de Armas. By then, the plundering of Cuzco, Vilcabamba and the rest of of Peru had reached, as it had in Mexico, a level of cruelty and greed with, in David Graeber’s phrase, “mythical proportions” seen never before or since. The campaigns in Mexico and Peru were “some of the most ingenious, ruthless, brilliant and utterly dishonourable ever recorded,” he says.


“If the Incas had managed to hold out in Vilcabamba until today,” muses the English Inca authority, John Hemming, “they might be an independent kingdom still, a member of the United Nations.”

The story of the ferocity of the conquest of this culturally distinguished Shangri-La is told in two recent books, translated into Spanish. This is Kim MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas. Movingly for many Peruvians, FX announced its plan to turn ‘Last Days’ into a 12-part series, describing it with modest Hollywood hyperbole as “one of the world’s great rebellions, led by a couple of teenagers.” That was in 2013, with nothing, since reported in the Hollywood trades publications. The other title is Forgotten Vilcabamba: Final Stronghold of the Incas by Vincent R. Lee, and there’s no hyperbole here. It is one of the great books of exploration in South America, which appeared first in 2000. Separately and together, these two books contain gripping accounts of the events of the last four decades (1532-1572) of the Inca Empire as well as super stories of the machete-swinging exploration that has added a new dimension of blood-stained reality to the dusty, tantalisingly brief and inevitably contradictory archives of the conquest.


In the 1980s, Vincent Lee, an energetic Wyoming architect, opened an entirely new window on the Vilcabamba, and on the wider story of the Inca Empire, with a trio of expeditions aimed at sorting out the ruins and remains of the last, desperate days of the Incas. The Shining Path revolt had begun and few tourists ventured beyond Machu Picchu. Likewise, cocaine was not yet an important part of the picture. The Sendero Luminoso terrorists, known then and now as terrucos, were still a low-grade bunch in the Vilcabamba compared with the tough activists in Ayacucho, Puno and elsewhere. But they and small nervous bands of soldiers nevertheless provide a rumbling background to Lee’s story of tough but good-humoured travel in difficult, spell-bindingly beautiful and ancient country. Lee was trying to solve sets of multi-dimensional archaeological puzzles while fighting rain, cold, heat, bugs and the nagging lack of coffee and pisco.


Lee’s descriptions of each step along crumbling paths merge well with the chronicle accounts written four centuries ago into an always-gripping saga. We slog with him through jungle rivers and over slippery log bridges as he tries to piece together an historical jigsaw of hidden ruins and both old and new accounts of who did what to whom and where. Vilcabamba today is the single most active Sendero zone west of the Apurimac and the world’s single biggest cocaine producer.


The DEA and the Pentagon are setting up a drone ops centre there, according to the Cuzco rumour mill, a reliable source of misinformation for close on five centuries. Cheek by jowl, only a few dozens of miles away, across Vilcabamba’s jungle canyons and frozen cordilleras, on its the eastern, Urubamba side, three thousand international tourists a day brave 18 hours of ancient, narrow-gauge train shuttles to reach Machu Picchu, tourism’s holy grail. These do not always include U.S. nationals. A decade ago, the State Department issued an unusually silly edict prohibiting their diplomats from visiting and warning all their citizens they might be kidnapped and held to ransom in exchange for release of Abimael Guzman, the Sendero version of Mao Tse Tung, sitting in a Callao jail for decades until he died there in 2021.


A modern kidnapping, uncomfortable as it might be, would compare well with what would have happened to hostages 450 years ago. As Lee and MacQuarrie relate, as happened to the ill-fated Padre Diego Ortiz in 1570, you could have been dragged naked for days and freezing nights by a rope plunged through a hole in your jaw, up cliffs and through icy rivers only to have a sharp stake thrust up through your rectum and out your mouth and left for the crows and buzzards to pick out your eyes and liver. Now as then, coca-laden hillsides were spread across the valleys neighbouring the magnificent palazzos of the Inca grandees: Machu Picchu, Choquequirao Rosaspata and Espíritu Pampa. Gary Ziegler and Kim Mallville’s account of Choquequirao, on the Apurimac side of Vilcabamba, 25 condor miles from Machu Picchu, described this world-class site properly for the first time, including its vast coca-producing terraces.


It is here at Choquequirao, or perhaps at Incahuasi, a perfectly preserved Inca solar observatory perched in a craggy gap at 4,000m described by Lee, that we can best appreciate the noble cultural achievements of three millennia of pre-Columbian Andean civilisation. This was on a par, and in some ways exceeded, the highest achievements of contemporary Eurasia. Whatever, it was not a world of savage underdogs.


In the Vilcabamba can be seen, as nowhere else in South America today, the profound links of these cultures to their natural surroundings, the frozen snows of the godly cordilleras, the fertile and well-watered alpine valleys and the hothouse maelstrom of the Amazonian jungles below. John Leivers, an Australian surf master who spent decades exploring Vilcabamba, often alone, tells me that Manco’s capital at Espíritu Pampa is today off limits because the Sendero have set up one or more bases nearby. Army and police posts a bit further downstream are being strengthened.


He was planning a trek to Espíritu Pampa not long ago and decided instead to visit the remote and spectacular Incahuasi, on its stunning ridge high in the Puncuyoc Mountains. Gene Savoy, the American explorer who was the first, in 1964, to identify Espíritu Pampa as Manco’s lost capital, had been told of the Incahuasi, but never been there. Vince Lee’s party in 1984 was the fourth group of explorers known to have reached the site. In “Forgotten Vilcabamba,” he describes it properly with maps, drawings and photos of its fine stonework and superlative setting. Leivers has GPSed the site and says it is aligned on a solstice line with the great sites of the Sacred Valley. “The Vilcabamba has always been underestimated by history,” Leivers says. A good part of the province is technically an archaeological park under the care of the Ministry of Culture, aka the INC. But the INC has hardly shown its face there and the local alcaldes continually bulldoze the once well-preserved Inca roads to replace them with mud tracks for trucks to spin their wheels in.


Today’s international lawlessness and five-star tinsel is an embarrassing, down-at-heel version of the Vilcabamba of the 15th century when the Incas adapted these great valleys into their vision of the Garden of Eden. It is difficult to think of a handful of more elegantly civilized places in 15th century Europe, Tuscany, perhaps, with Leonardo, Lorenzo Medici, than Machu Picchu and Choquequirao, and a bit further upstream, Ollantaytambo and Pisac, with their thousands of wonderfully sculpted terraces. This was a productive, large-scale society, more ordered and orderly than the raucous mess of medieval and post-medieval Europe. This is what the Spaniards found in 1532, and the gold and silver they looted and carried back to Spain provided the liquidity that financed Europe’s take-off from medieval barbarism into whatever you like to call it today.


The Vilcabamba, with Machu Picchu, Choquequirao, Rosaspata and Espíritu Pampa and a network of towns, villages, warehouses, Class A, B and C stone roads and thousands of flights of agricultural terraces was dramatic then as now but really just a typically well-organized section of the Inca heartland. Machu Picchu was not, as many think of it today, an outlier at the end of the line but at the heart of a major zone extending much further on into the Vilcabamba. But with the arrival of the Spaniards, the Vilcabamba acquired a reputation it retains today, rebellious and lawless. This twist, which sees rapacious conquistadores as respectable pioneers while the Incas are turncoat rebels, is still taught in Peru’s schools. as its local version is in the U.S. and Canada, where the indigenous have been depicted as untrustworthy, unreasonable and, above all, outside the law. Vilcabamba’s two main rivers are the all-powerful Apurimac, the longest of the Amazon’s tributaries, and the Vilcanota-Urubamba, the one that plunges below Machu Picchu.


The Vilcabamba contains two great snow and glacier-covered cordilleras as well as three lesser ranges, great deep jungle valleys, high-plumed waterfalls and 3,000-foot cliffs. In my day, half a century ago, there were no roads to the Vilcabamba either on the Apurimac or the Urubamba side. Hiram Bingham had been there, but no one had followed. A steam train powered by an ancient Baldwin locomotive passed by Machu Picchu once a day on its way to the edge of the tropical jungle. In 1963 the National Geographic Society even sent in a couple of special planes, and a team of parachutists to penetrate what it called this “Lost World.” I was a member of the expedition, and eventually, I had to force my way for weeks between thousand-metre cliffs up from the Apurimac to reach the northern ramparts of a still-un-named range of gloomy 15,000 ft. cloud-shrouded mountains.

The first recorded invader of the Vilcabamba was Pachacuti in the mid-1400s, three or four generations before the Pizarros’ 1532 execution of Atahualpa in Cajamarca. Hemming’s account of the Spanish attacks on the Vilcabamba emphasises that there was really only one entrance, which is at what is today Chaullay, at the junction of the Vilcanota, Lucumayo and Vilcabamba rivers. A massive, building-sized boulder was the anchor in the middle of the Vilcanota for a succession of rope bridges. The boulder was swept away by the great 1997 avalanche, which also took away the modern bridge, replaced a few years ago.

Pachacuti’s invasion, recorded by some of the chroniclers, is well recounted by Vincent Lee in “Forgotten Vilcabamba” The book is a classic partly because Lee is familiar with the chronicles and is a respected academic Incanologist, as well as a former U.S. Marine Corps officer, an unusual combination. Unlike, too, most academics, his accounts read easily and unaffectedly. He seems someone you would like to have another beer with. The reader enjoys his casual good humour and uncomplaining confrontation with everything from stone-age jungle indians to drunken, trigger-happy soldiers. But what lifts “Forgotten Vilcabamba” from many exploration accounts is Lee’s accounts from deep in hot valleys or freezing, foggy crags and passes of just how difficult it is to know where you are.

This path up here, or that one down there? Is this wall possibly part of the complex referred to by such-and-such a chronicler? Or maybe it’s an entirely new one. Is this the one mentioned by Bingham? Or Savoy? Which river is this? Is it as described in chronicle X, or is it the one the Spaniards came down in 1572? Is this mountain so-and-so, or are we in another valley? Piecing together different sets of multi-dimensional puzzles, trying to keep your cameras dry, finding somewhere to pitch a wet tent in the rain and find something to eat, or, at least, a swig of pisco, coping with ankle twists, cuts, bruises and worse is similar, I imagine, to being behind enemy lines.


As Hugh Thomson, an English Vilcabamba honcho, has commented, “Vince Lee takes the Incas, but not himself, seriously”. This is a good combination for putting together the written historical record and the stone remains left by the Incas and, as has lately come to light, their Huari predecessors. The result is a fascinating picture of the Inca world as currently understood by archaeologists who have dug into Machu Picchu, Choquequirao, Vitcos and Espíritu Pampa. The last of these is the conurbation, the ‘metropolis’ as Lee refers to it, of the Incas long lost final capital. Lee notes that it was, for the better part of four centuries, much like the mythical Camelot and Atlantis. Hiram Bingham found Espíritu Pampa shortly after finding Machu Picchu but decided that the little he could see of the buildings there were unimpressive, so he stuck to his story that the spectacular Machu Picchu was the Inca capital. It’s difficult to blame him: Machu Picchu is the masterpiece. Also, Bingham saw but a few of the hundreds of buildings shown on Lee’s maps that depict Espíritu Pampa as a true jungle ‘metropolis.


Almost as a side thought Lee and a construction-oriented friend have solved the problem that has foxed archaeologists and everyone else: how did the Incas move and manoeuvre and fit the enormous blocks of pre-shaped limestone at Sacsawaman so precisely? He’s shown how it could have been done with simple wood tools and stone hammers. Several TV documentaries, including a NOVA special, have featured his ideas. The full story is available at his website: Today, Machu Picchu has been savagely reconstructed by incompetent and sometimes dishonest government bureaucrats.


If you compare, for instance, photos taken by Bingham, Chambi and others six or more decades ago with the walls and buildings seen today, two-thirds are not even Inca. But, of course, this matters little to the seething mass of tourists. Still, all is not lost in the noble Vilcabamba. Like Vitcos, Choquequirao and The White Rock, movingly described by Hugh Thomson in his book of the same name, The Inca remains there offer great adventures. Pisac, at the head of the Urubamba Valley, only half an hour from Cuzco, is a fine experience, and there are dozens of small, out-of-the-way ruins which provide a sense of connection and discovery. This feeling of what you might think of as participation with the Incas will be immeasurably heightened by reading the accounts provided by Vince Lee, Kim MacQuarrie, Hugh Thomson, and the acknowledged chieftain of this tough tribe, John Hemming.

This article was first published in Spanish in Caretas in 2013. Not a lot has changed since.

A Stalled Antonov Bi-plane Evokes the Warm, Get-Rich Romance of the Amazon

By Nicholas Asheshov

Abel Muñiz’s hacienda in the jungles of the lower Cosñipata Valley has been stitched together over the past six or seven centuries.  Today the buildings are a homey mixture of wood, clapboard, stone, cement, palm thatch and corrugated iron.

The hacienda features the same sounds and smells as farmyards the world over —ducks, sheep, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, geese, dogs, cats, rats, bats.  In addition, the pets include a small caiman, a tapir, monkeys and parrots. Greta, Abel’s wife, first thing in the morning, used to go down to the sort-of natural swimming pool that they had made, to clean out any snakes and other fauna that TripAdvisor might make a fuss about.

Feb 15-2013 - Country Notes editA pack of women and children swirls vaguely round the kitchen patio.  The warm air is sliced every second by a thousand full-color and full-throated tropical birds.  The distant rush of water over a set of rapids in the Rio Tono is a grey-noise background to the scritch and hum of a million insects and amphibians.

Muñiz, a portly 60-year-old agronomist who tells a good story, says that the farm, Villa Carmen, belonged to Isabel Chimpuoccllo, a daughter of Inca Huayna Capac and the mother of Garcilaso de la Vega, the most famous of the post-Conquest chroniclers.

Farms in the jungle in those days, as they frequently still do, produced coca.  Today Muñiz keeps cows, has some ponds of carp, and takes tourists up the Rio Piñipiñi, the lowest reaches of which flow through his property after running down a section of the Pantiacolla hills in the Manu National Park.

Lost city mavens will instantly have perked up at the name Pantiacolla. This is a favorite haunt of planners of expeditions to discover Paititi. Italians, Scots, Americans, and French have been there in the past five years, and there once was also talk of a big Russian-US-Spanish effort being planned.

Not much was heard of Cosñipata till the 1960s when Alliance-for-Progress President Belaunde drew a line on the map between Cusco and Rio Branco, capital of the Acre Territory, the nearest town in Brazil, and called it an Intercontinental Highway.

An army road battalion was sent off to Paucartambo, then as now a charming colonial sierra town with a stone bridge. By the early 1970s, when I first knew it, Cosñipata was beginning to bustle with a frontier mixture of loggers, hunters, rice farmers, jeeps, missionaries, their Indians, gold panners and, in this case, the beginnings of the Manu Park.

There is no region on the planet that breeds more illusions than the Amazon. I wish I had a lottery ticket for every exciting, challenging conversation in which I’ve participated about the potential of this jungle plant, that jungle animal and the other jungle valley.

Muñiz is one of these enthusiasts.  One afternoon the other week he took a pick-axe out to the forest near his house and came back with a big, yellow papaya-shaped vegetable that weighed in at 10 kilos.  For supper it tasted like French-fried potatoes.

“It’s a creeper that grows up the trees,” he says.  “You can grow a tremendous cash crop without cutting down a single tree.”

Besides a hundred plants like Muñiz’s wonder-spud, the Amazon has, of course, a pharmacopia that is becoming, they say, better understood and appreciated nowadays.  The best-known to appear in the past two or three decades in Peru is the uña de gato, cat’s claw, which is marketed extensively in Lima and everywhere else as a cure-all.

But the most remarkable thing about the cornucopia character of the upper Amazon is the impressive contrast between the promise, the talk and the dreams, and the mud, the mosquitoes, the heat, and little else besides charm.

Pilcopata, the jungle town a mile away from Villa Carmen, is a lot bigger than when I first saw it three decades ago.  But it’s still a weedy, clapboard dump.

The people are generally quiet, amiably unambitious and unaggressively disorganized.  They know the jungle can’t be beaten, so they join it.

But people like Abel Muñiz don’t.  They lose Round One, Round Two and so on but they’re not going to give up and, damnit! they don’t.

In a field a couple of hundred yards from the hacienda buildings is a remarkable, evocative sight.  Here, in a clearing in the jungle, stands a large bi-plane, yes, a giant Gipsy Moth, quite new-looking.  A tatter here, a bird’s nest there, but the tires are full of air.

Against a backdrop of warm, misty, menacing jungle hills and a powerful river nearby, this is an impossibly romantic sight.  Like most piston aircraft of the old school, the nose is way in the air, with a four-blade propeller.  Inside, the fuselage slopes steeply backwards.  One climbs up towards the cockpit, keeping an eye and an ear open for snakes.

There are some Cyrillic signs in the cockpit and it takes no imagination to picture the pilot and co-pilot in those tight leather helmets and threatening oval goggles familiar from movies involving the Russian air force.

The plane is, Abel Muñiz tells me over a warm beer on his kerosene-lamp-lit veranda, an Antonov Two. They’re apparently still in production in Poland at US$300,000 apiece, and in service there and in Cuba today.

Its single nine-cylinder engine produces 1,000hp. It takes 15 passengers at a top speed of 170 mph, and a stall speed of 55 mph.  Unloaded, it can land in 60 yards, and take off with up to 500 kilos in just 80 yards. With a full 1500 kilos load, it can take off in 450 ms.

Abel tells me —news you can use— that there is another half-dozen of these wonders scattered round the Madre de Dios and the northern jungle.  They are the remnants of a venture only a decade ago when he did a deal with a Russian co-operative.

“Started off pretty well. But what with devaluations and recessions, terrorists and drug people, and no tourists, it flopped.

“My friends and relations thought I’d become a drug baron and insisted that I lend them hundreds of thousands.  Of course, the police and the tax people were the same.

“It’s hard to make anything work in Peru, let alone in the jungle.”

PostScript

It turns out that Abel’s Antonov II, the AN-2, also known as the ‘Annie’, was one of the great aircraft successes of the 20th Century.  I learn this from a fascinating, first-rate article on Wikipedia which tells us that it is “the biggest single-engine bi-plane ever built” and that more of them, 18,000-plus, were built than any other aircraft, and has only just lost this record to the Lockheed C-130 Hercules.

The An-2 started production in 1947 in NovoSibirsk, and was still being produced in Poland in the 1990s.  It was simple to operate, powerful and could fly at incredibly slow speeds, like 30 to 40 mph, thanks to extendable slots on the leading edges of the wings, which functioned with rubber bands!   Pilots learned to fly it so that it could land almost like a parachute and, in a suitable wind, backwards (over the ground). North Korea has a lot of AN-2s, it seems, and China produced thousands with its own modifications. With the breakup of the USSR, during the 1990s the AN-2 was sold, as it was to Abel Muñoz, all over the world for forestry, agriculture, ambulance, mapping, and there are a few in the U.S. which appear in air shows and for parachutists.  For more, search for Antonov 2 biplane on Google.

This article appeared in the Peruvian Times Feb. 15, 2013.

Downtown in The Lost Cities of the Amazon

This article first appeared in March of 2012, in Spanish in Caretas and in English in the Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES.
By Nicholas Asheshov
Some weeks ago two events, one of them startling, came together to pin-point the mysterious new conundrum of the Amazon.

The first was the appearance on a busy riverbank in the Madre de Dios of a few dozen members of a previously-isolated group of Indians. They killed someone who had been trying to help them.

The naked Indians, seen on TV screens around the world, were described by anthropologists as descendants of an unbroken line of hunting and gathering savages, living fossils of our neolithic past.

This is, according to new Amazon thinking, incorrect. These Indians are the sad, socially degenerated remnants of nations and tribes that were productive, sophisticated and stable just a few centuries ago.

The other event was an article in The New York Times that reported on the discovery in Acre, only a few hours travel from the Madre de Dios Indians, of extensive, deep straight, or sometimes circular, trenches, ridges and mounds dating back to pre-Columbian times, indicating a large, well-developed society.

This was just the latest evidence that the Amazon, or at least parts of it, was heavily populated by well-organized societies in much the same way as the high Andes were remodelled by the Tiahuanuco, the Chavin, the Chachapoyas, the Huari, and the Incas.

Over the past couple of decades the pre-history of the Americas has been revolutionized, setting off poison-tipped academic and ecological vendettas.

First of all, the Americas were populated much earlier, at least 33-35,000 years ago, double the time previously calculated. That is back to Neanderthal epochs.

Second, there were many more people here when Columbus arrived than was earlier thought. And, most important, the societies and nations of the Americas were much more sophisticated and structured than was previously understood. They were agriculturalists, not the war-whoopers of the movies. Their mode of life and agriculture had massive, long-term effects on the original pre-human forests. Fire was a basic control mechanism.

Today the evidence of genetics, linguistics and archaeology is clear that the Amazon was not just an impenetrable green hell populated by primitive hunters and fishermen eking out an unchanging, culturally marginal existence.

The same applies to North America. Here most of the descriptions of primitive Indians come from 18th and 19th century travelers who were seeing only the sorry leftovers of great nations that had been obliterated by smallpox, viral hepatitis, influenza and other European and African diseases. The Conquest set off the Dark Ages in the Americas.

In the Amazon the same collapse, featuring malaria and yellow fever, was exacerbated by the rubber boom of the late-1800s and early-1900s.

You can check this out in three fine recent books. Two of these are Charles C Mann’s easy-to-read, well-researched 1491 and a sequel, 1493, just out; and in John Hemming’s Tree of Rivers, a masterly description of the Amazon. Hemming, author of the classic The Conquest of the Incas has also written, earlier, three volumes on the peoples of the Amazon.

Charles Mann describes, for instance, how my old friend William Denevan, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, discovered how the Beni, on the edge of the western Amazon in Bolivia, was a flourishing, well-organized center of islands and causeways on what is today a bleak, sparsely-inhabited combination of dense jungle and flood-plain, inhabited today by sad remnants of Siriono Indians.

Bill worked on the Peruvian Times just before me in the 1960s and his stories on the Beni and similar mounds and trenches around Lake Titicaca in the PT were the first indication of this revolution in South American prehistory.

“Beginning as much as three thousand years ago, this long-ago society,” Mann writes, “created one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the planet.”

Great stuff.

Mann describes the Amazon as one of the world’s half-dozen agricultural heartlands, where plants were domesticated, the epicenters of civilization. Others were the tropical Andes, Central America, the Fertile Crescent, and China.

The Amazon, including the area where the savage Indians appeared the other day, just north and west of the Beni, was the source of yuca, known elsewhere as manioc or cassava, as well as tobacco, peanuts chili pepper, chocolate, Brazilian broad beans, the peach palm, and Brazil nuts.

It was also the homeland of Hevea Brasiliensis, the rubber tree, which was to be, along with steel and oil, one of the three creators of the 20th century version of civilization.

For the Amazon, including the Indians on the banks the other day of the Madre de Dios, rubber became a disaster, just as gold and silver had been for Peru and Mexico. The malaria and yellow fever, imports from Africa, that it helped to spread turned the Amazon and its western tributaries into what Charles Mann calls “depopulated fever valleys.” Slavery did the rest.

The Amazon as a center of civilization has become the subject of a bitter dispute between two magnificent lady academics, the archaeologists Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution and Anna Roosevelt of the University of Illinois.

Hemming mentions the two warring camps on the issue of whether or not there were tribes with sophisticated, stable, large populations: Dr Meggers says that the Amazon basically had only hunters+gatherers; Dr. Roosevelt says that there were big lively societies all over the place.

Here is a message to me the other day from John Hemming and you will find nowhere else a more precise and appropriately colorful description of the state of play today in Amazon studies.

Broadly, I think that Anna (and her acolytes like Michael Heckenberger) are right to say that there were large chiefdoms on some riverbanks of the main Amazon and its tributaries (although there were also very long stretches of uninhabited river). Those chiefdoms were based on the river and its fish and turtle resources. 

But I think that the Roosevelt school exaggerates the size and sophistication of their beloved chiefdoms, which they compare to the great civilizations of Peru.

They also exaggerate the extent of human manipulation of forests. Remember that it was very laborious indeed for early man to fell trees (other than palms) with their stone axes. And they had no need or desire to do so: they were very happy in pristine forests full of game. Planting the trees they liked near their villages was merely rearranging the deckchairs. It did not alter the Amazon landscape.

Meggers is right about the inability of Amazon terra-firma forest to support villages of more than a thousand people maximum – the surrounding game is exhausted otherwise, and the soils under mature forests are too weak to sustain large-scale farming. So, away from the rivers, early tribes were not much larger than their modern descendants at the time of first contact and before being hit by imported disease.

For many years, John was Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, London, and we can all understand what he means by “rearranging the deckchairs.”

But not everyone agrees. Charles Mann in his just-published 1493, calls the Amazon “the world’s richest garden,” quoting archeobiologists and looking at parts of the Amazon today that are carefully-distributed and well-tended collections of trees, plants and fish and game reserves.

Today there are tourists but it can still be a tough place. Near the Acre ruins noted in The New York Times, settlers are still gunned down by big-money ranchers. I remember John telling me of the day in 1961 when he carried the arrow-filled body of his friend Richard Mason back to camp. A decade later, in 1970, I myself was searching the jungles of the Pantiacolla in the Upper Madre de Dios for my friend Robert Nichols, chief reporter of the Peruvian Times of which I was then the editor, who had set out to find Paititi, a version of El Dorado. It transpired that he, and two French companions, had been stoned to death by the Machiguengas.

Unlike John, I am not prejudiced by knowing what I am talking about and I unreservedly plump for the Roosevelt school’s bumptious Amazonian super-civilizations and I am supported by no less than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Their latest movie, due out this year, is The Lost City of Z, where Brad plays Colonel Percy Fawcett, the English explorer, searching in 1925 for El Dorado in the Amazon. Let’s hope that Brad has better luck than Percy, who never returned.

————–

Notes.
Colonel Percy Fawcett said: “The answer to the enigma of Ancient South America – and perhaps that of the entire prehistoric world – will be found when the old South American cities are located and opened up to scientific research. These cities exist, and I will prove that they exist.”
————-
Tony Morrison, the wildlife photographer and author, on a recent trip to the Beni:
“Setting out from Trinidad in the Beni we hopped on a 35b bus in the plaza and headed to the great mound at Eviata where the entire village is built above the floodplain. I went there to see the last of the Siriono tribe, as they have a base around the old mission church. What a bedraggled lot they were and the mound is now topped by a huge ENTEL satellite dish — not a bad place to site it as it should be above the annual flood.”
——
Vera Tulyneva charlie.quispe@yahoo.com . Ms Tulyneva is completing a thesis on “Paititi” at the Universidad Catolica, Lima. Commenting on The New York Times story on ancient remains in the Acre:

“The earth constructions of Acre have been in the news for the past five years. The first one to speak of them was Martti Pärssinen, an historian from Finland who had been working in the region for many years. In fact, they are not “geoglyphs,” i.e. earth figurative drawings of apparent religious/ritual function, but rather utilitarian earthworks, like drainage trenches. Acre, Mojos, Beni, Xingu and many other Amazonic regions are full of them.”
————–
Michael Heckenberger website on Xingu: The Xingu Ethnoarchaeological Project
————–
An article on Acre: Pre-columbian geometric earthworks
and Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purus

————–
The New York Times: The Nazca Lines of the Acre jungle – Land Carvings Attest to Lost World
______________________________________

Nick Asheshov is a veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur. He was editor of the Peruvian times from 1969 to 1990.

——————————————————————

In response to this article, Dr. Jennifer Watling responded: (See her paper on the subject: Watling et al 2017 + SI)

For you to state the following: ‘These Indians are the sad, socially degenerated remnants of nations and tribes that were productive, sophisticated and stable just a few centuries ago’ for me shows a great disrespect and lack of knowledge about indigenous Amazonians and their ancestors, I’m afraid.

Best,

Jenny

Dr. Jennifer Watling
Post-doctorate Fellow,
Laboratório de Arqueologia dos Trópicos, Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia,
Laboratório de Micropaleontologia, Instituto de Geosciências,
Universidade de São Paulo
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jennifer_Watling2/info

The people who ran the Sun

By Nicholas Asheshov

The Incas, living as they did at 3,000m a.s.l., focused on the Sun’s capacity to provide more than warmth for their fertile, glacier-fed tropical valleys. They and their predecessors grasped, like the Egyptians and others, that the movements of the Sun, moon, and stars could predict rain and temperatures.

Informatica, then as now, was power. But the study and understanding of the sun and the stars gave the Andean peoples much more than a weather channel. They were able to reflect the orderliness and mathematical precision of the heavens into their own world. The unequalled exactitude of Inca stonework and their careful, magnificently engineered, imaginative landscaping of their mountain world was a statement of philosophical power on a Shakespearean scale. They would control the uncontrollable: the earthquakes, enemies, famine, and disease. Under the Inca there would be no apocalypse.

The Incas took it a logical step further. They would control the Sun itself. At Machu Picchu, Choquequirao, Pisac, and a score of other centres, they placed carefully-engineered granite blocks and windows so finely that at the solstices —June 21 and December 21— needles of light would hit exactly at such-and-such a marker.

The Incas, like politicians through the ages, spun the Sun story. It was they who were family with the Sun, sons no less of the Sun. Running the universe had become a family business. The sun’s rays would change direction on the orders of the Inca every 187.5 days.

At the winter solstice, the Inti Raymi, visitors to Ollantaytambo today can climb high up to the other, western, escarpment of the Rio Vilcanota and at 7:00 a.m. on and around June 21 can look down across the river half a kilometer away and watch a sudden sharp spotlight, then, moments later a couple of hundred yards away, another and then another, appear on an Inca throne-room the size of a tennis court.

If this is a stirring experience today it is not difficult to imagine the awe,, the grateful weeping, the roars of enthusiasm with which tens of thousands of Inca faithful would watch this mystic magic five, six and more centuries ago. They would see their Inca and his family re-born, the unchallengeable nexus of this world with the past and the future.

Accurate knowledge of how to interpret and predict stellar movement was a vital part of the management of a heavily populated agricultural society for which control of irrigation water and of the rivers was essential in both drenching monsoons and periodic drought.

The Incas upgraded the Tiahuanaco and Huari terrace systems and roads into one of the world’s safest and most productive polities, as we can see today from a million terraces in great flights of ingenious engineering of one of the planets most spectacular sculpted landscapes. The renovations included unequalled mountain hydrologic and civil construction, together with agricultural and genetic research.

The magnificent interconnected terraces in the Colca, the Urubamba, the Pisac and a score of other Andean valleys needed sophisticated agricultural techniques and engineering controlling water, heat, and experienced biological genetic experimentation. These terrace systems were so delicate that most of them are today unused because no one is sufficiently knowledgeable and well-organised to use them.

The Inca Empire, stretching thousands of miles along the Andes from Colombia to Argentina, was joined by perhaps 15,000 miles of stone all-weather roads with A, B and C grades of size for lateral valleys of better quality and deeper penetration than any land communications system anywhere in the world until the advent of the railways in the 19th century. Legal, census and production records were kept on the decimal-based khipu knotted strings.

Warehouse complexes stored food and clothing. The Andes were more cohesive, more productive than anywhere in contemporary Europe, on a par with Ming Dynasty China.

Today energy not the Sun, has become the new god. It is energy, starting just two and a half centuries ago with the invention, in England, of the steam engine, which has created a different universe. Before 1750 no one moved faster than a horse, a running man, or a sail-driven galleon. Wood fires became coal, electricity, petroleum and nuclear.

A Bank of England economist calculated the other day that if we look at the 50,000 years of the existence of modern homo sapiens and call it 24 hours, 99% of the progress will have taken place in the last 20 seconds. It’s a nice notion though it might be seen to give short shrift to the Acropolis, to Leonardo and Bach. But it makes the point that few among the seven billion of us can understand the world today and for sure no one can control it. It is built to change. Intrinsically unstable. It must, faster and faster, keep on the move.

By contrast, anyone can see, at Machu Picchu and at Sacsayhuaman that the people who built these achievements did indeed understand their universe. They had done it themselves, stone by careful stone. It was built never to change, to last forever. Maybe it will. FIN

First published in Spanish in Caretas in March, 2015

El Dorado (Paititi) The Mysteriously persistent pre-Columbian Utopia

No one has got rich by finding a lost city but there’s a dream hidden there in the mind of all of us.

By Nicholas Asheshov

Clearly, the important thing about lost cities is that they’re lost. Once they’re found, the archaeologists take over, and the tour guides won’t be far behind. Another handful of expeditions is setting off this season, as there will be every year forever. There is more chance of hitting the New York State lottery than of finding El Dorado or Paititi but every expeditionary would rather find The City than win the lottery. To discover the unknown past is as good as, and more believable and possible than, seeing and touching a UFO. Show us the man who can prove that El Dorado and UFOs don’t exist!

Peru has been supplying genuine lost cities not just way back when, like Turkey or China, but this century -Machu Picchu to begin with and more recently Pajaten and Espiritu Pampa in the mid-60s and Gran Vilaya just 10 years ago.

From the 1980s, too, came Sipan, the startling, rich pyramid, which for these purposes qualifies as a city, hidden not behind the Andes in impenetrable jungle as required by lost city lore but out in the open desert not far from the Pan-American Highway. But coastal sites like Sipan are mostly produced by archaeologists, in this case Walter Alva, a dedicated, persistent scientist who thoroughly deserved his success.

But archaeologists are trained to keep their noses to the ground, preferably below ground. Their grasp of the nitty-gritty doesn’t allow them to see the wood for the trees. So they rarely find the genuine Lost Cities out in the bush and actually they hardly even go looking for them. It wouldn’t be scientific. The real thing is invariably searched for and found by people who act like, and sometimes even look like Harrison Ford. They include, in the case of Peru this century, Senator Hiram Bingham, Colonel Percy Fawcett, Gene Savoy and Robert Nichols. A handful of others, including Vincent Lee, Robert Randall and Yoshiharu Sekino have also been prominent in looking hard, scratching the surface of the Amazonian flanks of the Andes.

Bingham and Savoy both survived their adventures and went on to become well-known and established in their own country, the United States. Savoy is alive and well in Reno, Nevada, though he is just about to set out on yet another sea-faring trans-Pacific adventure in a 20 meter mahogany catamaran with two Mochica dragons as prows. That’s the kind of style lost city discoverers like to travel in no cut-rate economy class for them.

Nichols, Fawcett and Randall are dead. Nichols was killed by Indians 25 years ago as he searched for Paititi, a fate suffered by Col. Fawcett half a century earlier. Randall, based for years in Ollantaytambo, died five years ago after being bitten by a dog.

40 kms from Cuzco, in Pusharo, in the jungles of Madre de Dios, there were found petroglyphs covering 14 meters of a massive rock wall, apparently part of a religious complex, thought by some to indicate the existence of a lost city with the characteristics of Paititi.

Up-and-comers include Vincent Lee, a Wyoming architect, who is apparently about to produce a book on Vilcabamba. I myself spent part of my early years in Peru looking either for lost cities or for people who had got lost looking for one it’s basically the same thing and I own a hotel in the Sacred Valley which is riddled with ancient cities and an integral part, for sure, of the greatest lost city territory left on Earth.

Savoy, now in his sixties, has always look more like Buffalo Bill than Harrison Ford, but he has the same outlook. Why is he going to sea rather than looking for lost cities? “Living among the gamblers in Reno, you learn to quit when you’re ahead.” Savoy says today. “I was getting like an old gunfighter. It was too easy. That’s dangerous.”

Savoy also helps to explain why it is explorers and not archaeologists who find the lost cities. “Getting into archaeology would have stopped me dead.” he says. “Digging into a pit, messing around with carbon 14 and the other bits and pieces. History, not archaeology, is the key.” Listen carefully, explorers. Savoy is the only man alive who has won the lost city lottery. Three big, big ones, and a score of lesser, excellent finds. At that level we are talking not of gamblers, but of the fellow who owns the casino.

Two on my list set off to find El Dorado but never returned. The first was Colonel Fawcett, an eccentric English army officer, a qualified surveyor who among other things fixed a big part of the Bolivia-Peru frontier, and did it so well that it has never been disputed.

Colonel Fawcett was doing this at the same time, 1910-11, as Bingham was marching down the Sacred Valley finding Machu Picchu and Rosaspata. Inspired by Bingham’s success, he returned from England in the mid-1920s at the head of an expedition but this time heading, via Rio de Janeiro, for the north-western corner of the Mato Grosso, near the Bolivian frontier.

I can’t recall what the logic of his search was, though it was certainly based on stories from locals and Indians he had encountered on his previous travels and surveying. But he disappeared forever and set off a whole school of lost city excitement in England for two or three generations of adventurers who would set off to find both Col. Fawcett and the Lost City that he had presumably found and where he and his son Jack were being held captive in incredible luxury. (Another son, Brian Fawcett, lived for years in Peru and was the foremost authority on steam trains in the Andes).

In fact Percy Fawcett was killed by Indians in 1925, as proved more or less conclusively by the Villas-Boas brothers, the Brazilian Indian specialists, in the 1950s.

The same fate was suffered by my friend Bob Nichols, a tough, unassuming traveler from Oregon. Bob was in his thirties during the 1960s when he spend several years in the Convencion valley, below Cuzco and then in the Alto Madre de Dios jungles at the bottom of the Q’ospipata valley. It’s a tough place today even though a few tourists pass by in powered canoes but it was a really tough place in those days.

Bob was an unusually fine writer and got a job with me as a reporter on the Peruvian Times. After a year he told me he wanted to go and find Paititi. His time down in the Madre de Dios had provided him with the inside story, the clues from the indians, whatever. For Bob this last piece of the legend turned out to be unbelievably, tragically true. He, two French friends and half a dozen Mashco Indians set off up the Rio Palatoa from the Dominican mission at Shintuya. They passed the Shinkikibeni petroglyphs. The guides returned, having refused to go on, Bob and the two Frenchmen pressed on. They never reappeared. Many left for El Dorado and never returned.

One doesn’t ask questions. Among lost city fans Paititi is the name for a kind of Inca or pre-Inca lost city-state which, in most versions, is still functioning. It is, at least, zealously guarded by impenetrable jungle and impassable ravines as well as by 20-ft bushmasters (shushupes), jaguars and, of course, deadly Indian-guardians.

This was 1970. I spent six months  looking with no success and no further indication of a Paititi. But two years later a quiet young Japanese law student went in alone and with splendid persistence and courage found, photographed and chatted with three Machiguenga Indians who told him how they had killed the three explorers. They gave him enough bits of paper and other objects to show, beyond doubt, that their story was to be believed.

Yoshiharu went back more than once, armed with satellite photographs which showed for this area a series of “dots” apparently in some triangulate alignment. He found nothing but went on to other parts of Peru and produced a super collection of photographs of Peru’s jungle and mountain peoples. Dr. Carlos Neuenschwander, an Arequipa physician, subsequently persuaded the air force to fly into this area, the Pantiacolla range of hills, with a helicopter but found nothing. “Everybody always wants them but you never find anything with helicopters,” says Renato Marin, a Cosquero naturalist and explorer who knows this part of the world better than anyone else. Mr. Marin thinks that there’s a good chance of finding a genuine big city up in the hills behind his former hacienda, Amaybamba, in La Convencion, just downriver form Machu Picchu itself.

Two main areas of the mountains and the jungle in Peru are the most consistent producers of ancient cities and fortresses.

The classic area is to the north of Cuzco anywhere in an arc from Ausangate to the south and east around through Quincemil and across to the Alto Madre de Dios and Alto Manu and then up towards Atalaya, then back up the western flank of the Apurimac basin towards Ayacucho. Actually, I’d include most of the area north of a line between Cuzco and the northern shores of Lake Titicaca, including the Bolivian frontier region.

I’d say that half the world’s lost city people will continue, in my view rightly, to comb this often difficult, outstandingly beautiful, powerfully evocative area with its fine track record. This place smells of lost cities and, why not? lost tribes. Inca roads dive off the highlands into impenetrable jungle and other essentials, including risky, difficult-to-locate Indian groups. Two or three of these have been found within helicopter distance of Cuzco in the past three or four decades. They’ve even attacked oil exploration parties (they didn’t get ’em).

The other area is in the North, around Chachapoyas and the great fortress at Kuelap. It’s in this region that Gene Savoy found Gran Pajaten and, later, Vilaya. Savoy also found dozens of other remarkable sites in this area. It was Savoy, too, who located and correctly identified Espiritu Pampa, in the Vilcabamba as the last refuge of Manco Capac and Tupac Amaru.

If you think that you will be popular and meet interesting people once you have found a lost city you may be in for a surprise. You might think that your efforts, which undoubtedly provide work for needy archaeologists, would make you respected by them. Not at all. They dislike Savoy intensely and they hated Bingham, the finder of Machu Picchu, Rosaspata and a handful of other world-class ancient remains. Both of them were accused formally of being grave-robbers and huaqueros (people who illegally dig up artifacts and sell them at Sothebys). I myself had to dig Savoy, at that time a reporter for the Peruvian Times, out of clink in Lima on one occasion a quarter of a century ago.

This is pure jealously on the part of archaeologists and locals who didn’t have the persistence and perception to get there and stand up and say “I found it!”. Neither Bingham nor Savoy claimed any special academic knowledge. What both of them did was to do a lot of homework, reading the chronicles carefully. They also listened carefully to their guides and travel companions.

“Do your research, period,” Savoy says. “History is the key. If someone was there and left a record, find it. Also, local people know. Ask, and listen to their answers.”

What Savoy is saying sounds obvious but actually almost no one follows this advice. This is a mistake not made by another branch of lost citying, looking for lost treasure galleons. The winners there comb the records religiously before setting out.

This is not at all the style for most lost city searchers. What they all do, I did it myself, is to look at the map and say to themselves and their chums. “This looks like a likely spot. There are no roads, the approaches are dreadful, my friend X’s father’s peon said there is an Inca road that goes straight off that away and he found a golden amulet. Also, it’s not been properly mapped.” (This statement applies to almost all of the area north of Cuzco and the Sacred Valley).

A few travelers tales from missionaries easily the most unreliable sources and farmers and hunters rounds out the picture and before long we’re out shopping for Brazilian snake-bite serum, asking how much helicopters cost (too much) and ordering zip-lock plastic bags from Miami.

Lost cities and fortresses not found on maps remain invisible to air photography

The main basis for thinking that Paititi is off the map is because the Incas are supposed to have thought that the Spaniards were after their last gold hoard and that they ran off with this into the jungle.

Victor Angles, an amiable Cuzco historian who has written extensively on Incas and their ilk, says that this is hogwash. “The Incas thought the Spaniards were gods and handed over ever bit of gold to them. There’s nothing left. There’s no Paititi.”

There may be historical logic to Mr. Angles’s thinking. But it’s not going to cut much ice with the lost city crowd.

He himself puts a big “But…” into his own thesis after he describes how the Count of Castelar sent the King of Spain documents, which indicated that the ‘Empire of Paititi’ was at the confluence of the Beni and Mamore Rivers more or less where Percy Fawcett was heading.

Mr. Angles continues, “When more complete ethnological studies are carried out on the native tribes in Peru’s southern jungles, we’ll have more light shed on Paititi.”

Those are our marching orders. We must shake the moths out of our mosquito nets!

If you though Terra Incognita was only on ye olde maps, take a look at the latest satellite-based charts produced by the Department of Defense (DoD), Washington and the excellent Instituto Geografico Militar, Lima. The DoD (the Pentagon) are the people who can put an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile into the kitchen in the Kremlin, but they haven’t got round to backland Peru. Big slabs of maps within a day’s march of Machu Picchu are blank, with the lame excuse “Not Covered by Aero photographs.” And this is the satellite age.

Lost city people, take note and take heart. The DoD people, lost city men for sure, are keeping something back.

Kura Ocllo, a Peruvian heroine

By Nicholas Asheshov

As Franacisco, Gonzalo, Hernando and Juan Pizarro entered Cuzco in 1533 they were met by a deputation presenting to them the 17-year-old Manco Inca.

The Pizarros, who had just garotted Atahualpa, Manco’s half-brother, in Cajamarca and they were happy to set up young Manco as a front man.

It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway but a new tragedy unfolded that has coloured Peru ever since. Gonzalo Pizarro, a tough, tall, ferociously brave bully, conceived a passion for Manco’s young wife and half-sister, the beautiful, clever, loyal Kura Ocllo.

Gonzalo persisted. The Inca court gave him all the girls he could want. They even gave him another pretty half-sister and dolled her up to look like Kura. But after a few nights Gonzalo soused her out and kicked the sister out.

Gonzalo and a gang of his thugs simply sequestered and raped Kura and kept her. Manco, furious and desperate, left Cuzco. The rape by Gonzalo of Kura Ocllo set off a 40-year rebellion that blocked any possibility of a meeting of the minds between Conquistadores and Incas.

Kura escaped back to Manco and they both retreated to the mountain-jungle fastness of Vilcabamba, beyond Machu Picchu. From here they waged a partly-successful war against the Spaniards.

In one incident it was Kura Ocllo herself, now 20, who spotted a detachment of Spaniards creeping up a steep path to Oncoy, above the Apurimac, to capture Manco. She organized the womenfolk to impersonate Inca troops to frighten the Spaniards while Manco himself led the charge on the Spaniards, killing all 30 of them, a tremendous victory that ought to be celebrated by an annual national holiday.

Gonzalo himself then led a military expedition into the Vilcabamba. With him went two of Manco’s half-brothers, full brothers to Kura Ocllo. These went ahead to try to negotiate with Manco who, however, had them immediately beheaded –in front of Kura Ocllo. As Gonzalo and his men closed in Manco escaped, but alone. The horrified Kura Ocllo paralysed with shock refused to desert the bodies of her brothers.

Gonzalo threw Kura to his men. On the way back to Ollantaytambo, she tried to protect herself by covering herself in her own excrement.

In the plaza of Ollantaytambo, where today hundreds of tourists park their buses every day, Francisco and Gonzalo Pizarro ordered her stripped naked, tied to a stake and whipped while Cañari mercenaries stoned her and shot darts into her.

She refused to cry out, the chroniclers report, until just before dying, she shouted out, “Cowards!”

Manco, like his wife-sister, was clearly a noble, brave, devastatingly young leader. He was assassinated in Vilcabamba a few years later by the same renegade Spaniards who earlier had killed Francisco Pizarro himself down in Lima.

Gonzalo rebelled against the Crown, killed the Viceroy and 300 royalist Spaniards and was later executed in Cuzco by a new Virrey.

Manco and Kura Ocllo, youthful, dashing, are the stunning heroes in one of the epic moments of world history.

Here is Othello and Romeo & Juliet all in one, a crueler, nobler Helen of Troy-Paris-Achilles. But how many Peruvian children, or their parents, know this story? Two of my children did their early-ays schooling within a couple of miles of the scene of her outrageous death. But I’ve asked them, and other Urubamba kids, and they know her not.

Nor did I, of course. I have extracted and summarized the Kura Occlo story from Kim MacQuarrie’s excellent “The Last Days of the Incas” due to be published shortly in Spanish in Lima, in time for the Bingham-Machu Picchu fandango in July.

Kura Occlo and Manco are just two of a great cast of characters in a gigantic confrontation, the collision of two of the great traditions of humankind.

In France, Joan of Arc, burned at the stake by the English in 14xx, is a much-loved heroine, a registered saint and indeed us English treat her memory with equal affection. The English are also proud of Boadicea, the Celtic queen who was, with her daughters, publicly tortured, gang-raped and killed by the Romans two millennia ago. Kura Ocllo deserves, surely, to be remembered with similar pride by Peruvian schoolchildren. Manco, likewise.

MacQuarrie’s sources for the Kura Oclloa story are the account dictated by Manco’s son, Titu Cusi, the last-but-one Inca, to Cristobal de Molina, and a letter by a Spaniard explaining to the King of Spain how Gonzalo stole Manco’s wife.

MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas tells the stupendous story of the Conquista better than anyone so far. It is deliberately dramatic “…blood dripped from Pizarro’s sword…” etc. But it is also carefully researched and runs parallel to John Hemmings’ classic The Conquest of the Incas which appeared in 1970 and updated and translated into Spanish in 1995, a gripping must-read.

But Kim MacQuarrie’s “Last Days” brings the cruelty, the civilizing savagery, the wealth that was to transform the economy of Europe and above all the characters to immediate life. The five Pizarro brothers, unbelievably tough and courageous, impossibly wealthy, low-born and ambitious,

The backdrop was a society, the last, sadly, of a score of great cultures produced here over many millennia, which functioned much better than any contemporary in Europe, and incomparably better than any that has struggled to succeed in Peru or anywhere else in South America.

Perhaps MacQuarrie’s “Last Days” will inspire teachers in schools all over Peru, high and low, to take a new, proud look at their own world-class predecessors.

Published in Caretas Country Notes in Spanish

Indian girls + machetes = Christians

By Nicholas Asheshov

Just downriver from Machu Picchu at this time of the year there used to be a slave market where Jesuits, Franciscans and Dominican priests from Cuzco would buy Indian women and children in exchange for machetes and other trade goods.

It was known as the Feria de Santa Rosa. Earlier it had been known too as the Feria del Carmen because it took place in July as well. The women and children were Machiguengas who had been pirated from their homes deep in the jungle by tough Piro Indians from the lower Rio Urubamba.

The Piros, great traders and travellers all over the western Amazon, would paddle up the Urubamba, past what is today the Camisea gas fields, a multi-billion-dollar industrial complex, in raiding-trading parties of dozens of war canoes, through the still-ferocious rapids of the Pongo de Mainique.

The Piros were such powerful paddlers that in their canoes they ressembled, according to one missionary, “centaurs as one with their horses.”

They would come to a site called Cocabambilla near the present-day towns of Quillabamba and Echarate where the railway line would later end; this was wiped out by a huge avalanche in 1998.

The women and children, acquired from Machiguenga curacas or simply snatched from their homes, would be exchanged, along with salted fish and other deep-jungle goods, for Cuzco mountain produce as well as knives and, later, guns provided by the rubber barons.

The Incas would have been impressed to see how their descendents, today’s comuneros from the highlands of Cusco and Puno, have taken over the eastern jungles. In the old days, 600 years ago, the Chunchos, or Antis (Antisuyos) were much feared by the rulers of the greatest empire of the 15th century.

No longer. Today’s jungle Indians are all but exterminated. They stood up to the Incas and then the Spaniards though by the early 20th century they had been badly hit by the rubber barons. But the invasion by sierra campesinos in the past few decades, plus lumbermen and oil and gas men from Texas, have just about done for them.

The Incas conquered the mountains with a wonderful system of tens of thousands of miles of roads. The Amazon was dominated by the canoe on the world’s greatest network of rivers. It may be that a couple of thousand years ago, say, there were great cultures in the Amazon as there were along the pre-Conquest Mississippi.

Some scholars, including my old chum Gene Savoy, the great Andean explorer, maintain that the Amazon is the original source of all the Andean cultures.

Until a hundred years ago the jungle indians, like the Piros and Campas, were the aggressive ones. The chroniclers record forays by the Chunchos into the Cuzco region, including one where a jungle princess went off with Inca Prince Copacabana and “large quantities” of women and children.

The Jesuits, Franciscans and Dominicans wanted the women and children, we should assume, to convert them to Christianity.

Whatever, there were occasional more refreshing side-effects. One of the Machiguenga boys, Martin Mentiani, arrived in Lima during the guano boom in the service of the gay Dominican provost of the Santa Rosa Convent.

Martin escaped and hid out on a French merchant ship during the Chilean occupation, turned up in Antwerp and became butler to Paul Gauguin’s art dealer. He returned to Lima during the 1900 centenary celebrations, and returned to Cusco and the jungles of the Alto Urubamba.

This and other tall jungle stories were told to me this week by Alejandro Camino, Peru’s distinguished and much-travelled anthropologist. He has just returned from Madagascar and has spent years in places like Nepal. He and Mrs. Camino serve the best Hindu food this side of Darjeeling at their home in Miraflores.

The Santa Rosa/Carmen slave market came to an end only three or four generations ago, in the early years of the last century.

I was reminded of it by a visit, also this past week, to the annual barter market at Tiobamba, Maras, just above Urubamba, where truckloads of people arrive from Pucara and other parts of the Puno altiplano with thousands of clay chombas which they exchange for maize from the Urubamba Valley. Most of the deals are still straight barter and all the chatter is in Quechua. The metre-high ones for making chicha make fine pots for plants, though I admit that I paid coin of the realm, not maize, for the chombas –S/25-30 for big ones, the same as the cost of a machete.

Published in Caretas Magazine

 

Don’t believe all you hear about lost cities. But then again, why not?

By Nicholas Asheshov

Sra. Nelly, who helps out on busy weekends, told me the other day when she heard me talking about a valley below Machu Picchu: “My cousin Alfredo knows where there’s this really big ruin. It’s on his own place, above Sta. Teresa.”

Nick's adventure as captured by Peruvian artist Carlos Christian Castellanos Casanova

I should have a double Scotch for every time someone has told me where to find buried treasure and secret ruins.

Nelly went on, looking round to see that no one else was listening. “It’s got these three lines of great walls, near the top of a hill. There’s a waterfall…”.

With lost cities and buried treasure there’s some common characteristics to the stories. One is that they are always second-hand.

The most consistently unreliable stories come from priests and protestant missionaries, invariably imprecise and gullible; perhaps it goes with the territory. The most famous in our area was a Padre Polentini, active for decades in the Lares Valley over a cold bare pass from Calca. According to everyone you meet in this attractive but little-visited area, Padre Polentini spent all his time -this would be the ’70s and ’80s– looking for lost cities and of course he built up, the same stories say, a hoard of gold and silver objects which one of the Cuzco archbishops sent off to the Vatican.

To add substance to the foggy world of lost cities and buried treasure, there’s a private museum in Lima crammed full of spectacular gold and silver objects that are all grave-robbed. It is much better than the tourist-trap Gold Museum, which is full of fakes.

A late-breaking version of the secret hoard syndrome is the story, first published in Caretas’ Country Notes in March this year, that Machu Picchu itself was looted in the 1880s by a German, August R. Berns, and all the huacos were sent off to the Berlin Museum.

The discoverer of this gem of lost city-ology, Paolo Greer, is much smarter and more persistent than the professional archaeologists and historians. One of Paolo’s specialties is locating old gold and silver mines, some of which are in production again over on the eastern slopes of the Carabaya between Cuzco and Puno. Today this is one of Peru’s toughest no-go regions, controlled by drug gangs and illegal gold panners.

Paolo has also been working on what he calls “Portuguese” silver mines to the East of Machu Picchu. He tried to get up there a few months ago but got turned back by impassable cliffs.

Others, led by Gary Ziegler, of Colorado, and Vince Lee, a couple of months ago held a symposium hosted by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of The Explorers Club. I’ve been out many times with Gary in the Vilcabamba beyond Machu Picchu and he thoughtfully combines GPS technology with ensuring that one of the mules is assigned to carry three crates of Stolychnaya with a few bottles of Martini for the women.

Technology doesn’t seem to have made the slightest difference to the rate of discovery of lost cities in the Andes.

The Instituto Geografico 100:000 maps, produced arm-in-arm with the Pentagon, are still dodgy, because they don’t do much footwork to back up the clever satellites.

However, things are a lot easier in the field today with the ferocious accuracy and handy cheapness of GPS machines the size of a telephone. This means that you can draw your own maps, as detailed or as sketchy as you like with spot-on accuracy.

But clear thinking is much more important than technology.

A few years ago a priest down in the Apurimac told me about a treasure-trove of dollars, quantities of camping equipment, a massive cache of canned food, a light bulldozer and shotguns up in the northern Vilcabamba. He added: “There’s a dozen late-model parachutes.”

I instantly realized he was talking about my own National Geographic expedition in 1963 Perú by Parachute – NGS 1964 (link to pdf of article) where, true, I’d had to abandon a couple of torn ‘chutes, a broken 16-bore shotgun and a pile of empty Coke bottles. I explained it all to the priest.

He didn’t believe a word of it.

Now I must get on with organizing a trip before the rains start to check on Sra. Nelly’s cousin Alfredo’s lost city above Sta. Teresa. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Sept. 12, 2008

Looking for lost explorers

By Nicholas Asheshov

In 1925 Col. Percy Fawcett, an English artillery officer, disappeared while searching for a lost civilization in the Amazon and people have, in turn, been looking for him ever since.

One early hope in the years immediately following Fawcett’s disappearance was that he had found the lost city and that he and his son Jack, who had accompanied him, were living it up as honoured guests of the inhabitants: they were, after all, English.

One of those who went to look for him was Peter Fleming, brother of Ian, creator of 007 James Bond. Fleming’s book about his expedition, “Brazilian Adventure” (1933) was a best-seller.

Fawcett went into the Mato Grosso and the Xingu only a few years after Arthur Conan Doyle, inventor of Sherlock Holmes, had published ‘The Lost World”, the best-seller where dinosaurs, warring Indians, vicious man-like apes and intrepid English explorers were stirred into the heart of the Amazon.

Hiram Bingham, also, had just discovered Machu Picchu and his photographs had stunned the world.

Col. Fawcett and the whacko world of lost cities is the subject of a new book out just this month in New York, “The Lost City of Z. A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon” by David Grann, a journalist on The New Yorker.

‘The Lost City of Z’ was the description that Col. Fawcett gave to the object of his obsession. The reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere speak well of the new book but in fact others know much more about Fawcett and the Amazon. These are led by a couple of friends of mine; John Hemming, author of the classic “La Conquista de los Incas” and, out just last year, “Tree of Rivers; The Story of the Amazon”. Hemming is also the leading international authority on the wild tribes in the forest.

The other is William Lowther who has spent many years on the Fawcett story. Both Hemming and Lowther tell me that Fawcett was “nasty.” Lowther recalls how Fawcett simply left one of his English team members on the Peru-Bolivia frontier to die alone in the jungle after being badly bitten by a poisonous insect. The man by a miracle lived to tell the story.

This had happened in 1906 when Fawcett, who was born in 1867, had been hired to survey the Bolivia-Peru frontier which still stands as he defined it. Lowther tells me that “Fawcett was tough and energetic. He worked so fast that the Bolivians paid him a bonus.” They went on to hire him to do their frontier with Brazil, too.

It was during this time that Fawcett collected stories of lost cities and lost tribes. As a surveyor, he was also drawing up maps and from my own experience maps quickly acquire their own reality.

Fawcett fought through World War 1 on the Western Front in the Royal Artillery and Lowther tells me that he was almost promoted to General. By one of those coincidences Hemming’s father, a mathematician, was one of Fawcett’s junior officers and accused Fawcett later of basing his targeting on an Ouija board. “Untrue!” Lowther says.

But these were the great days of Spiritualism and cranky, high-handed Colonel Fawcett believed that you could indeed have contact with the other world. On top of that, like most English people in those days, he was a racist who thought poorly of the forest Indians.

He believed that a lost civilization in the Amazon was still peopled by a superior race of which his son Jack was also a member. So all he and Jack had to do, was to get to the right area and the inhabitants would spot Jack as one of their own and welcome him, and of course his father, in!

They were certainly killed by Indians. Some of their belongings were to turn up in the market some time later at a town in the area.

From my account it may seem as though Fawcett was a basket case who dragged his son to a certain death.

Maybe. But Hemming, a great scholar, Secretary for many years of the Royal Geographical Society, has told me how in 1961 he carried out the arrow-filled and battered body of his friend Richard Mason, both recently graduated from Oxford.

Nine years later, in 1970, I myself spent months searching for Robert Nichols, a friend, a Peruvian Times reporter who had disappeared while looking for Paititi in the Pantiacolla hills of the Alto Madre de Dios.

A year later we found that Nichols, relaxed and amiable but as tough and experienced as Col. Fawcett, had been stoned to death by renegade Machiguengas.

As a footnote, the leader of the main ground search party, Elvin Berg, who avoided getting attacked by the Machiguengas by reading the signs correctly, was himself caught a dozen years later in a remote corner of the Apurimac by a gang of Shining Path thugs who strung him up and burned him to death. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of March 13, 2009

 

It’s The Serranos That Count

By Nicholas Asheshov

I’m expecting that the census the other day will show an upsurge in the rural population. We out here in the campo may even be getting back to the population levels of the Inca Empire.

There’s been only a modest increase over the past couple of decades. But anyone traveling round the southern sierra and in the montaña east of Cusco will see bigger villages, more roads and above all more school-children.

Every valley in the massive Cuzco core of The Empire is heavily-populated. The forest is being cut back aggressively.

By contrast all over rural England and elsewhere in Europe they have been shutting primary schools. But here in Urubamba and in the great hinterland beyond the Valley, primary schooling is a big focus. For nearly two decades the government has been opening primary schools and kindergartens for three-to-fives, even crèches called here wawa wasi.

A while back I was in Occabamba, one of Cuzco’s hidden, exciting cacao-coca-coffee valleys. Spectacled bear, deer and eagles are close by but you also see truckloads of school kids going to and fro at around eight any weekday morning and after one in the afternoon. Five of every 10 people is under 16.

Richard Webb, with his Cuanto? organization, the only people in town for numbers, tells me that the figures show that only 7.6 million Peruvians are classified as “rural.” But he suspects that often “tiny little hamlets are included as urban, meaning that the rural population is in reality higher. Whatever, around three out of every 10 Peruvians live out in the country.

The amazing thing is that the rural population of Peru is still lower than it was under the Incas even though the total population of Peru is three times greater. Of course everyone in Inca times lived en el campo apart from a few tens of thousands in Cusco, Chan Chan, Huanuco Viejo and Pachacamac.

The low point over the past six or seven thousand years came in 1620, with only 600,000. These would all fit today into Miraflores and San Isidro with room left over.

The Conquest produced one of the great population disasters of history. It was worse even than the Black Death of the 14th century where half of Europe was wiped out.

In Peru, out of every 20 people, only one survived.

Vital censuses were carried out by Viceroy Toledo in 1570, in Huanuco and in Yucay, just up the road from Urubamba. These were followed up in 1603 and 1620.

On the basis of the 1570 head-counts, carried out less than 40 years after the Spaniards had arrived in Cajamarca and just as Tupac Amaru was being executed in the Plaza de Armas de Cusco, Toledo estimated that the population of pre-Conquest Peru at eight and a half million.

This was a pretty good shot. according to the best work done on Inca population, David Noble Cook’s “Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru 1520-1620”.

Cook looked, for instance, at how many people would live off a hectare of tilled land –seven, according to a 1960s study– and came up with 6.5mn people living on the Coast in 1520, which was when Atahualpa and Huascar were getting ready to destroy each other, a decade before Pizarro landed in Tumbes.

Using statistical regressions based on Darfur-like disasters he calculated how many people had died from disease and warfare, and came up with a total population for Inca Peru of 9.4mn; the 0.4 there is William Devevan’s calculation of the population of the montaña. There’s a good case, he also says, for numbers of around 14mn.

So within less than a century the population had dropped by around 95% to 600,000, almost all of whom were sierra Indians. The native population of the Coast had dropped to zero. No one was left.

Ever since, Peru has been massively underpopulated, the classic land without people, and people without land. By the early 20th century, 100 years ago, the population of Peru had inched up to just over three million, according to my 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. By 1940 Peru had just over seven million. In 1961 it was 10.4mn, more or less as it had been before the Conquest.

The sierra saved a small genetic something of Inca and pre-Inca Peru. The sturdy Quechua tradition, with its Quispes, Mamanis, Usquamaitas, Corimañas, Orqohuarancas and Yupanquis is all that remains of the Incas, the Lords of Sipan, the Dukes of Chavin, the Earls of Huari and the Kings of Tiahuanuco.

Much more interesting than counting how many people spend their lives in unproductive cities would be some DNA studies of the ancient families of my neighbours here in the Sierra to tie them to the glories of seven millennia of one of the great success stories of civilization. We can be sure, in any case, that the per capita GDP of the Inca Empire was substantially higher than it’s ever likely to be under today’s slash-and-burn efforts. ENDS

Published in Caretas Magazine Oct 28 2007

Bishop Savoy, King Solomon and the Incas

By Nicholas Asheshov

You can walk through the middle of a lost city without seeing a thing.

Or you can find a couple of stones on top of each other and, mein Gott! I’ve found Atlantis!

I’ve done both but we can be sure that Gene Savoy, the great lost city explorer who has just died at 80, never made mistakes like that. Unlike most explorers Savoy, who was not confused by having a degree from Cambridge ni mucho menos, knew what he was doing. He discovered more lost cities than the rest put together.

He was often accused of being a huaquero and on a couple of occasions I had to rescue him from some comisaria and rush him into the diplomatic immunity of the Phoenix Club, where he would be safe at least from wives and girl-friends.

But actually he hadn’t the slightest interest in the bits and pieces of traditional Peruvian archeology.

Savoy believed that the Sumerians, Phoenicians, Essenes and Egyptians had set up great societies in the Amazon which had expanded into the Andes and had then spread up to Mexico. This was his Feathered Serpent thesis.

Here’s the focus. It came in an invitation he sent me to a black-tie do in Reno in 1998 to launch his “Project X –the Search for the Secrets of Immortality.” Gene, the Head Bishop of a church he himself had founded, had just survived the break-up of his 73-foot made-in-Peru Mochica Dragon-prowed catamaran sailboat Feathered Serpent III in a typhoon south-west of Hawaii. This had put an end to a projected seven-year round-the-world Grand Ophir Expedition.

For nearly half a century Savoy, the Project X blurb said, “has dedicated his life to the search for the secrets of immortality”.

Indeed, I remember Gene in the ‘sixties, between his successful Lost City trips into the jungle, chatting in the Haiti Café in Miraflores about south-east Asian monks and holy men living for more than 120 years thanks to yoga-like sexual contortions.

He had airbrushed this for publication. “As a result of our research and exploration, we have been able to recover the rudiments of a lost science practiced in ancient times…, techniques for prolonging human life and extending human intelligence…”

The Grand Ophir Sea expedition is “an odyssey in search of clues to a true understanding of the ancients and their global society”.

It is “retracing King Solomon’s actual visit to ancient Peru”.

There it is.

King Solomon’s mines were not in Arabia or in East Africa, but here in the Andes, maybe just up the road from Urubamba or, more likely in the north round Gran Pajaten or Gran Velaya, two of his great discoveries. Ophir, referred to in the Book of Kings as a source of immense wealth, was Peru.

A few years ago Savoy told me that he had located what he called a “glyph” etched into a tomb of one of his Andean lost cities which, he later wrote “not only looked like a ship but research revealed that the same symbol in early Semitic hieroglyphics means ‘ship’.”

The same symbol in another text “found in Israel” means “Gold of Ophir belonging to Beth Horon, 30 shekels”. It also appears in Egypt, we learn, meaning “ships bound for Punt, a place scholars believe was Ophir, the land of gold.”

Gene knew perfectly well that this kind of thing was not academically kosher but he didn’t care. “Archaeologists spend their lives with their heads in a hole in the ground. You can’t expect too much from them.”

He’s right. Archaeologists in Peru have provided a miserably boring and unproductive set of stories on what the ruins and remains show was clearly a fabulous set of multi civilizations.

It was not much more than a couple of generations ago that many of the sites, starting with Machu Picchu, were fictitious Lost Cities. It was Savoy who located Espiritupampa as the last refuge of the Incas, whacking the academics on the head. They said no, it was just a legend, or that it was Machu Picchu.

Sipan, with its eye-popping gold- and silver-ware, only came to light 15 years ago and Carral a decade ago, both of them sitting not in dense jungle but out in the desert. The Nazca Lines were discovered only in 1940, and most visitors think that they’re flying saucer airports.

Whatever, the archaeologists can’t tell you what they were and none of them have had an ounce of Savoy’s flamboyant physical and intellectual courage. Salud, Gene!

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Sept 16, 2007

 

The Incas and global warming – Opportunity knocks, again, in the Andes

By Nicholas Asheshov

The last time global warming came to the Andes it produced the Inca Empire.

A team of English and U.S. scientists has analysed pollen, seeds and isotopes in core samples taken from the deep mud of a small lake not far from Machu Picchu and their report says that “the success of the Inca was underpinned by a period of warming that lasted more than four centuries”.

The four centuries coincided directly with the rise of this startling, hyper-productive culture that at its zenith was bigger than the Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire – the two most powerful contemporaries of the Inca.

“This period of increased temperatures,” the scientists say, “allowed the Inca and their predecessors to expand, from AD 1150 onwards, their agricultural zones by moving up the mountains to build a massive system of terraces fed frequently by glacial water, as well as planting trees to reduce erosion and increase soil fertility.

“They re-created the landscape and produced the huge surpluses of maize, potatoes, quinua and other crops that freed a rapidly growing population to build roads, scores of palaces like Machu Picchu and in particular the development of a large standing army.”

No World Bank, no NGOs.

The new study is called “Putting the Rise of the Inca within a Climatic and Land Management Context” and was prepared by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, an English paleo-biologist working for the French Institute of Andean Studies, in Lima. Alex led a team that includes Brian Bauer, of the University of Illinois, one of today’s top Inca-ologists. The study is being published in Climate of the Past, an online academic journal.

Alex spends a lot of time in Cuzco and he told me the other day that the report “raises the question of whether today’s global warming may be for the Andes another opportunity”.

The core samples from the sediment of the little lake, Marcacocha, in the Patakancha valley above Ollantaytambo, show that there was a major cold drought in the southern Andes beginning in 880 AD lasting for a devastating century-plus through into 1000AD. This cold snap finished off both the Wari and the Tiahuanaco cultures which had between them dominated the southern Andes for more than a millennium.

It was at this same time that the Classic Maya disappeared in Yucatan. It was also a time, on the other side of the Pacific when major migrations from East Asia took place into Polynesia, an indication of a major Niño event; a Niño sees western Pacific currents switch to flow from West to East.

Core samples from glaciers and from the mud beneath lakes in the Andes, the Amazon and elsewhere have built up a history of the world’s climate and the message is crystal clear. It is that changes have taken place in the past, during the six or seven thousand years of our agriculture-based civilizations, that are just as big as the ones we are facing from today’s CO2 warming.

The message may be, too, that climate change is especially forceful in the Andes. Here we are, sandwiched thinly between the world’s biggest ocean and the world’s biggest jungle. The peaks are so high that they have had until just a few years ago deep ice on or near the Equator.

The valleys and surrounding hills have formed the roof of the human world for at least three millennia, according to Alex Chepstow-Lusty’s core samples. Nowhere else do millions of people live at or even near 4,000ms above sea level where it is cold, but getting warmer.

Today’s warming is also following on a colder spell that started, the core samples say, not long after the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century.

For instance, the pollen in the cores says that there was maize being grown under the Incas around the lake at 3,300m above sea level. Until recently the upper level for maize around the Urubamba valley was 3,000-3,100ms. In the past few years the maize level has moved up and today there is maize being grown again above Marcacocha.

Alex’s records show that hundreds of terraces were being built around the lake between 1100 and 1150 AD -“lots of mud followed by the heavy pollen of maize”.

Enrique Mayer, at Yale, tells me that “the question of the expansion of maize together with the Inca state is now a proven archeological fact, notably in the Mantaro Valley (Tim Earle).

“The question of why terraces are not worked now as intensively as they could has been worked on (Bill Devevan) in the Colca Valley where the terraces are actually in franco retroceso.

“Also, you have John Treacy’s book on Coporaque which is probably the most technically accessible to the argument that terraces are, like flower pots, expensive to maintain.”

There is also, of course, the work of John Earls on the terracing at Moray.

Today there are thousands upon thousands of fine flights of Inca terraces all over the upper ends of the valleys of Central and Southern Peru but few of them are used on a regular basis.

Efforts have been made, among them by Ann Kendall, the English archaeologist, to resuscitate the old irrigation channels and the use of the terraces in the valleys above Machu Picchu. But most have been re-abandoned.

In the same vein the great forests of polylepis, the world’s highest tree, which capture and conserve moisture, have mostly been cut down for firewood.

As they say, you only have to look in the mirror to see where the problem is. FIN

Published June 25 in Caretas Magazine

Why Easter is so late this year

By Nicholas Asheshov

Every afternoon this week, including Monday – which in Cuzco was the Day of Our Lord of Earthquakes – thunder has battered the steep sides of the Urubamba Valley.  This is very unusual.  Normally thunderstorms announce only the beginning of the rains in October and November.  Normally the rains end in Urubamba like clockwork between March 23 and the 28th.

Not this year and I consulted Kim Malville, professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado and a leading authority on ancient Andean astronomy, which I’ve always thought of as the Weather Channel for the Incas, Moches and the rest.  I wanted to know why Easter is so late this year and what effect this is having on our weather.

Here Kim, with whom I have traipsed into the rugged Vilcabamba looking for ancient solstice and other star markers, tells us how the Church which sadly, as we know, replaced the Incas, decides each year when Easter is to be, something I’d never understood.

Read carefully.

“Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox – well, almost.  The Church has messed things up a bit by making it the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon, which is the ecclesiastical full moon, which may be two days off the real full moon because when they established tables of the full moon 1,700 years ago, in A.D. 325, they made a few accounting errors, which the Church cannot correct: you’ll have to check with your local Cardinal why not.

“But the Church fathers did not mess it up for 2011. There was a full moon on March 19, the day before the vernal equinox, so we have had to wait a full lunar month for the next full moon which was at the beginning of the week, on Monday April 18, and then another six days for Sunday April 24,” which, Kim adds, is his birthday.

April 24 is a very rare Easter Sunday.  I checked on the internet and it hits the 25th of the month about once a century: the last one was 1943 and the next one is in 2038.

Though Easter is so mobile, I’d always thought that the equinox, like the solstices, were fixed for the 20th or 21st of March and September.  The equinox is when the sun passes over the equator.  The solstice is when it reaches its furthest point north or south, 23.5 degrees: Antofagasta, for instance, is 23.4 degrees south, Lima is 12 degrees south and Cuzco 13 degrees.

However, Kim tells me that the equinox is itself “a pretty abstract concept” as it is the day the sun crosses the celestial equator,” which no one can actually see.

“On an island in the Pacific on the equator, with an utterly flat horizon, the sun will rise due east on the day of equinox. Elsewhere, either because of an elevated horizon such as at Urubamba or even Lima, or because of refraction, it will not rise due east.”

Kim adds that, “With so many llamas, condors, cats and dogs in the way it should make no difference to you.”

More to the point, the late Easter has no effect on the length of the rainy season.

“Your rains have nothing to do with the Church, the Paschal moon, surfing competitions at Punta Rocas, or anything astronomical.

“Because the Earth moves around the sun in an ellipse and travels faster when it is closest to the sun, the number of days between the two solstices and the equinox is not the same. The half day count between December and June solstice lands some 3-5 days after spring equinox (and before fall equinox), so that ancient people counting the days would celebrate equinox at a different date than on our wall calendar.”

Myself, I shall stick, as advised by Voltaire, to gardening.

Published April 22, 2011 by

Machu Picchu, Maize and the Advantage of Backwardness

By Nicholas Asheshov

– Special for the Machu Picchu Centennial –

Machu Picchu and the Inca Empire were the creation of an import from Central America, maize, and a dramatic climate shift that turned the Andean highlands from inhospitable wet-and-cold to pleasant, as it is today, dry-and-warm.

For more than half a millenium before this shift the high Andes had been miserable.  With the new dry-and-warm, starting around 1000 AD, a backwoods tribe, the Incas, put together the new climate and technology breakthroughs and by 1500AD had produced the world’s most go-ahead empire, heavily populated and larger, richer, healthier and better organized than Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire, its nearest contemporaries.

The Incas, like a score of tribes all over the tropical Andes, had moved up over the previous millenia from hunters-and-gathers to llama-herders and, latterly, agriculturalists, farmers of potatoes and quinoa, the top names among a world-class agricultural flora that was famously described in the National Academy of Science’s The Lost Crops of the Incas (1989).

Then came maize.  New studies, the latest just published in London by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, the Cambridge archeobotanopalaentologist,  show that high-altitude, large-kernel maize suddenly became widely established around 2,700 years ago – 700BC.

Alex’s work is based on core samples he took from Marcacocha, a pond at 3,350ms asl just 30 miles upstream from Machu Picchu itself.

They provide a high resolution (40-100-year) environmental and agricultural history of the heart of the Inca region over the past 4,200 years, encapsulated within 6.3 meters of well-dated, highly organic sediments.

In these core samples the maize opal phytoliths first appear in 700BC, early on in an earlier warm-and-dry cycle.

The samples record, in general terms, a 500-year cycle of warm-and-dry alternating with another half-millenium of cold-and-wet, though the past 500 years haven’t been as bad as earlier events.

Analysis of maize opal phytoliths from four archaeological sites in the Copacabana Peninsula, Lake Titicaca, have also come up with a date for the appearance of commercial maize of 2,750 years ago.  Even though Lake Titicaca has always provided a special solar-heated mini-climate, at 4,000ms asl this is an astounding height for a species that started its career in muggy Yucatan 7,000 years ago.

Maize, together with new weeding techniques, irrigation, fertilizing and genetic selection, was to transform the Andes into a center for a succession of productive civilizations, starting with Tiahuanaco around Titicaca itself.   The Andes were, as the Cambridge archaeologist David Beresford-Jones puts it, “one of humanity’s rare independent hearths of agriculture.”

“Maize was the last piece in the puzzle of the Andean agricultural package, which allowed an expansionist agricultural intensity threshold to be crossed,” says Alex’s latest study, just published in Antiquity, London.

Recent stable isotope analysis of the bones, taken to Yale by Hiram Bingham a century ago, show that the main item in the diet of the inhabitants of Machu Picchu was not the potatoes and high-protein quinoa native to the Andes, but maize.

The Incas got their kick-start to fame with the global warming that was also underway in Europe.  It was this climate change that allowed Western Europe to emerge from the cold-and-nasty Dark Ages.

At the same time as the Middle Ages in Europe were blossoming into the Renaissance, the Incas were developing a sensational re-construction of the natural verticality of the Andean landscape.  They created thousands of well-drained flights of level stone terraces, unequalled anywhere, covering whole valleys.  Turbulent river-courses were channeled and walled.

Not only did the population explode, but the Incas knew how to marshal this key resource.  They would put thousands of workmen onto the job just like a modern engineering concern.

The Inca understanding of stone, of construction and of hydrology is described by Kenneth R. Wright, a prominent engineer from Denver, in his first-class Machu Picchu: A Civil Engineering Marvel (2000).

Few of the Inca terraces are in use today.  The complicated irrigation flows and long source-channels have fallen into disuse.   What they did was to make the best, in the dry-and-warm cycle, of the snow-melt, rivers, streams and lakes, ensuring that agricultural production remained high even during long droughts.  Now that we ourselves are into a new global warming it’s certainly time to see how the use of these super-terraces might be resuscitated.

The empire was pulled together by thousands of miles of all-weather stone roads and a warehouse network with two or three years worth of strategic reserve food and clothing. These were immediately ransacked, of course, by the Spaniards when they took over in the 1530s.

Bureaucrats, another feature of empires, were prominent.  Gary Urton at Harvard has shown that the khipu, knotted, colour-coded cords, was a complex mathematical and legal record system that was certainly as competent as the double-entry book-keeping that was being introduced in Europe at that time.  Much easier to transport and store, too.

Quinoa, a chenopod not a true grain, is much richer in protein than all true grains, so the pre-maize potato+quinoa Andean diet sounds rather healthy.

But cereals, starting with wheat, barley, oats in the Middle East and, in the Far East, rice, have invariably provided the high-volume calories that empires need to support cities and armies.  No cereal, no empire.

Graham Thiele, of the International Potato Center in Lima, tells me:  “Potatoes are bulky and perishable.   So maize has a huge advantage.  It was the transportablility of maize, even more than the productivity, that made it a key part of the Inca scheme.”

Maize, he adds, is easy to store, while potatoes go bad and get ruined quickly by bugs and blight.

I have to say that this new emphasis in the historical record on high-altitude maize comes as a surprise to me, even though I live in the heart of Urubamba, 2,840masl, one of the great maize valleys of the Andes.  I have always thought that potatoes were the true Andean basic, with hundreds of varieties backed by a cultural tradition akin to that of rice in China.  By the way, the International Potato Center tells me that China is today –surprise— the world’s top grower of potatoes and camote (sweet potatoes).

When the last big-cycle global warming began around 1,000AD, the established regimes in the southern Andes, Tiahuanaco and Wari, were unable to adapt and the Incas moved in.

Fashionable economists and political scientists today have started to call this “the advantage of backwardness.”  This intends to explain, for instance, why China, India and Brazil, basket-cases three decades ago, are suddenly leaping forward into the top ten.

A favorite instance are the Romans around 300BC who, regarded as crude barbarians by the Greeks, Persians and Egyptians, quickly took them over and created the world’s best-loved empire.

In the Peruvian Andes the Inca country cousins out in the Cuzco boondocks reacted quickly to the drought while the entrenched Wari sat, watched, and disappeared.  Their impressively sad capital, Pikillacta, an hour south of Cuzco, is next door to the parish church at Andahuaylillas, the ‘Sistine Chapel of the Andes.’ Gordon McEwan’s masterly Pikillacta: The Wari Empire in Cuzco (2005) is the sourcebook.

Today the Incas would have won the Nobel prize for agriculture, architecture and another couple for conservation.   They planted high-altitude polylepis forests to encourage and capture rain in the high cordillera.  We have cut most of these down for firewood.

Like the Romans the Incas brought in talent.  The stonemasons of Tiahuanaco, metallurgists and goldsmiths from the Coast and agriculturalists from the North.

Sadly for the Incas, there was to be no advantage when the Spaniards arrived, to their backwardness in warfare.  It took less than five quick years for a handful of Spanish warriors to destroy the monumental achievement of five centuries of a civilization that was built, as Machu Picchu shows, to last forever.

NOTES:

Richard Webb, former President of the Central Reserve Bank, comments that the concept of the Advantage of Backwardness was created by Alexander Gerschenkron, a Vienna-educated Russian who was in charge of economic history at Harvard and influenced a generation of economists there, including Webb.  “His examples were Germany, France and Russia, which all benefited from lagging after England during the 19th century.”

Hugh Thomson, the film-maker and author of The White Rock and of Red Cochineal, both on travel and the pre-history of Peru, comments:

“I am not sure that the transition from Wari to Inca was quite as seamless as you make it sound (‘the Inca country cousins out in the Cuzco boondocks reacted quickly to the drought while the entrenched Wari sat, watched, and disappeared) – the model I’ve usually heard is Wari decline around 1000 A.D. , for climatic reasons, slow emergence of Incas from around 1300 AD, ‘full-on’, to use an archaeological term, expansionist Inca period from after 1400 on, although I know that this early Inca period is constantly being re-evaluated by Bauer and others.”

David Beresford-Jones, the Cambridge archaeologist and author of the just-published Lost Woodlands of Ancient Nasca‘ (Oxford University Press), comments:

“Excellent… The point about maize, for which Alex’s work (among others) provides real data, builds upon an argument that the Andean linguist Paul Heggarty and I make in a 2010 article in Current Anthropology, ‘Agriculture and language expansions: limitations, refinements and an Andean exception?’

“But I am not so sure about the detail of how you portray Wari. For I’d say that all of the elements of statecraft that we think of as Inca: roads, khipu recording systems, and intensification of maize agriculture through terracing and irrigation, in fact had their roots in the Wari Middle Horizon. Indeed, Paul and I would argue that we should add to that list another element still popularly associated with the Inca Empire: the Quechua language family.

“This is developed in another article of ours making that case, ‘What role for language prehistory in redefining archaeological culture? A case-study on new Horizons in the Andes’ recently published in Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability and Transmission, edited by Roberts, B and Vander Linden, M., pp. 355-386. New York: Springer.

Gary Ziegler, the archaeologist and explorer comments:  ”The transition from Wari decline to Inca expansion remains one of the great enigmas in Inca study.

“The fall of the Inca was historically determined by the arrival of epidemic disease (likely Bartonellosis from Ecuador and the resulting war of succession following the death of Huayna Capac, not European military superior capability. I suspect Topa Inca would have made quick work of Pizarro’s handful of raiders had they arrived a few decades earlier.

“It is interesting that maize apparently did not get to North American until around 800 AD. This probably allowed the development of the advanced Mississippi and Anasazi polities.”

Vince Lee, the architect and Vilcabamba explorer, commenting on Nick Asheshov’s piece and on the Wari/Inca connection, refers here to the Wari tombs found recently by INC archaeologists at Espiritu Pampa.  Espiritu Pampa, identified by Gene Savoy in 1964 as the true last refuge of the Incas, is down in the jungle beyond Machu Picchu.  The discovery of the Wari tombs has set off speculation of a close connection between the Wari and the Inca, but Vince Lee doubts it.  He says:

“The Wari tomb is not in the midst of the Inca ruins, but several hundred meters away.  So it does not look like the Incas found or simply reoccupied an earlier Wari site.  As you may know, there are several hundred years separating the decline of the Wari from the rise of the Incas.  When I first went there in 1982, Espíritu Pampa was covered by thick rain forest and looked exactly as it did to both Hiram Bingham in 1911 and Gene Savoy in 1964.  The growth was so thick that even finding the ruins took quite a bit of work in 1982.  I mention this to suggest that a Wari site abandoned there for several hundred years would have virtually disappeared long before the arrival of the Incas.

“I note that lots of speculation is turning up that attempts to somehow connect the Wari and Inca cultures via this find, but I’ll be surprised if future work confirms this.

This article, without the end comments, was published in Caretas magazine the week of June 27, 2011 in Spanish.