Mountain peoples:adaptation and cultural persistance for a new century

by W.L. Mitchell and P.F. Brown

Winifred L. Mitchell and Paul F. Brown are Professors in the Department of Anthropology, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota, United States.

Can the subsistence patterns, social organization and ideology of traditional mountain cultures persevere in the modern world? The example of the Aymara people of the Peruvian Andes.
Five hundred kinds of flowers of as many kinds of potatoes grow... in the earth; mixed with night and gold, silver and day.

The hundred flowers of quinoa which I planted at the summit bubble their colors in the Sun; the black wings of the condor and of the tiny birds are now in flower.
It is noon; I am close to the lord-mountains, the ancestor peaks; their snow now yellow flecked, now with red patches, is shining in the Sun ...
... look at my face, my veins; the winds blowing from us to you, we all breathe them; the earth on which you count your books, your machines, your flowers, it comes down from mine, improved, no longer angry, a tamed earth ...
We don't know what will happen. Let death walk towards us, let these unknown people come.
We will await them; we are the sons of the father of all the lord-mountains; sons of the father of all the rivers.

José María Arguedasfrom "A call to some doctors", 1966(translated from Quechua)

With his 1966 poem "A call to some doctors" (that is, scientists), the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas decried the dominant lowlands' imposition of judge-ment and changes on the indigenous Andean way of life (Murra, 1986). The lines above are a reminder that however well intentioned, lowlanders observing mountain people and their cultures are intruders, imposing flatland categories on an ancient bastion of tradition in balance with an awesome landscape.

About 26 percent of the world's population lives in or near mountains (Meybeck, Green and Vörösmarty, 2001), with only 2 percent being residents of the highest mountain chains (Grôtzbach and Stadel, 1997). The peasant inhabitants of high mountain regions, like their counterparts at lower elevations, live in a world of fields, grazing lands and forests which provide them with their main sources of sus-tenance.

They are far from the political centres of their nations, not just geographically but in terms of their political participation and influence. Many share the disadvantages of rural poverty and ethnic or religious discri-mination. Mountain peoples, however, face additional challenges to subsistence brought about by elevation, rough topography and severe climate. Even natural disasters such as earthquakes, landslides, avalanches and floods are more likely to occur in mountain areas (Ives, 1997). Highland communities have developed cultural strategies over the centuries to sustain life in their often fragile and unforgiving environments.

This article focuses mainly on one group of mountain people, the Aymara of the Peruvian Andes. Their culture fits into Grôtzbach and Stadel's (1997) category of mountain peasants living in old and relatively densely settled high mountains and practising largely intact traditional subsistence patterns. In this sense, they may represent a "typical" mountain culture, but the authors' intent is to deal with specific cultural pheno-mena rather than generalizing about the large diverse group of mountain dwellers.

Some comparison is made to cultures of the mountainous regions of Central Asia, the Himalaya-Karakorum-Hindu Kush, as the two cultures share some striking cultural similarities. Both populations are small by global standards: 26 million in the Andes and 33 million in the Himalaya (Neustadtl, 1986). However, both areas have been major cultural centres and seats of ancient civilizations and remain strong pockets of cultural persistence in today's globalized world.

TRADITIONAL MOUNTAIN LIFE: "A TAMED EARTH"

The traditional Aymara culture illustrates the kinds of adaptive strategy employed by mountain peoples. The Aymara are farmers and herders who inhabit the altiplano, the semi-arid basin surround-ing Lake Titicaca in the Andes of southern Peru and western Bolivia. Altiplano soils and climate combine to produce an environment in which available energy sources are limited and environmental fluctuations from year to year are severe.

The altiplano lies between two massive ranges of the Andes. Its altitude ranges from 3 800 m above sea level near the lakeshore to over 4 100 m near the foothills. The soil is loose and spongy, allowing moisture to disappear rapidly from the surface. Altiplano soils have deficiencies in phosphorous, nitrogen and organic material (Winterhalder, Larsen and Thomas, 1974). The plain has been virtually treeless for centuries, a condition that is thought by some scholars to be the result of human occupation (Gade, 1999).

Highland Aymara communities consist of scattered sod houses with tin or thatch roofs separated by tiny plots of agri-cultural and pasture land. On their landholdings of 5 to 20 ha, families coax a living using labour-intensive rainfed agriculture and careful animal husbandry. They are mainly subsistence farmers, relying on the staple crops of potatoes, quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa, a small, nutritious grain that has been cultivated in the Andes for at least 5 000 years) and barley, small herds of sheep and cattle and a few pigs, chickens and the native Andean species of llama, alpaca and guinea pig. Droughts, floods, hail and frost are all possible impediments to successful farming, so families and communities must be well organized and resourceful in managing production.

Centuries of trial and error have resulted in distinctive subsistence patterns, social organization and ideology which enable highland peoples such as the Aymara and their Himalayan counterparts to thrive in their harsh mountain environments.

Subsistence patterns

Use of multiple ecological zones.

Before the Spanish conquest of Peru, the Aymara existed in a number of kingdoms or city-state clusters around the Lake Titicaca basin. In addition to their altiplano holdings, they exploited many of the coastal valleys of southern Peru, growing maize and beans (Martinez, 1961). They also kept large herds of llamas and alpacas at higher elevations where crop production was not possible.

These herds served as a food bank for use during years of low agricultural yield (Murra, 1968). The exploitation of three different environments - the altiplano, the highlands and the coast - prevented food shortages in the event of ecological disaster in any one area. This adaptive process, often referred to as verticality by anthropologists (Murra, 1975) or as staggered land use by geographers, is prevalent in the traditional agricultural systems of both Asian and South American mountains (Grôtzbach and Stadel, 1997).

Today, with greater population densities, communities rarely have access to land in all vertical zones, but the practice continues through human ties of trade, reciprocal relationships with family or community connections in the different ecological zones.

Dispersion of landholdings and crops.

The altiplano consists of a series of micro-environments - localized, discontinuous areas marked by differences in temperature and rainfall patterns. The Aymara have achieved a partial solution to this problem with an inheritance system that fragments each family's landholdings because each child inherits some land from both parents. The Sherpas have a similar land inheritance system, although inheritance is limited to males (Ortner, 1978).

This type of inheritance system results in the distribution of all land types within a community's holdings among all house-holds. Households of each community own several small parcels of land distributed among the different micro-environments. Thus, a single family may farm as many as 30 to 70 non-contiguous plots of land. In any given year a family may lose part of its crop to flooding, but if the family also owns parcels in a micro-environment that normally experiences less rainfall or has better drainage, at least part of the production will be spared.

This system, resembling a micro version of verticality, includes the use of many different cultivars in each micro-environment to further reduce risk by maximizing variability. Thus Argueda's reference above to hundreds of kinds of potatoes is not a poetic exaggeration. In fact, some sources report up to 200 potato varieties planted in a single field (Richardson, 1994).

Cultivation practices.

Besides distributing land over many micro-environments, the Aymara have dealt with the problems of fluctuating rainfall patterns and temperatures through a system of sloping. In preparing their fields for potatoes, still the most widely grown crop in the altiplano, the fields are ploughed along the slope of the hill rather than parallel to the contours as is the practice in most Western agriculture.

The sloping method offers better drainage for the potatoes, a matter of great importance where torrential rains are always possible. In dry years the furrows help retain moisture because of the aporque technique (see below). Wild grasses growing in the furrows help to minimize erosion and to facilitate the transition to pasture land during fallow years (Orlove, 1977).

The Aymara also have a technique of modifying the potato fields which affords additional protection for the crop. After the field has been planted and the potatoes have begun to grow, the plough is passed over the furrows and the dirt is piled up around the base of each plant. This procedure, called aporque, provides a number of benefits: first, the new soil piled up around the plant adds nutrients where they are most needed; second, the plough deepens the furrow between each row of plants, ensuring proper drainage; third, in dry years the deep furrows act as tiny reservoirs, holding any available water longer than the rows do; and fourth, the water trapped by the furrows maintains a more even air temperature around the plants, protecting them against frost.

Aporque is reminiscent of the raised field technique practised by the ancient Tiwanakan Empire (200 to 1000 CE); raised field agriculture supported a city of 50 000 people (Tiwanaku) in the now rural Bolivian Titicaca Basin and an empire that stretched into present day highland Peru, Chile and Argentina (Straughan, 1991). The terrace-like system with a pattern of ridges and depressions approximately 3 to 4 m wide produced up to seven times the present altiplano yields by protecting the crops and renewing soils in a similar manner.

Also used by ancient Aztec and Maya civilizations, this American technique is comparable in its labour intensivity (but perhaps superior in crop protection and soil renewal benefits) to the widespread hillside terracing seen throughout other mountain regions of the world. Terracing is also practised on the steeper slopes of Andean hills and has been from at least the time of the Incas.

Animal husbandry and collection of dung.

The problems of low energy availability and poor soil quality in the altiplano and other traditional mountain agricultural zones worldwide are lessened by the careful collection of animal dung for use as fertilizer and fuel. This is supplemented by the practice of pasturing animals on fallow land, where the animals defecate and add more nutrients to the soil. Dung from cattle, donkeys, horses and camelids (both American and Asian) dries quickly in the arid climate and is easily gathered by women and children en route to pastures and fields. Dung from sheep and other similarly sized animals is left in fallow fields or high altitude grasslands to fertilize the soils. The use of lowland fodder to feed animals that will later fertilize high pastures is another example of the functional integration of different ecological zones.

Food preservation.

Andean peasants must be credited with the discovery of the original freeze-drying method of preserving food. Each June, with the beginning of consistent freezing night-time temperatures, the Aymara spread small potatoes out on flat ground and let them freeze overnight. During the warm, dry days, older women and children walk around on the piles of potatoes, squeezing out the moisture.

After this process has been carried out daily for two to three weeks, the potatoes are about the size of walnuts and their skin has begun to flake off. The remaining skin is then removed by scraping the potatoes back and forth across the ground with the hands repeatedly for a week or so. This process also helps to remove any moisture that still remains in the potato.

The end product, called chuño, is placed in woven llama or alpaca wool bags and stored inside the house. It will keep for up to six years without spoiling. Most families try to have at least a three-year supply on hand in the event of ecological disasters that can destroy most of their potato crop. Chuño has often made the difference between survival and starvation during periods of extended drought or flood.

Working together: mutual aid and cooperation

The yearly round of farming tasks occupies the time and energy of each family member in a mountain household. Particularly at peak times of planting, weeding, cultivating and harvest, every-one is involved. The division of labour by gender and age has much in common with practices in other cultures worldwide (Brown, 1970): women's jobs include herding, weeding, cooking, spinning and weaving, all compatible with child rearing and multitasking. Aymara women participate in most agricultural tasks but are said to be helping men.

Older adults expect to turn over more work to their middle-aged children and sons- or daughters-in-law. Men seem to retire from their labours (agricultural) more completely than do women, who continue with household jobs into their grandmother and great-grandmother years.
Children help adults of the same gender, but girls, like their mothers, cross gender boundaries more often.

For example, both boys and girls may herd sheep, haul water or tread on chuño, but boys rarely help cook. When boys of ten years or more begin to help their fathers in the men's tasks of ploughing, sowing and lifting the heavy harvest loads, they are said to be working, no longer just helping. A female of any age is always considered an agricultural helper if she works beside or in place of a man. Children begin to work at the early age of six or seven years and are seen as labour assets to the family, especially when they are not in school.

A woman who sends all her children to school will find herself burdened with so many tasks that she will probably discourage some of her children from school attendance, especially the girls. Hewitt (1997) reported a similar pattern for women of the Karakorum-Himalaya, and noted that prolonged male absences for herding or wage labour leave women behind, both physically and ideo-logically.

This is also observed among the Aymara: women are less likely to be literate or fluent in Spanish, the language of the dominant culture outside the community, and as a result may be perceived by their men and by the whole nation as backward, unsophisticated and underdeveloped. Nevertheless, the household is seen as the chacha-warmi, literally the man-woman - the union of gender-prescribed efforts for the desired outcome of perpetuating family life in an uncertain world.

During the agricultural off-season, male heads of household and teenagers of both genders frequently leave the Aymara villages for long periods to seek wage labour on the Peruvian coast. The cash earned from these endeavours supplements the subsistence agriculture, which can produce enough to feed most households in good years but provides no surplus for sale. Nor is there much margin, even with the ingenious chuño. The loss of a harvest or even the loss of a family member's labour through illness can erode a family's fortunes irreparably (Leatherman et al., 1986).

As is true throughout the developing world, when men migrate, women's responsibilities expand to cover the work of absent males. As Hewitt (1997) also comments for the Himalaya, women's homebound status is what enables men to migrate. Moreover, the family's continued subsistence farming acts as a subsidy which sustains the low cost of temporary wage labour in mountainous farming zones.

Temporarily absent household members often return to help out at the peak work times of the agricultural year, but the nuclear family still has insufficient labour power to complete the work within the time limits imposed by the Andean climate, and must rely on its wider kindred. Extended family members are bound by strong and enduring obligations to render assistance under an ancient Andean system of labour reciprocity known as ayni.

Ayni obligates relations to render assistance to each other whenever it is needed, and those receiving assistance to return the favour during the same period in which it is received. Ayni commitments are so strong that failure to repay an ayni debt - a very rare occurrence - is considered one of the most serious offences in the countryside.

The owner of the land being worked by ayni helpers is considered the patron (the boss or overseer) of the work; he is expected to direct the activities and to set the pace. He and his wife must provide the workers with hearty meals, coca leaves and alcohol for the day. If children help, they receive sweets.

Ayni is able to function because of two environmental factors: the unequal distribution of land and other resources within the kindred, and the dispersal of landholdings over several micro-environments. Because of the unequal distribution of land and resources, those families that own more land, and thus have greater labour needs, can count on help from families that are labour rich but resource poor.

In exchange, poorer families receive essential resources such as seed, tools and draught animals when they need them. Because of the dispersal of landholdings, the scheduling of work is spread out so that not all families will require additional labour at the same time. Thus, all families are assured of receiving the necessary labour input for production when they need it most.

The Sherpa mutual aid system, tsenga tsali, is remarkably similar to ayni except that the obligations endure and are passed on to succeeding generations (Ortner, 1978). Tsenga tsali bonds give produc-tion a collective aspect in spite of the Sherpa ideal of the independent nuclear family household. No doubt the fragmented land inheritance patterns that the Sherpas share with the Aymara result in the same ecological setting for reciprocal labour.

Land fragmentation has sometimes been remedied by sons consolidating their lands through fraternal polyandry (all the brothers sharing one wife), a practice that continues (Goldstein, 1987) despite the fact that it has been outlawed by the Nepalese Government.

Ideology: "I am close to the lord-mountains, the ancestor peaks"

Ayni and the entire Aymara labour system are grounded in the ancient Andean notions of dualities and interdependence: of land and people; men and women; heaven and earth. The patron-for-a-day provides for his workers; obligations are strictly accounted and repaid. Men serve their communities by taking on civil-religious roles, sponsoring festivals that link people together in mutual obligations.

Women and men work together to sustain their families. Even if domestic violence or a man's absence makes conditions difficult, a woman will rarely break what she sees as the necessary balance of a male-female household. This world requires a commitment to the values of balance and harmony to work well for its inhabitants. When one household or individual is at odds, everyone is potentially affected by the interconnectedness of the kindred, the genders and the generations.

The earth, too, requires balance. Mother Earth must be "paid" with offerings at harvest time and during life transitions. Ceremonies to honour her and perpetuate her bounty are held on hilltops, often at dawn, resonating with Argueda's "lord-mountains" imagery. Natural disasters are also part of the balance: a lightning strike, earthquakes, pestilence, a run of bad luck - all are attributed to an imbalance in the Andean cosmos.

Lightning, for example, is a punishment from God, sent through the avenging spirit, Santiago, and directed for example at one who has not been a good, cooperative citizen (Mitchell, 1993). (Both "God" and "Santiago" are folk-Catholic blends of ancient Aymara theology and Spanish imagery.) Other catastrophes may be attributed to local evil spirits if an individual trespasses in their domains. The shamanic spiritual leaders who officiate at important ceremonies blend ancient mountain beliefs with the folk Catholicism of the past 500 years to connect the people with the spirits of the "ancestor peaks".

CHANGE AND MODERNIZATION: "WE DON'T KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN"

The Aymara are a people in transition, operating partly in the modern world of wage labour and partly in the traditional practices of ayni. In one of the communities studied by the authors in the late 1970s, only half of the households relied on ayni for agricultural labour needs. In contrast, in a more isolated, traditional community all the households used ayni (Brown, 1987).

With so many men and young people absent from the less traditional community, households were looking beyond the traditional Aymara system for other ways to meet their labour needs. These included paylla (food for work), hiring day labourers and increased family sizes. When the authors returned to the same community in 1984, even more people were away on the coast and labour needs were continuing to change.

Even traditional civil-religious obligations were changing in 1984, with cargos (responsibilities) divided and shared among more people than before. This trend away from traditional civil-religious hierarchy obligations is noted for many highland communities (Mitchell, 1991).

Peru's social, economic and political fluctuations since 1980 have been among the most extreme in the world (Dietz, 1998). Since 1984, more villagers have migrated from the countryside seeking jobs or refuge from the threat of Shining Path terrorism. The economic process of out-migration became a flood of refugees fleeing from the war-torn countryside, with the displaced numbering at least 150 000 by 1986 (Mayer, 1994).

Economic fluctuations were rife in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s. Some economic respite was felt in the countryside in the late 1980s and again in the early 1990s after the capture of the Shining Path leader, but with the centralization of the Peruvian Government in the 1990s the highland people were once again marginalized (Klarén, 2000). The subsistence farmers of the altiplano are fortunate to be able to fall back on their land for basic food production, but communities also need out-migration and circular labour migration to maintain their stable human/resource relationship. The success of wage labour migration fluctuates with the fortunes of Peru.

The world beyond the village and its surrounding countryside is not as reliable, equitable or predictable as the village. Like natural disasters that unexpectedly deliver punishments from God, the wages, transportation and housing of the modern world appear capricious. If the disappearance of reciprocal labour continues, will the values of balance among people and between humans and their environment continue long into the twenty-first century? Will a trend away from reciprocity and balance in social relationships also signal less stewardship of the fragile mountain ecosystem that has supported these people for centuries? Planners of economic development schemes must be alert to the risk of undermining these traditional values if sustainable agriculture is to continue in these regions.

About Cerro Baul: Empires of the Andes

The people huddled in their impregnable fortress atop the high mesa called Cerro Baúl, their last refuge as the mighty Inca legions swept through the valley far below. With its sheer walls and single, tortuous route to the top, the citadel defied attack by storm, so the Inca army laid siege to Cerro Baúl. For 54 days, the people held out. But with little food and no water, they found their redoubt was not only a grand bastion but also a grand prison.

Then, in hopes of saving their starving children, the defenders sent the youngsters down from the beleaguered mountaintop. The Inca received the children with kindness, fed them, and even let them take a few supplies to their parents - along with a promise of peace and friendship.

That was enough for the hungry and hopeless people of Cerro Baúl. They surrendered unconditionally to the new imperial order about A.D. 1475. The siege of Cerro Baúl was but the final chapter in the legendary history of what 500 years earlier had been the southernmost outpost of the Wari, the first of the great empires of the Andes. The Inca siege was described by Spanish chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, and our two seasons of excavations at Cerro Baúl lend credence to this historical lore.

The mesa today is a sacred mountain, sanctuary of El Señor de Cerro Baúl, a spirit that's widely venerated throughout the region. But our investigations confirm that it was, for nearly five centuries, a majestic city that dominated the frontier between the Wari and the neighboring Tiwanaku empire.

The story of Cerro Baúl begins in the time archaeologists call the Middle Horizon, when the two empires ruled the central Andes. The Wari, secular and militant, governed most of highland and coastal Peru from their upland capitol at Ayacucho. The Tiwanaku, a trade-based state with a religious core, controlled parts of what is now Bolivia, southern Peru, and northern Chile from a capitol near Lake Titicaca. The Moquegua Valley, dominated by Cerro Baúl, is the only place where the two civilizations are known to have come face-to-face.

The Moquegua Valley had been in the Tiwanaku orbit until the Wari made their bold thrust into the region. To secure their political outpost, the Wari intruders strategically settled the towering Cerro Baúl and the adjacent pinnacle of Cerro Mejia. Unraveling the nature of this intruding colony and its relationship with the surrounding Tiwanaku is a long-standing concern of the Asociación Contisuyo, a consortium of Peruvian and American scholars investigating the region. Recent mapping and excavation at Cerro Baúl and adjacent sites are beginning to reveal pieces of this puzzle.

Where the two competing nations met, their citizens apparently chose cooperation over conflict. Our excavations find no evidence of warfare during the centuries (from about A.D. 600 to 1020) in which the Wari and the Tiwanaku shared the valley and its scant water. Goods and ideas almost certainly were being exchanged; interaction was inevitable, if for no other reason than to discuss rights to the most critical resource of the arid desert. Water streaming from mountain rainstorms had to pass by a Wari canal before it reached Tiwanaku fields.

Furthermore, we recovered a Tiwanaku-style kero (a drinking vessel used in ceremonies) among the Wari's most sacred ceremonial offerings yet found at the site - a strong argument for ritual interaction between the two groups who shared the valley.

Cerro Baúl was a bustling city of one- and two-story houses organized around plazas where people raised guinea pigs (for food and fuel), prepared feasts, created obsidian projectile points, and made necklace beads of turquoise, lapis lazuli, onyx, and polished shell imported from the Pacific coast. The 25-hectare (62-acre) summit of Cerro Baúl - some 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet) above the valley floor - was clearly the political and social crown of the Wari outpost. Yet most of the empire's citizens lived not on the top, but on terraces cut into less lofty heights.

When the Wari arrived in the valley, they introduced an agricultural technology of terracing steep slopes and digging long, serpentine canals across the broken land. A 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) canal wound from the Torata River through the El Paso Divide between Cerro Baúl and Cerro Mejia, where the water course split to irrigate expansive terraces that stairstepped the flanks of both hills. This high-country irrigation system may be the key to the Wari's successful expansion into the extremely arid Moquegua Sierra, especially during severe droughts from A.D. 562 to 594 and from A.D. 650 to 750.

The summit of Cerro Baúl is divided into two areas of very different architecture. A monumental core comprises one- and two-story masonry buildings, while the eastern occupation, extending to the edge of the mesa and overlooking the route of ascent, is crowded with more modest, one-story stone dwellings similar to those found on the terraces of the slopes.

Building atop the mesa was a daunting task. Earth for mortar and silt for plaster came from the banks of the Rio Torata, two hours away by foot. Water for mixing those materials was hauled uphill from the El Paso canal. For construction stone, Wari builders turned to the mesa itself, quarrying the western half of the summit so heavily that it resembles a cratered lunar landscape.

Fine masonry construction was restricted to important buildings that adhered to the strict architectural canons of the imperial capital at Ayacucho. D-shaped structures are among the rarest and most distinctive buildings at the political nexus, where they likely were at the sacred center of Wari culture, an area of sacrifice and propitiation of the gods. At Cerro Baúl, we find at least one and possibly two of these temples. In our investigations of one of them, several fine artifacts were found in a ritual offering. These include entire polychrome ceramic vessels, an engraved gourd bowl, and a silver-alloy foil camelid 2.5 centimeters (about an inch) across.

Another potentially important religious complex at Cerro Baúl is the plaza of the sacred stone, an architectural compound built around a large boulder at the center of the summit. Sacred stones were prominent features in Inca cosmology, and a similar structure has been uncovered near the Wari site of Pikillacta in the Cuzco region. These stones were the centers of ritual and received offerings of special libations (such as maize beer or sacrificial blood) or of sacred items. Common Inca sacrificial offerings included llamas, coca leaves, gold or silver work, and in extreme cases, human children. The massive boulder of Cerro Baúl likely played a similar role.

The most common architectural form at the capital and other Wari cities is an enclosed plaza flanked by impressive stone halls. These halls included residences of governors and wealthy citizens, government offices, and beer houses for state-held parties that rewarded the loyalty of important subjects. The most interesting of the long halls that have been excavated so far contained a burnt deposit of classic vessels and keros, some of which were decorated in a hybrid Wari-Tiwanaku style. Six fine necklaces were also recovered from this burnt offering. Each had an average of 970 shell beads, some with a few lapis lazuli or chrysocolla tube beads as well. The evidence suggests the fire that destroyed the hall was intentionally set, and the beautiful ceramic vessels, many of them probably brought more than 500 miles from the Wari capital, were deliberately smashed and thrown into the smoldering flames.

The fire and destruction clearly were ceremonial and not a general sacking of the site. As part of the final sacramental drinking episode in this hall - perhaps as part of the abandonment of Cerro Baúl itself - Wari priests ceremonially interred the building. The offering of bead necklaces was made after the fire had been extinguished.

Similarities in their religious iconography are impressive and suggest intimate contact between the Wari and Tiwanaku. The Tiwanaku influence on hybrid Wari keros reflects the incorporation of Tiwanaku ideas in the highest realms of Wari religion, and the existence of a Tiwanaku-style kero in the most sacred of Wari ritual offerings on the summit documents the inclusion of Tiwanaku artifacts in Wari religious ceremonies.

By studying relationships between the Wari and the Tiwanaku, we can observe how ancient empires communicated with each other. In our own age of internationalization and globalization, the Andean past may tell us a great deal about the nature of confrontation between nations and the successes and failures of strategies of imperial interaction and control.

PATRICK RYAN WILLIAMS is visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Educated at Northwestern University and the University of Florida, he has directed the Cerro Baúl Excavation Project since 1997.

MICHAEL E. MOSELEY is Professor and Associate Chair of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Educated at Berkeley and Harvard, he was a founding member of the Asociación Constisuyo and has conducted archaeological research in the Andes for more than 30 years.

DONNA J. NASH is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida. She is currently directing excavations at the site of Cerro Mejia and is a Supervising Archaeologist on the Cerro Baúl Excavation Project.

The ancient greeks,the incas and the altomesayoq

Anthropologist Alberto Villoldo reports the comments of his informant (and mentor), Prof. Antonio Morales, regarding the great civilizations who had developed North of the equator, as been characterized by a “descending God”, where “the divine comes from the heavens and descends to the Earth” (Villoldo 1995:172).

The Greeks were amid those ancient civilizations who had this marked “descending” character attributed to their divinity. The Incas – unique great culture developing South of the Equator – conversely, had an “ascending” god-force, raising, like the golden maize stalks in the garden of the Koricancha Temple, from mother earth to heaven. Still, we believe there are oversimplifications in this pattern of reconstruction, which do not take into account the many, complex overly-articulated aspects of ancient Greek perception of the divinity, the different phases and stages where these religious ideas were manifested and expressed in -sometimes – conflictual forms, which make any “descending” statement tout-court a bit of an issue in terms of reflecting the actual way these different visions of the world were perceived and channelled in cultic and ritual practices by our Greek ancestors.

This is not the place for a treaty on ancient Greek religion, therefore we shall dwell only on those aspects of this ancient Greek sense of divinity – those archaic cults linked to the earth-goddess, and then prophecy and divination as they were practiced in the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, and to a specific cult of Zeus, worshipped as “Kataibates” – which lend themselves to be seen with a more sympathetic eye to the explorer of Inca shamanism.

By all means, a few millennia before the Incas, Ghe’ – Gaia, the primordial Earth Mother – was worshipped by the ancient Greeks. One of the attributes of the later, Olympian deity of Apollo was Pythios, and – as the myth goes – Python was the dragon-snake, son of Gaia, who guarded the ancient oracle at Delphi. Here, the Pythia, priestess of the Oracle, divined in trance, uttering inexplicable, enigmatic prophetic announcements, intoxicated by the vapours coming from a rocky chasm in a special area of the sanctuary. Her words were later interpreted by a special class of priests, devoted to the de-codification of the prophetic response. Python was the guardian of this chasm, from where the inebriating vapours ascended from the depths of the earth. The power of prophecy was – in primordial times – originating directly from Ghe’, the Earth Mother. It came, ascending from the earth. In later times, Apollo, a later, solar Olympian deity, stole the role of this primordial divinity, killed Python and took over in the cult at Delphi, becoming himself the god of prophecy.

The Incas worshipped Viracocha, their creator god, Inti, the Sun, Quilla, the Moon goddess, and had in the cosmological temple of Koricancha – in Cusco – a whole section dedicated to Venus, the Pleiades and all the stars. Here, Garcilaso de la Vega informs us, there was a room “dedicated to lightning, and to thunder, which they were both expressed by the single name, illapa. [...] This room was entirely covered with gold, but neither thunder not lightning were represented there [...]. The fourth room was devoted to the rainbow, which they said descended from the Sun [...]. It was entirely covered with gold and the rainbow was painted, in beautiful colours, across the entire surface of one of the walls. They called the rainbow cuichu and revered it very specially. [...] The fifth room and last room was reserved for the high priest and his assistants, who were of royal blood. [...] The name of the high priest was uilac-umu [...] This means “he who speaks of divine matters” [..]“.

Cusco was for the Incas what Delphi was for the Greeks: an esoteric centre of the world.

So far, we have seen an ascending Greek goddess, Ghe’, and had a glimpse of the special status that Cuichu, the rainbow descending from the sun, had for the Incas. Far from mirroring the complexity of the dimension of religious cults and vision of the world in either culture, the statements of Prof. Morales – as reported by Villoldo – do not seem to pay full justice to the reality of facts. There is no clear-cut view of Inca shamanism, religion and cultic practices versus ancient Greek civilization and, escaping poetic and simplified views, more than antithetical and opposite visions of the world we are strongly bound to believe that there is much more ground to dwell on similarities instead.

We do not know in what form the uillac-umu, the high priest of the Incas who spoke of divine matter may have – if at all – survived in contemporary Andean religion and cults. But we know that the Q’eros, who repute themselves direct descendants of the Incas, distinguish (alongside other indigenous communities of the high Andes) between two different types of different shamans: the Altomesayoq (or Alto mesayoq), a higher shaman – invested by the the power of prophecy and seeing – elected by the Apu (“Lord”, Sacred Mountain Spirit) and stroke by lightening (up to) three times, and the Pampamesayoq (or Pampa mesayoq) – a “normal” shaman, of lower status than the Altomesayoq. Both are called Paqos (or pakos).

The lightning cults of ancient Greece, where individuals and areas struck by lightning benefited in certain cases of an exceptional sacred status, and the election process of the Andean Altomesayoq bear a close intrinsic resemblance: both benefit from a special sacred condition and elective affinities.

In ancient Greece, one of the epithets with which the figure of Zeus was worshipped (as we know from Aischylos, as early as 467-458 BC) was that of Kataibates – the god “who descends” as a thunderbolt, or (as later sources translate the epithet) he “who makes to descend” the thunderbolts, denoting in either case the fall of the striking lightening from heaven to earth.

Zeus Kataibates was worshipped for many centuries in different regions of Greece, and the ground adjoining the altars of the god was at times regarded as an ábaton, or inviolable sacred place, innermost sanctuary or shrine. We know that there were lightning ábata, called enelýsia, holy grounds of the god, which were essentially spots struck by lightning and reputed to be the living place of Zeus Kataibates.

The closest Andean equivalent to the Greek enelýsia may be seen in the spot hit by Illapa (deity of thunder, lighting and rainstorms), where the future Altomesayoq – the “shaman of the high table” – will find the sacred stones that will become part of his or her own mesa (sacred space with medicine objects) and will be the aid in the direct communication with the Apu.

The most striking parallel between the specially elected and higher condition of the Altomesayoq and the ancient Greek world (at least from the 5th century B.C.) is probably offered by the status of the Dioblés, the “Zeus-struck man”. The god descended as a lightning flash and the one on whom he fell was considered Diόbletos – “struck by Zeus” – and held in an especially sacred status. In ancient Greece, the divinity of the god was conveyed on the individual struck by the lightning – i.e. by Zeus Kataibates – who was made immortal, or imperishable.

In the Andes there is a special relation between lightning and the make of a high shaman. The Altomesayoq, who can communicate directly with the Apus and Illapa – receives his or her shamanic powers after been struck by lightening. The initiatory process develops essentially along three phases, which are all deeply remnant of traditional shamanic initiations: at the outset Illapa strikes (one to three times) and kills the chosen person, then his or her scattered body parts are put back together, and finally the person is brought back to life. When the candidate future Altomesayoq re-awakes from the shock and regains consciousness, he or she must look for special stones that the Illapa left on the ground when it stroke. Nobody must see – or interfere with – the future Altomesayoq (who may otherwise die).

These stones – called Khuyas stones – are invested of special powers and sacredness, and will become part of the mesa of the Altomesayoq. These will be the intermediary in the direct communication that the high shaman establishes with the Apu and Illapa.

References
Cook, A. B. Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, Cambridge University Press, 1925Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, translated by Maria Jolas, Lima 2002