Ancient Cuzco

by Brian S. Bauer

  The central plaza of Cuzco was also an important ceremonial area in the city. During major rituals, the mummies of the dead Inca rulers were placed in the plaza, and thousands of people gathered to see them. The city center also held temples for various gods, several palaces, numerous royal storehouses, and a wide range of other state institutions and facilities. For example, the large complex of the Acllahuaci (House of Chosen [Women]), which housed hundreds of women who dedicated their lives to serving the state, stood near the center of Cuzco.

  Just outside the city was the monumental structure of Sacsayhuaman. World famous for the massive stones that form parts of its walls, Sacsayhuaman is frequently referred to as a “fortress.” Some early accounts of Cuzco (Cieza de León 1976: 154 [1554: Pt. 2, Ch. 51]) indicate that Sacsayhuaman contained a sun temple, suggesting that it was the focus of ritual activities. Further outside the city, but still within the valley, were other state facilities, royal estates, and a large number of villages and towns.

  DYNASTIC ORDER OF THE INCA

  At the time of the European invasion, the royal Inca traced their ancestry back eleven generations from the last undisputed ruler of the empire, Huayna Capac, to the mythical founder of Cuzco, Manco Capac (Table 1.1). Traditionally, the Inca are thought to have expanded their state beyond the limits of the Cuzco region under Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, the ninth ruling Inca. A warrior king of legendary proportions, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui is frequently credited with having reorganized the economic, social, and calendric systems of the empire. According to oral tradition recorded by the Spaniards, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui’s eldest son, Amaru Topa, was passed over as heir to the throne, and the rule was given to his younger son, Topa Inca Yupanqui. Decades later, Huayna Capac, a son of Topa Inca Yupanqui, inherited the rule from his father and continued expanding the empire until his sudden death in an epidemic that swept the empire in the 1520s, shortly before European contact. Following the death of Huayna Capac, the rule of Tahuantinsuyu was disputed between two half brothers, Atahualpa and Huascar. The Spanish forces of Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1532, just as Atahualpa defeated Huascar. Pizarro captured Atahualpa in the highland city of Cajamarca and, after holding the ruling Inca hostage for most of a year, executed him.

  For some forty years after the execution of Atahualpa, the Spaniards established and supported a series of puppet Inca kings in Cuzco. During this period the Spaniards fought a protracted war against Manco Inca (a half brother of Atahualpa) and his descendants, who attempted to maintain an independent Inca state with a capital in the remote area of Vilcabamba. The end of indigenous rule came in 1572 with the capture and execution of Tupac Amaru, the last surviving son of Manco Inca, by the Spaniards.

  TABLE 1.1. Traditional list of Inca kings

  The Cuzco Valley and Its Natural Resources

  The Cuzco Valley is defined in this work as the area drained by the Huatanay River (Map 1.2), which flows southeast from above the modern city of Cuzco, through the area of the Angostura (the Narrows) at approximately mid-valley, and into the Lucre Basin, where it turns northeast and enters the Vilcanota River. So defined, the Cuzco Valley is about 40 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide at its maximum (Photo 1.1). For analytical purposes, the Cuzco Valley is frequently divided into three parts or basins: the Cuzco Basin, the Oropesa Basin, and the Lucre Basin.

  The Cuzco Basin represents the northwest end of the valley and is defined as the region between the headwaters of the Huatanay on the mountain of Huaynacorcor, northwest of Cuzco, and the distinct narrowing of the valley below the modern-day town of San Jerónimo called the Angostura, southeast of Cuzco. The Oropesa Basin represents a long and narrow stretch of the river valley between the Angostura and a second constriction of the valley just southeast of the town of Oropesa. The Lucre Basin entails the drainage area for Lake Lucre near the conjunction of the Huatanay and the Vilcanota Rivers. The southeast end of the Cuzco Valley, in the Lucre Basin, lies at 3,100 m, while Cuzco rests at 3,400 m. The highest mountain surrounding the valley is Pachatusan, which rises to 4,842 m. A series of diverse climatic zones are located along the slopes of the Cuzco Valley.3 During Inca times, the lowest-lying areas were inundated from January through March by annual flooding. Thus, although the valley bottom supported a wide range of faunal and floral life, it was unsuitable for permanent human occupation.

  MAP 1.2. The Cuzco Valley is divided into three basins: Cuzco, Oropesa, and Lucre.

  PHOTO 1.1. The Cuzco Basin looking southeast (Courtesy of Servicio Aerofotográfico Nacional, Peru)

  The most agriculturally productive and intensively occupied environmental zones in the Cuzco Valley are the large alluvial terraces that rest some 20–50 meters above the valley floor. Being flat and relatively easily irrigated, these regions are excellent for maize cultivation. It should be noted, however, that the alluvial terraces are not distributed evenly across the valley. For example, the north side of the Cuzco Basin is characterized by steep mountain slopes, entrenched streams, and small areas of alluvial terraces. In contrast, the southern side of the Cuzco Basin contains broad expanses of alluvial terraces, wide tributary valleys, and gentler slopes. For these reasons, the first agriculturists focused their settlements on the south, rather than the north, side of the basin. It was not until the Killke Period (AD 1000–1400), and the advent of large-scale irrigation systems built as public works projects, that the agricultural potential of the north side could be fully and effectively exploited. The settlement preference for the south side of the valley was immediately clear to us while conducting the survey, and it is even notable in the first archaeological map of the basin, made when the locations of only a handful of sites were known (Map 1.3).

  A variety of Old and New World crops, including wheat, broad beans, and potatoes, are currently grown on the valley slopes (3,500–3,900 m). Daniel Gade (1975: 105–106), working in the nearby Vilcanota Valley, notes that in Inca times this zone was characterized by the cultivation of tubers (such as oca, añu, and ullucu) and native seed crops (such as quinoa and tarwi). Harvests on the valley slopes vary greatly from year to year because of frost and hail damage.

  The highest environmental zone in the Cuzco Valley is characterized by rounded ridges and scattered rock outcroppings. The lower reaches of this zone are occasionally used for tuber cultivation (3,900–4,000 m.) while the upper parts are covered with the hearty Andean ichu grass used extensively for pasture. Gade (1975: 104) writes of this zone: “Undoubtedly the most important single grass species is Stipa ichu, the basic food of llamas and alpacas, as well as a plant used directly by man in a number of ways. The low temperatures and short growing season rule out full-scale agriculture, and in this zone one finds the uppermost limits of crop cultivation.” A variety of frost-resistant tubers, including various “sweet” and “bitter” potatoes, are cultivated in the Cuzco region. From June to August, when the nights are cold and frosts frequent, chuño and moraya, two different forms of freeze-dried potatoes, are produced in this zone.

  MAP 1.3. The first archaeological map of the Cuzco Basin, made by John Rowe (1944), highlights the fact that many of the largest prehistoric sites are located along its south side.

  Rising above the upper limits of crop cultivation are several important mountain peaks, most notably Pachatusan, where snow survives year-round in the deeply shaded spots near its summit. Other important mountains adjacent to the valley include Huanacauri (4,089 m), Anaguarque (4,000 m), Picchu (4,050m), and Huaynacorcor (formally known as Sinca [4,400 m]), which were all considered sacred by the Inca (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1906: 69 [1572: Ch. 31]). Evidence of Inca offerings has been found at the summits of most of these mountains.

  It is also important to note that although the Cuzco Valley is now greatly deforested, during late prehistoric times this was not the case. Garcilaso de la Vega witnessed the rapid deforestation of the valley that occurred soon after the arrival of the Spaniards:

  I remember that the valley of Cuzco used to be adorn
ed with innumerable trees of this valuable variety, but within the space of a very few years it was almost stripped of them, the reason being that they provide excellent charcoal for braziers. (Garcilaso de la Vega 1966: 504 [1609: Pt. 1, Bk. 8, Ch. 12])4

  Perhaps the largest concentration of forest lay to the northwest of Cuzco, in a vast and rolling area between the city and the slope of Huaynacorcor. Based on the large number of projectile points found during our survey work in these hills, it seems that the northwestern end of the valley continued to be a favored hunting region throughout prehistory. This remained true even in Inca times, as we know that the Inca maintained a royal hunting lodge there (Cobo 1990: 63 [1653: Bk. 13, Ch. 14]).

  Salt springs are common features of the Andes, and when the concentration of salt in the water is high enough, the streams are exploited for their minerals. During the dry season, wide, shallow basins are dug into the earth and repeatedly filled with the saline water. Through numerous evaporation and refilling events, deposits of salt develop on the basin floors which are then harvested at the end of the dry season. Such salt production continues today in the area of Maras, some 30 kilometers northwest of Cuzco, and there were once similar, although much smaller, salt pans just outside the village of San Sebastián in the Cuzco Basin. Various early colonial writers note the production of salt at this location, and it was at this spot that Hernando Pizarro defeated Diego Almagro in 1538 in what is called “the Battle of the Salt Flats.” Bingham recorded the salt pans in a 1912 photograph, and a few survived until the early 1970s, when they were finally destroyed by urban growth (Photo 1.2).

  Overview of Cuzco Archaeological Research

  Following Peru’s independence from Spain in 1824, Cuzco became a mecca for those interested in the Inca.5 American and European explorers began arriving and subsequently publishing accounts of their travels. At the same time, Peruvian educational and research institutions began to develop, and their members also journeyed to the former imperial capital to report on its antiquities.

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY WORKS

  With the publication of William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), interest in the Inca was renewed worldwide. Building on the success of Alexander Humboldt’s explorations into Ecuador at the turn of the century, the French were especially active in explorations. In 1847 Léonce Angrand (1972) traveled from Lima to Cuzco, recording his journey in a series of fine-line drawings.6 Peruvian-born Mariano Eduardo de Rivero and his colleague Johann Jakob von Tschudi described the general antiquities of Peru, first in Spanish in 1851 and then in English in 1854, and included a discussion of Cuzco. Their work contains a rough but early illustration of the Dominican church that was built upon the Coricancha as well as a crude drawing of a stone wall in the city. British explorer Clements Markham arrived in Cuzco in 1853 and spent several weeks visiting the city and the nearby countryside (Markham 1856). He, too, provides a number of rough drawings of the city and its ancient monuments (Blanchard 1991). Charles Wiener was commissioned by the French government to travel through and report on Peru and Bolivia in 1877. His book contains many engravings of Cuzco and various artifacts that he saw while in the city (Wiener 1880). Peruvian researchers were also active during this time. Among the most important was Antonio Raimondi, who recorded his impressions of the Cuzco countryside in his multivolume work El Perú (1874–1879).7

  PHOTO 1.2. The salt pans of San Sebastián in 1912 (Neg. no. 2586, Hiram Bingham, courtesy Yale Peabody Museum and the National Geographic Society)

  Ephraim George Squier, perhaps the most celebrated nineteenth-century explorer of the Andes, visited Cuzco in 1865 and lived for two weeks with the Dominican monks within the confines of the former Coricancha. He traveled to Peru as part of a special negotiating commission appointed by President Lincoln to settle a variety of issues with the Peruvian government. After completing his official work in Lima, Squier spent over a year (1864–1865) exploring the Andes. On returning from South America, Squier wrote his classic study Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas. His book is filled with detailed discussions of the places he saw, maps of many of the sites he visited, and numerous engravings of the lands, ruins, and peoples he encountered. In all, Squier provides three maps (including the earliest map of the Coricancha) and more than twenty engravings related to the city of Cuzco and its surrounding ruins.

  An equally significant contribution by Squier, although largely unpublished, is a collection of photographs that he took during his travels.8 His pictures of the coast are of extremely high quality and represent the earliest photographs of many important archaeological sites. Unfortunately, Squier’s photographer died as soon as they arrived in the Bolivian highlands, so he was forced to take his own pictures during the later months of his trip. But Squier had little photographic experience, and his pictures of the Lake Titicaca Basin and Cuzco region are of poor quality. Nevertheless, they preserve important architectural information, and several are published for the first time in the second half of this book.

  EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY WORKS

  One of the “fathers” of Andean archaeology, Max Uhle, conducted active fieldwork in Peru for several decades after his first visit to Peru in 1892.9 He spent time in 1905, 1907, and 1911 in the Cuzco region, where he conducted excavations (Uhle 1912; Valencia Zegarra 1979), as well as in the city itself, where he produced an early map of the Coricancha (Uhle 1930). The great turning point in Cuzco archaeology occurred, however, with the work of Yale University’s Hiram Bingham. Although Bingham was a Latin American historian rather than a trained archaeologist, he led a series of three archaeological expeditions over the course of five years (1911–1916) that brought Machu Picchu to the world’s attention. This spectacular find placed Cuzco in the limelight for world travelers, where it has remained ever since. Bingham’s numerous publications and those produced by other members of the expeditions also marked the beginning of scientific literature for the Inca heartland.10

  By 1920 the Cuzco region—with the imperial city of the Inca, the so-called Sacred Valley of the Vilcanota, and the newly cleared site of Machu Picchu—was established as a world-famous tourist destination. Guide books (Zárate 1921; García 1922), postcards, and images for lenticular stereoscopes showing the ancient monuments of the region were being produced on a large scale. In 1934, to increase tourism and to mark the fourth centenary of Spanish Cuzco, the Peruvian government began a series of large-scale restoration projects at the largest and most famous sites of the region, such as Sacsayhuaman, Kenko, Tambomachay, Pikillacta, and Pisaq. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few brief accounts by Luis E. Valcárcel (1934, 1935), the results of these massive projects have not been published. However, other studies conducted in Cuzco over the course of the 1930s, particularly those supervised by Luis Pardo, director of the Archaeological Museum in Cuzco (1938, 1939, 1941, 1946, 1957), were completed and published.

  The 1940s brought many advances to Cuzco archaeology, which was at that time still largely focused on studying Inca remains. Starting in 1941, John H. Rowe began an investigation of the region to identify its pre-Inca materials (Rowe 1944). Working closely with local archaeologists, Rowe (1956) produced the first ceramic sequence for the region, which spans the time between the appearance of large agricultural villages (ca. 500 BC) to the fall of the Inca Empire. In the post–World War II period, there has been a steady increase in research interest in the Inca and pre-Inca remains of the region. Much of this more recent research is discussed in detail in later chapters of this book that present the various historic periods of the Cuzco region in chronological order.11

  The Cuzco Valley Archaeological Project

  With the rapid population growth of Cuzco, dozens of its archaeological sites are being destroyed each year, and there is little time left to collect information on the heartland of the Inca. In the early 1980s, the National Institute of Culture (INC, Instituto Nacional de Cultura) in Cuzco funded a project to document the largest s
ites of the area. In the course of this project, the INC produced a series of outstanding maps that have successfully been used to defend many areas of cultural importance against the advancement of urban growth. Nevertheless, with the construction of new homes, roads, sewer lines, and other support facilities for Cuzco, many sites are destroyed each year. In 1994 I began the Cuzco Valley Archaeological Project, which included both a regional survey and an excavation program, to understand the settlement history of the valley before much of the evidence was destroyed by urban growth.

  THE REGIONAL SURVEY PROGRAM

  A research methodology based primarily on systematic survey data was selected for this project in the belief that the developmental processes of culture change are best investigated through regional archaeological investigations (Hutterer and MacDonald 1982). Regional archaeological surveys suppose that the spatial distribution of the sites of a prehistoric society will reflect fundamental organizational features of that society, and that a systematic examination of settlement patterns is a logical beginning point in the investigation of prehistoric social and economic systems. Assuming that the settlement patterns in a region reflect indigenous patterns of resource use, subsistence procurement, and social organization, archaeological surveys are now widely conducted in the Andes (Browman 1970; Earle et al. 1980; Schreiber 1987a; Wilson 1988; Bauer 1992a; Billman 1996; Stanish et al. 1997; Parsons et al. 2000a, 2000b; Stanish 2001, 2003; Silverman 2002). By comparing the regional settlement patterns obtained for each period of the valley’s history, we can view regional changes over space and time and model the kind of changes brought about by a number of important processes, such as the formation and expansion of a centralized state.