Hello, and welcome to Western Sieve Episode two hundred and forty five, People
of the Andes. Last week we finished with Hernan Cortes and the Fall of
Old Mexico. Hernan Cortez is probably the most famous Spanish conquistador of the era,
but there were others. If Cortez is in first place, then certainly
Francisco Pizaro comes in a close second. Cortez is to the Aztec Mexica what
Pizaro is to the Inca. The Inca were absolutely at their height of power
and authority when Pizaro arrived. And if you've never been, the Andes is
one of the places on earth expressly designed for defense. So if anyone stood
a good chance against Spanish encroachment, it should have been the Inca. Yet,
as we will see, there are numerous parallels between the fall of Old
Mexico and the collapse of the Inca. Today, I want to cover the
basics. Who were the Inca, where do they live and what can we
say about their culture. One thing I should note at the outset is that
compared to the Mexica and the Maya, we can say a lot more about
the Inca. The reason is simple. While Natal, the classical Mexica language
is effectively dead. Quechua, the language of the Inca, is still spoken
in parts of Peru and Chile today. That language never died, so we
can make connections more easily when it comes to the Inca than we could with
the Mexica and sir with the Maya. So with all that being said,
let's get started. At first glance, the rugged lands of western South America
probably look like a bad place to give birth to a grand civilization. Compressed
within a narrow band along the Pacific Ocean lie the highest peaks in the western
Hemisphere, a coastal desert that may go on for years without rain, and
dense tropical jungles. As forbidding as the setting seems, a closer look shows
that the land contains a mosaic of productive micro environments and natural resources. The
Andes Mountains form the continent's most commanding geographic feature, Running eight thousand kilometers along
the length of the land mass. They ascend so rapidly that the mental divide
lies only one hundred kilometers east of the shoreline at Lima, Peru. For
a seasoned hiker, the climb up to the high passes takes about a week,
but a passenger in a long distance taxi can get there in a couple
hours. The descent from the eastern snow caps to the upper reaches of the
Amazon Jungle is even more precipitous in some places. To appreciate how geography has
condensed the ecology, we can visualize a path across central Peru from ocean to
forest. In a trip that would cover about two hundred kilometers by air,
we would pass over twenty, yes twenty, of the world's thirty four major
life zones. In this compact vertical arrangement, which is not duplicated anywhere else
on the planet, Distinct ecological belts may lie less than a hour's walk apart.
The early inhabitants managed to flourish in the demanding conditions, for the Andes
contain one of the richest ecological zones of any of its size in the world.
People first entered the continent at least fifteen thousand years ago, when hunting
and gathering were the way of life everywhere. Over the millennia, they devised
a wide variety of foraging, farming, and herding strategies. The marine fisheries
of the Bone chilling inshore waters could be exploited with simple technology well Yama and
alpaca herding became both a successful adaptation and a source of wealth for the mountain
people, although people still foraged for some resources. After states appeared about two
thousand years ago, all of their staple foods and industrial crops had been domesticated
by three thousand BC. They modified features of the landscape through irrigation, terracing,
and draining wetlands. At the same time, they adjusted to the rhythms
with their lives to the demands of the climactic cycles. Despite their successes,
however, land in the Andes was never easy. Even in some of the
most densely occupied highland zones, Crops honestly could still fail two years out of
three, while earthquakes, floods, erratic rainfall, disease, and a host
of other natural forces periodically brought disaster to subsistence systems. The Inca Empire,
which was very much a latecomer to the Andean civilizations, built upon a millennia
of adaptation, tradition, and innovation in carving out their domain. For the
most parts, it was a rural society, as most people lived in small
towns and villages and spent their time farming and hurting. Over the last five
million years, the oceanic Nazca Plate has been sliding eastward, slowly, creating
a deep trench off the coast of Peru and Chile, while raising the Andes
Mountains. The highest snow cap in the America's Mount Akungagu is six thousand,
nine hundred and sixty meters tall and lies along the Chile Argentina border. Plate
tectonics have also created three active volcanic zones along the spine of the mountains from
central Columbia to central Chile. The Andes, as a result, are much
richer in terms of mineral deposits than the central Mexican valley of Cidian abounds,
and there are deposits of copper and tins scattered about, making Chile and Peru
prime locations for mining stills a day. In terms of climate, there are
two major trends in western South America. Number one, the eemperate zone in
Chile from the south to the tropics in Columbia to the north, and two,
the arid west to the humid east. Offshore. The Chile Peru Trench
provides a conduit for the frigid waters of Antarctica to flow north, making the
waters rich in fish, everything from anchovies to sea bass. Both the rocky
and sandy shores provided homes for many kinds of shellfish. In some areas,
the remains of these are piled up to five meters deep in ancient sites.
From the northern reaches to Peru to central Chile, the entire coast is essentially
a coastal desert where very little grows. Slightly further inland, it's possible to
grow stable crops such as corn, squash, and cotton. Above the coastal
zone is the warmer yungus zone, which produces crops like peppers and cocoa for
chocolate. But the most productive zone is the Quechua band, defined as three
thousand, one hundred to three five hundred meters above sea level. Here is
where you would find native grains like quinwa, and here is where the potato
was born. Above this zone is the Sunni zone up to four thousand meters
above sea level, which features cold hills, bridges, and deep valleys.
Above this is yet one more zone, the Puna zone up to five thousand
meters, which is the natural habitat for the only beasts of burden in the
Americas before the arrivals of Europeans, Yamas and alpacas. Down the eastern Peruvian
slopes lie the Upper Amazon Brew speaking from personal experience, is a truly remarkable
place. You can go from frigid mountains to humid jungles in a day.
In some places, the upper edge of the Amazon is known as the Sia
de Silva or eyebrow of the Jungle. During the height of the Incan Empire,
it was cut and terraced there he could produce corn, cocoa, fruits,
and peppers. While we do not have much information about how this zone
fit into the Incan Empire, without a doubt it was important economically. To
the north are the coastal mangrove swamps and western woodlands of Ecuador. This would
have been the border of the Incan Empire, for the Inca never managed to
bring this region under its control. Traditional communities today in the Andes are based
on kin groups called ailu. Members of this group believe that they share a
common ancestor. They hold resources collectively and allocate according to family size and status.
Whenever possible, a n ailu would have access to all the growing zones
in the Andes regions. Ailu usually contained two or three opposing parts or divisions
you might think of them. Members typically take their spouse from the opposite division
and thus keep resources within the larger group. The INCA used this same kin
group system to take advantage of the varied natural environment and achieve self sufficiency.
Communities sought to distribute their members across the landscape. For every ailu. It
was very advantageous to have different members of the kin group in all the different
farming zones. Has also helped to maximize labor because the growing period in each
of the zones was different. By using irrigation, farmers could move up their
planting seasons and their especially in the higher zones, beat the frost. The
system was intelligent but very straightforward. Everyone would work on the land in the
highest zone first and then keep moving down with the seasons. That way,
Anaelu could be efficient with its labor pool and ensure that there were always fresh
crops about to be harvested. Pastoralism augmented farming. Evidence suggests that drovers have
been taking caravans of yamas and alpacas to the coast for thousands of years,
and we're certainly doing so during the Incan imperial period. Recently, archaeologists have
made great strides and identify and explaining the major changes that occurred in Andean prehistory,
or readily admit that we still have a long way to go and accounting
for the emergence of complex society theories tend to focus on a few key issues
in seeking for the explanations for the rise of early states. Among the most
important our population growth and the concentration of people in more urbanized settlements. As
societies expanded and nucleated, their interactions made it harder and harder to maintain social
order and obtain adequate food. On the other hand, the close interaction of
large numbers of people, and this is the case generally everywhere, offered a
setting that fostered intellectual life and creativity. Increases of food production, specialization of
labor, and coordination of labor for tasks ranging from erecting monuments to warfare were
also crucial. When found together, they indicates a society had centralized leadership and
that its members were interdependent for their livelihoods in ways that fed back on one
another. Socially, the most important change was the appearance of inherited status differences.
This shift signaled differences in access to power and prestige that were ascribed at
birth and laid the foundations for class society. Formalized ideologies explained humanity's place in
the cosmos, provided rationales for life, But the beliefs also legitimized social inequality
by proposing separate origins for the elite and common members of society. The religions
thus simultaneously bonded societies and justified disparities in rank and power. The beliefs were
also given physical form in monumental architecture such as pyramids, palass and open spaces,
in art, and in ceremonies that sometimes venerated the dead as if they
were still among the living. In terms of political life, the creation of
offices with specific duties allowed a privileged few individuals or kin groups to control the
accumulation of information and thus wield disproportionate power within societies. Those individuals gathered and
guarded information, set policy, and made day to day decisions. All those
actions were advanced by the invention of standardized recording systems. Each of these features
was well established in the Andes more than one thousand years before the rise of
Inca power. Following a period of slow development, things really started to take
off in the Andes about twenty five hundred BC. Around two thousand, five
hundred, simple foraging began to give way to farming, and small scale corporate
architecture starts to emerge, think like small pyramids. This era also saw major
advances in craft technology. Pottery improved, metallurgy developed. The head of loom
was invented. From one hundred to seven hundred CE, the first state and
urban societies developed along Peru's northern coasts. By fourteen hundred CE, a group
called the Chimu had united the entire region. Next week, I'm going to
talk about the political life of the Incan Empire, so I'll leave that particular
thread dangling for just a moment, but suffice it to say that by one
thousand CE, the Incas were still living in hundreds of fragmented societies. As
I mentioned before, the language of the Incas was Quechua, but its speakers
would have known it as run Assimi, or translated literally human speech. By
fifteen thirty two, Quechua was the Lingua Franca of the Andes. The Spanish
and their writings referred to it as the main language of the land. The
Inca, like the rulers of many ancient societies, promoted an official ideology.
The tenets of state religion were intended to justify both incas supremacy and the supremacy
of their rulers. However, like any time that politics and dogma collide,
they're bound to be contradictions. For example, the Inca worship the Sun,
the divine line of kings, and sacred landmarks, but at the same time
they consciously manipulated that same past to legitimize their rule. For the Inca tradition,
history and politics were interwoven with belief. The Inca religion was quite decentralized,
despite the fact that Cusco was the political capital of the Inca. Religious
practice tended to revolve around local deities, shrines, and myths. Even into
the sixteenth century. The Spanish, as they were in Mexico, were slow
to recognize the complexity of Inca religious belief and practice. To them, it
all looked like devil worship. The Spaniards recognized that the Inca worship the sun
and believed their rulers were divine, but not much beyond that. It took
the Spanish about fifteen years to begin to unravel anything more complex than that.
Sadly, that was about fifteen years after the last major Son ceremony. I
say sadly because I don't think there's a person alive today who would not want
to know exactly what went on during that ceremony. Now, when we talk
about Incan creation myths, most begin at lake and run something like this.
In ancient times, before there was a light, the Creator or Alpachica,
fashioned a race of giants to see if it would be good to make humans
at that scale. He saw that they were too large, however, and
so he made humans in his own size. But they were filled with hubris
and greed. So the Creator turned some to stone and others to diverse forms,
and some were swallowed up by the earth or the sea, and he
caused a great flood to cover the land, destroying all that was upon it
save for three men, whom he saved to help him create humans anew.
Obviously, you're going to notice a lot of connections between other creation myths.
Later, on an island in Lake Titicaca, he caused the sun, moon
and stars to come forth. The Sun was jealous that the Creator had made
the Moon brighter than he, so he cast ashes in her face. Thus
she remains with her brilliants dimmed. The Creator then crossed over the dry land
at Tiwanuka, where he carved and drew images of all the nations he thought
to create on some larger stones. He ordered his two servants to memorize the
names of the people and the places where they were to appear on the earth.
Then he sent one of them to the coast and the other to the
eastern slopes. Waika himself took the central path, calling out the people from
the lakes, springs, valleys, caves, trees, caverns, and mountains.
He appeared to be a man of normal size, dressed in a white
robe, hearing his staff and a book in his hands. At Cuzco,
he called forth the Incan nobles, gave Cusco its name, and continued north.
Finally he reached the Ecuadorian coast, where he told his servants that his
messengers would return one day, and then together they walked out over the water
until they appeared beyond the horizon. Worship of the Sun was a centerpiece of
official Inca religion. Incan emperor's claimed to direct genealogical link to the Creator through
the Sun, but of course there were other gods. The patron god of
empire and conquest was called Inti. The Inca as I mentioned in the Creation
myth, worshiped the moon as well, who was considered the wife of the
Sun. Into Ilappa was the thunder god, but also the god of lightning,
the rainbow, and basically all other meteorological phenomena. The Inca's annual calendar
was based on solar cycles, while festivals were largely built around twelve lunar cycles.
The Incas knew that twelve lunar months fell short of a solar year,
so they made a correction at the winter solstice. Historians aren't ane hundred percent
sure about this, but they believed that the Inca used a thirty day month.
Inc and ceremonies were tied to both solar and lunar cycles, as well
as irregularly scheduled rituals. For example, Inti Rami or quote unquote warriors cultivation
took place in the month that coincided with the June solstice. Whatever month that
happened to be that year, but the biggest festival was the Inca Festival of
the Sun, which lasted eight to nine days and was considered a grand state
ceremony. According to one Spanish official quote, they brought out all the effigies
from Cusco's temples onto a plane at the edge of Cusco, toward the area
where the sun dawned. The effigies with the greatest prestige were placed beneath rich
finally worked feather canopies, which had an elegant appearance. The space between the
canopies formed an avenue of over thirty paces wide, and all the lords and
other principal figures of Cusco stood in it. End quote. But as I
mentioned, the Inca religion was not at all centralized. Across Peru. Still
today are the remnants of hundreds of shrines and miniature temples. The Inca believed
the land around them positively teemed with spirits. But fascinatingly, all of these
shrines are not randomly placed, not random at all. The Inca based everything
on the Temple of the Sun in Cusco. From there, they literally on
a map, drew lines emanating out in different directions. All of the smaller
shrines fall on one of these lines. Now, as to human sacrifice,
suffice it to say that the Inca did not practice human sacrifice as regulariously as
the Mexica. That being said, they did practice human sacrifice. For the
Inca, however, human sacrifice was a limited religious component, generally practiced only
during the festival of the Sun, after a major military victory, or after
the death of an emperor. Certainly, that's still a lot of human sacrifice,
but one might, of course argue that one human sacrifice is too many.
But it's not even close to the level that the Mexica engaged in such
practices. Likewise, the rationale for human sacrifice isn't laid out as well for
us in the Inca sources as it is in the Mexican sources. The best
we get in Peru are fleeting references to needing to join the Creator, the
Sun, and other deities after death. For the vast majority of people,
though, life revolt around kin, not major festivals or human sacrifices. These
were the people with whom you shared social ties and economic risks. Most of
the highland societies headed by hereditary local lords called kuraka, now as I will
discuss more next week. In any portion of the empire, the Inca themselves
and I mean the ethnic Inca, were at the top of the social pyramid.
While the Inca conquered and subjugated new peoples around them, just like the
Mexica, they did not incorporate them into the imperial structure. There was the
Inca and then there was everyone else. The Inca were at the top of
the social pyramid, and from there what mattered was your proximity to the royal
family. The closer you were, the higher your status. From there,
your value actually broke down based on your stage of life. The Inca did
not keep track of people's specific age. Rather, they kept track of where
they were in their stage of life, though in the middle stages were of
the highest status. Because the Inca very much valued labor, the Inca also
valued large families. Women were encouraged socially to have as many children as the
land might support. This was, of course a pre industrial society. As
a result, more were hers meant that more land could be put into cultivation,
and we have no evidence that the Incan Empire ever suffered from some of
the overpopulation problems that confronted. Late medieval Europe. Women in fact, worked
pretty close up to childbirth from the moment the mother went into labor. However,
she was prohibited from visiting the farm fields for religious reasons. Children were
treated sternly from the word go. Famously, newborn infants were dipped into icy
streams as a sort of rude welcome to their old and somewhat inhospitable mountain world.
Consider the following account quote. Every morning, when the baby was wrapped
up, it was washed in cold water and often exposed to the night air
and do The mothers never took the babies into their arms or on their laps,
either when giving suck or at any other time. They said that that
made them cry babies, and encouraged them to want to be nursed and not
stay in the cradle. The mother reared the child herself, never gave it
out to nurse, even if she were a great lady, unless she were
ill. During this time, they abstained from sexual intercourse, considered that it
spoiled the milk and caused the baby to grow weak. End quote. Now,
as usual, the children of the nobility were treated differently. If you
were an inca young boy you'd receive the most formal education available. You'd learn
the use of weapons, how to speak a Quechua, religious historical studies,
how to read and write. If you were the son of a local non
Inca noble, then you would be sent as a hostage to Cuscoe to ensure
the good behavior of her father. However, once in Cuscoe, you generally
received the same education as the sons of Incan nobles. Both boys and girls
went through the rights of passage in their early teens, which marked their transition
from childhood to adolescence. A girl celebrated individually at her first menstruation, which
occurred then by the age of thirteen or fourteen. Although a girl's ceremonies were
less elaborate than the boy's collective affairs, they were equally valued. She was
required to fast and seclusion for three days, on the last of which she
received just a little raw corn. On the fourth day, her mother washed
and dressed her in fine clothes made for the occasion. The relatives then came
to visit for a couple of days, during which the girls served them food
and drink. Her most notable uncle gave her an adult name, counseled her
to live right and serve her parents well. Favorite names in Incan society generally
emphasize beauty and purity. For example, there were names like q Lore which
means star, wrong too which means egg oslo which means pure, Shimpo which
means mark, and gold which means auri. The ceremonies concluded as he the
uncle and the other relatives gave her gifts according to their means. Boys maturation
ceremonies were probably very simple for common people, but were extremely elaborate for the
sons of Inca aristocrats. The right of adolescent passage was celebrated once a year
for a community in Cusco. This always coincided with the December Solstice festival.
Boys would reach the age of about fourteen were given their breechcloth at this time,
which was woven by their mothers. They also received adult names during these
rites. Preferred name for Inca boys in English this time are things like condor,
snake, and hawk. Marriage marked the passage into full adulthood. The
marriage ceremonies were simple and varied from one Ayulu or clan to the next.
Generally, there was some form of gift giving ceremony. The groom presented the
future mother in law with a bag of cocao leaves, and when she accepted
it, the marital bond was done. The new couple would then take up
residency in their own household. The Inca views on afterlife were different from the
Mexica. In the Andes, a person's status changed when he or she died,
but they didn't descend or ascend into a sort of heaven where hell.
Instead, the spirit of the ancestor still inhabited the land, which is why
the streams, valleys, and so on and so forth had quasi magical properties.
Not to some extent, farming practices in parts of the Andes haven't changed
much since fifteen thirty two. The final year of the Inca land was divided
out based on the size, needs, and prestige of the Ayulu or clan.
One Spanish source in fifteen thirty two wrote that each newly married couple received
a quote tupou of May's land that was supposed to be the amount necessary to
feed the couple for a year. In modern terms, if we do the
math, a tupoo comes out to about one point five acres or one half
a hectare. The Inca were also different from the Mexica in that they had
beasts of burden alpacas and yamas. To that end, most of their clothing
was made of wool from their animals. And that being said, there's very
little evidence to almost no evidence that either animal was consumed regularly for its meat.
The elite might consume alpaca on special occasions, but by no means was
it a regular occurrence. Now, thinking about the economy, local autonomy remained
the ideal, but it was not always possible. Depending on what eco zone
you were in, you might not be able to produce everything for your family.
This is where the greater Ayulu comes in. Exchange networks in the Incan
Empire were based on connections between eco zones, so, by no means was
this capitalism. This was a form of cooperation intended to assure mutual revival goods.
We're not really traded, and certainly not traded for luxury items. They
were exchanged for other essentials and often just within your kin group or clan.
And a particular good example of this is a form of cooperation that was help
during military service. We will discuss the inc And military system more next time,
but when inc And peasants were called up for military service. The expectation
was that if their neighbors were not called up, then they would assist in
cultivating the fields of those who went. So production never dipped. Outside of
farming, household life revolved around family care, cooking, and weaving. Now
these are all one hundred percent essential items, and as a result, within
the household, the woman was the minute figure. The idea was that each
household would produce whatever it needed. When that was not possible, people leaned
on familial connections through the ayulu. A typical inc and household included husband,
wife, their children, an unmarried or widowed adult kin. During the days,
the women and girls spent a lot of time collecting wood or yama dung
to be used as cooking fuel. Again, this was not a task that
was in any way looked down upon. Fire was essential to life in the
Andes, so these female tasks revealed as just as important as male farming duties.
Potatoes and kenwalk were the essential staples of the Highland diet. They were
flavored with herbs and peppers from different ego zones, while stews with fish were
also popular, But meat, as I mentioned, was reserved for special occasions.
Tools were produced, but generally produced only for local use. To the
best of our knowledge, there was no larger market exchange for produced and finished
goods like metal tools. Now. I'm going to go into this more next
time, but I wanted to talk a little today about how the Incas structured
their rural societies. Here is one account from a Spanish priest during the era
immediately after Pizarto's conquest. Quote. When the Inca settled a town or reduced
one to obedience, they would set up markets on its boundaries and divided the
fields an arable land within its territory into three parts in the following way.
One they assigned to religion and the cult of his false gods. Again,
this is a quotation from a Spanish priest. Another he took for himself.
A third they left for the common use of the people. It has not
been possible to determine whether these parts were equal in any towns and provinces.
However, it is known that in many places the division was not equal,
but depended on the availability of the land and the density of the population.
The Inca had the same division made of all the domesticated livestock assigning one part
to religion, another to himself, and another to the community. He did
the same with the grazing lands and the pasture in which the live stock was
pastured, so that the herds were indifferent pastures and could not be mixed.
End quote. Now, when it comes to how they set up their rural
society, the good news is that the Inca didn't have a large urban population
to support in Cusco, nor could they ever have hoped to move bulk goods
over great distances in the Andes to sustain such a population. So this wasn't
like a Rome situation, wherein the capital becomes a sort of parasite on the
provinces. What the Inca wanted was it necessarily tribute goods. So they're also
different from the Mexica in that regard. What they wanted was labor. The
Incan conquests gave new lords access to millions of new workers, and their goal
was to maximize this labor. The Incas chose to intensify the highland economies they
knew best and left the more integrated systems largely alone. Traditionally, as a
result, the Inca economy by historians has been described as quote supply on command
end quote. When the Inca conquered upheaval, they took over the land,
then they sort of gave back or least back the land in return for labor
duty. This is essentially similar and the same as the French corvet system,
which'll talk about eventually when we get to the French Revolution, which designated the
heads of household for rotating labor service. In Quechua, the system is called
mitta, which translates literally to quote take a turn end quote. So in
the Incas system, the labor provided was the tax. Individuals provided a number
of hours of labor each year in lieu of cash or goods in kind.
To make things work. Officials required current information about the size of the tax
paying population and the natural resources at their disposal. This labor tax was levied
on the head of households called the hatoun runa. These were married men who
belong to an age category that corresponded to about twenty five to fifty years of
age, so middle age. All in all, this mounded to somewhere between
fifteen to twenty percent of the empire's total population, which was required to provide
two to three months of work per year. This was the backbone of the
Incan Empire and their political structure. Rome was based on tribute cash or in
kind. The Incan Empire based itself on compulsory labor. Even though the labor
tax was assessed for the head of household, traditionally everyone in the family helped
with the job to get it done more quickly. All taxpayers were supposed to
render some kind of labor, but in practice many were exempt from the traditional
labor service. The Urus who lived on the edges of Lake Titicaca were an
example of a whole people who were exempt from labor service. Sadly, the
Inca chose to exempt these people because they considered them totally inept. Instead,
these folks provided you know, cash or a tributing kind, mostly cloth,
even those communities who provided absolutely nothing, and I do mean absolutely nothing.
The Urus provided cloth, but some communities just couldn't get stuff together enough to
provide any sort of service. But the Inca still made those people provide labor.
And I mean that. There are examples of whole communities being forced to
provide full baskets of lice, which were of course immediately discarded, And the
Inca did this just so that these folks could learn the value of imperial service.
What we know is that over time this corvet like system became increasingly specialized
as the income became more adept at learning what their subjects were good at.
Now, of course, it's really hard to say exactly what everyone did.
Not every job left a mark for archaeologists to study. Forty percent of people
performed portage services or acted as guards at various guard posts, and this obviously
left no archaeological imprint on the land. We do know that one out of
every nine compulsory workers made pottery, which historians love and are able to track
quite easily. Furthermore, one of roughly every four hundred workers was assigned to
go to Cusco, though precisely what they did when they got their historians aren't
sure. Some people worked on large collective farms. These were called farms of
the State and farms of the Sun. Farms of the State grew food for
royal administrators and for the army. Farms of the Sun supported the temple and
the priests. The products of these farms were separated both physically and administratively.
As the quotation I read earlier indicates, the vast majority of The labor on
these farms was provided by the compulsory labor system. Now, farms of the
Sun were supposed to be set aside in every province, and both Sun and
state farms were distinct from royal and aristocratic lands worked by the peasants. The
most extensive of these farms historians know of were at Cochabamba in Bolivia. As
many as fourteen thousand workers labored on fields there at one time. These massive
farms were divided into seventy seven narrow strips across the valley, with groups assigned
to each strip. Alpacas and llamas were a major part of the economy.
However, in this situation, the Inca couldn't just conjure up new herds.
Instead, they had to maximize animal husbandry in the places that had already existed.
Again, as with the farms, there were private herds, herds of
the state, and herds of the Sun. It's very difficult to tabulate total
numbers today, but let's give it a try. In fifteen sixty seven,
a sort of middle of the road local lord had about fifty thousand animals at
his disposal. Thus an estimate of hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of
alpaca and yama in total across all the herds of the state, and sun
is no way out of the question. In order to try to increase these
numbers, the INCA did make efforts to try to introduce flocks into areas where
they had been unknown previously. But how successful these efforts were, well,
we just can't say. The primary use of all these herds was for the
military. Armies on the move regularly used trains of thousands of yama's and alpaca
to pack supplies, and then they could be used as meat when they were
no longer needed. Reportage. While the INCA had the manpower and beasts of
burden to move goods over great distances, they did not have the capacity to
move everything without stopping. The Incan state needed different items at different times across
what was a very long empire. It was too difficult to move items from
one central location across jungle mountains and desert to another in one fell swoop,
so the INCA developed a vast storage system to provide a bridge between production and
need throughout the empire. Most of state storehouses, called kolko, were built
in one of three places. One near Cusco, two along main roads,
and three next to state farms. A Peruvian historian gives us a sense of
the scale that was involved. Quote, in the more than twelve hundred leagues
of coast they coverned, they had the delegates and governors, and many lodgings
in great storehouses full of necessary things which were for provisioning the soldiers, because
in one of them there were lances, and in others darts, and in
others sandals, and then the other remaining arms that they had. Moreover,
some storehouses were filled with rich clothing, and others with more goods, and
others with food and all manners of supply. In this manner, once the
lord was lodged in his housing and his soldiers nearby, not a thing,
from the most trivial to the greatest was lacking, because it could be provided.
Certainly. When the Spanish saw all of this, they were impressed.
A contemporary road as follows. Quote from the fortresses above Couscoe, one can
see many houses, and many of these are the houses of pleasure, and
the rest of past rulers, and others are of the leaders or chiefs of
all the land, who now reside in the city. The others are houses
or storehouses full of blankets, wool, weapons, metals, and clothes,
and everything that has grown or made within this realm. And there is a
house in which are kept more than one hundred thousand dried birds, for from
their feathers articles of clothing are made. There are shields, beams for supporting
tents, knives and other tools, sandals, and armor for people of war,
in such quantity that it is not possible to comprehend how they had been
able to tribute so many different things end quote. These storehouses epitomized ink and
state planning. The overall design of the system greatly facilitated accounting, since it
was easy to determine and catalog the items in said storehouses. Storehouses came in
two models, circular or rectangular. Of course, it goes without saying that
these two models were contoured to the land so as to ensure that they were
always as close to the road as possible. Exactly how much of which supplies
were kept in the storehouses remains a bit of a mystery, although logic dictates
that food was probably the highest percentage good in any storehouse at any time.
Remarkably, the incas storage system continued to run and function for decades in some
areas even after the empire collapsed. It's very difficult to say how much of
an impact on the household economy the state labor system had. Certainly, if
you lived in an area designated as either a state farm or a farm of
the sun, you were going to have to move. That would have been
a major disruption, but for everyone else the disruption was probably minimal. In
many cases, any disruption was probably offset by the relative security the empire provided.
Valleys and terraces, which prior to the Inca were too tempting of targets
for local marauding groups, became effective locations for intense agriculture. There probably would
have been a labor shortage or at least a pinch during the planting and harvesting
periods. After all, state farms and sun farms would have needed planting and
harvesting at the same time as communal plots, so families were probably, to
use a modern term, a bit short staffed during those two periods. Again,
how much this affected people during the time that the Inca ruled is very
hard to say. Certainly, though, when the Spanish arrived, they discovered
a civilization far beyond mere subsistence levels. One conquistador wrote as follows quote.
In one cave they discovered twelve centuries of gold and silver, of the size
and appearance of those of this country, extraordinarily realistic. There were pitchers half
of pottery and half gold, with the gold so well said into the pottery
that no drop of water escaped when they were filled, and beautifully made.
A golden effigy was also discovered. This greatly distressed the Indians, for they
said it was the figure of their first lord who conquered this land. They
found shoes made of gold, of the type women wore like half boots.
They found golden crayfish such as live in the sea, in many vases,
on which were sculpted and relief, all the birds and snakes that they knew,
even down to spiders, caterpillars, and other insects. All of this
was found in a large cave that was between some outcrops of rock outside Cusco.
They had not been buried because they were such delicate objects. The Inca
commanded thousands of metalsmiths, weavers, carpenters, sandal makers, potters, and
dyers, amongst other more specialized craftsmen. The INCA do not seem to have
created many works just for display, in contrast to the Mexica INCA production centered
around creating simple objects for mass consumption. That these products were so consistent suggests
that there must have been some state control and state supervisors. But I don't
want to confuse you. This wasn't a Soviet style command economy. Most of
these goods were still produced and consumed locally, but controlling INCA obtained most of
their goods by compelling a certain amount of labor from artisans rather than a specified
amount of tribute. The most common material made by artisans in those circumstances was
cloth, cotton, and wool. The INCA did not force their people to
come up with the raw materials for these goods. However, each year,
families of weavers received wool from these state stockpiles, which they then spun into
cloth. This wasn't an overly complicated process. In the Andes, prepared wool
was spot into cloth using a simple distaff, which requires a lot of skill
but not a lot of technological innovation. Most inc and weavers then used a
simple horizontal loom consisting of two rods attached to poles set in the ground.
Like other civilizations, the Inca had very different levels of quality for their finished
cloth. The coarsest of this was called choosy. A single length of choosy
served as a bed roll and blanket. More elegant, finer cloth was called
chompi and was made from both cotton and finer woolves The military was probably the
major consumer of cloth and other woven goods such as bags. The Incas also
consumed large but still unknown quantities of textiles for religious activities, especially sacrifices.
Textiles were also used expressly for political purposes. For example, the only way
a non Inca could wear a garment made from the finer cloth chambre was if
an Inca gifted it to them. Clothing therefore signified group identity and social status.
Quote. The men and women of each nation and province had their insignias
and emblems by which they could be identified, and they could not go around
without this identification or exchanged their insignias for those of another nation, or they
would be severely punished. They had this on their clothes with different stripes and
colors, and the men wore their most distinguishing insignia on their heads. Each
nation was identified by their head dress end quote. In the cold, both
sexes dressed in layers of simple, untailored wool clothing. Cotton then, was
much more common in warmer weather. The production of so many textiles required tens
of thousands of people working at coordinated tasks. The raw materials came from state
or church farms, or herds, or gathered resources. In some instances,
the weavers and herders lived nearby. Elsewhere, the raw materials were accumulated,
stored, and dispensed to the artisans as needed. Many of the tasks involved
in making textiles were restricted by gender, but just about everybody in the family
could get involved in some way. Young boys, for example, collected bird
feathers, and girls the dye stuffs. Different kinds of cloth were woven by
women and men. While male weavers wove many of the finer grades of cloth
and the feathered textiles. The women's made the finest and most valued compeis for
sacrifices, idols, and the ruler himself. Other women holding special rank also
made textiles. The wives of lords, even those of the inca themselves,
also wore fine cloth, As one Spaniard reported, quote, there was no
one who was an administrative official who did not send the Anca every year a
set of garments made for his person by the hands of the official's wife end
quote. To meet the nearly insatiable demand or clothing, the Inca set entire
communities to weaving. Sometimes this might mean as many as one thousand households in
a community working on weaving. The Inca were also skilled metal workers. People
had been working metal in the Andes for thousands of years before the Incan Empire
was established, so the Inca were drawing on existing knowledge. This is not
like the end of the Bronze Age, when iron workers brought the tradition with
them as they moved. The Inca used a lot of simple copper tools,
like needles, and some of these were even bronze smelted with arsenic. These
items were not particularly prized, suggesting that they were common obviously, though the
Spanish didn't come to Peru looking for copper needles. What they wrote home about
was the gold. The Inca, especially in Cusco, had massive amounts of
gold. The entire interior of the Temple of the Sun was covered in gold
plates. Each nearly a yard by a yard in length. Consider this account.
Quote. These buildings were sheets with gold and large plates on the side
where the sun rises, but on the side that there was more shaded from
the sun, the gold in them was more debased. The Christians went to
these buildings, and with no aid from the Incas, who refused to help,
saying it was a building of the sun and they would die, the
Christians decided to remove the ornament with some copper crowbars end quote. The conquering
Spanish removed seven hundred of these plates, each weighing around two kilograms, and
melted them down. Today, the gold alone, not the artistic value,
which would have been immense and incalculable, would be at eleven million dollars.
Because the Spanish hunted down inc and gold treasures so thoroughly, only a few
pieces survive from museum collections. When it came to mining, the Inca made
a blanket claim to all mineral resources, but that was more of an assertion
of sovereignty than reality. Quote. Some of these mines were worked at the
expense and under the auspices of the Inca themselves, and others constituting the majority
were worked at the expense of local lords of the districts in which the mines
were located. This was so that they would have things to give as presence
to the Inca. End quote. Mining techniques were simple and extremely dangerous.
Chafts were tiny and only one person could enter at a time. Fall Ins
were common at the time, but this was the only way to extract any
sort of metal ore. Given that the Inca obtained a tribute through hours of
labor, you can bet that they assigned workers to the mines without much regard
for their personal safety. Now, for most people, mining was a seasonal
job. At higher elevations, workers just couldn't work in the winter months,
and in general everyone needed to be available to work the fields during planting and
harvesting, which greatly restricted when mining could happen. However, during the Incan
Empire, local lords generally and slowly lost control over the mines. These,
like state farms, were transferred to imperial control. Now, historians and archeologists
love, and I do mean underline love pottery. Trust me, it's all
over any book from the ancient world. I'm not going to bore you,
but just understand the Inca. We're very evative when it came to ceramics.
Cusco style polychrome pottery is the archeological benchmark throughout the Andes. When you go
to a museum and you see a piece of South American pottery with ornate geometric
designs, it's almost certainly Incan. They also made those distinctive vessels with the
flared rims, so these have like long, skinny necks that flare out at
the top. In addition to being pretty, Inca pottery was also a high
technical quality and regularity. Hence most of the pottery from the Incan Imperial period
looks the same. Still, you should know that the Inca did not consider
ceramics an essential job on their hierarchy. It is listed below weaving, featherwork,
and metallurgy. Now, finally, the Anko we're also fantastic stone workers.
And what I mean here is that the Inca we're about on par with
the ancient Egyptians. They crushed stone, they broke it, and they fitted
it perfectly. Their techniques were essentially ancient. But that being said, despite
repeated earthquakes, most inc And buildings remain undamaged still today. So I'm going
to leave it there for this week. Next week we're going to talk about
the foundations of the Inca Empire and take a really close look at its political
and military structure, because those are the things that are going to be highly
relevant when it comes to Pissaro's invasion, which we're going to get to in
very short order. Here now, as I always say, in the link
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