The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (83 page)

Wari Imperialism

Wari extended its political control over the entire Ayacucho basin, bringing about the disappearance of earlier population centers such as Ñawinpukyo. It then began establishing colonies in more distant regions. Wari affected places as far away as Viracochapampa (480 miles to the northwest) and Cerro Baúl (420 miles to the southeast). At the same time, it is not always clear whether Wari controlled, or merely influenced, these distant places.

Wari colonists often built high-walled rectangular enclosures with a central patio and long, narrow galleries. These enclosures, along with Wari-style pottery, provide clues to Wari expansion. In some places the expanding empire co-opted existing settlements; in other cases, it built brand-new settlements from scratch.

One of Wari’s newly created colonies was the 495-acre settlement of Pikillaqta. Pikillaqta was built only 20 miles from the Cusco basin, the region that later gave rise to the Inca. The Cusco basin was occupied by a distinctive local society at that time, and the Wari chose not to confront it directly. Instead, Wari colonists chose a large mountain shelf above Lake Lucre, near the confluence of the Vilcanota and Huatanay Rivers. The centerpiece of Pikillaqta was a walled enclosure with a series of multiroom buildings that, when seen from the air, resemble giant ice cube trays. The colonists also built irrigation canals and terraces, bringing large tracts of previously marginal land into agricultural production.

It is possible that Wari administrators found the Cusco society of that period too uncooperative or underdeveloped for their purposes, so they built their own administrative center and staffed it with Wari officials. Archaeologists are convinced, however, that the inhabitants of the nearby Cusco basin watched every move the Wari colonists made and learned a great deal of statecraft from them.

As we saw earlier, Moche public constructions were built by rotating labor gangs. The construction of Pikillaqta seems to have been similar. The great walls enclosing the centerpiece of the community were made up of sections, built in slightly different styles. This architectural variation reflects a pattern of construction by multiple gangs. Such a pattern conforms to the Andean ideal of rotating responsibility, but it is less than ideal from the standpoint of architectural strength; the seams between sections eventually become weak points.

After occupying the Lucre basin for an estimated 200 years, Pikillaqta was eventually abandoned. Sometime later it was burned, presumably by the local inhabitants of the region. Pikillaqta’s abandonment was part of the general decline of the Wari empire, whose causes are not fully understood. With this imperial presence removed, the societies of the Cusco region could now begin their own trajectory toward statehood and empire.

Tiwanaku

While Wari was expanding over the central highlands of Peru, a rival second-generation empire was emerging in the Titicaca basin on the Peru-Bolivia border. One of the highest large bodies of water in the world, Lake Titicaca lies more than 12,000 feet above sea level. This altitude rules out many frost-sensitive crops. However, fields of quinoa and root crops such as potatoes,
oca
(
Oxalis
sp.),
mashwa
(
Tropaeolum
sp.), and
ollucu
(
Ullucus
sp.) could be grown on the slopes near the lake. The region could also support herds of llamas and alpacas.

Archaeologist Charles Stanish has provided us with a scenario for the consolidation of the Lake Titicaca basin into one centralized, state-level society. This scenario begins around 500
B.C.
and involves the emergence of an urban kingdom out of a group of competing chiefly societies.

At 500
B.C.
the Titicaca basin, stretching more than 200 miles from northwest to southeast, was occupied by at least six or seven rank societies. The largest of these were Qaluyu in the northwest and Chiripa in the southeast. Within 500 years the northwestern society, with its paramount center at a place called Pukara, had expanded to control an area 90 miles in diameter. Its relations with the smaller southeastern society, whose center was Tiwanaku, were hostile.

Between
A.D.
200 and 300, Pukara society underwent a rapid decline, perhaps owing to depredations by its aggressive neighbors. This gave Tiwanaku an opening to grow unimpeded, and by
A.D.
600 it had no rival in the basin. At its height it had an estimated population of 30,000 to 60,000, living in a city covering two square miles. The city’s core was a planned complex of plazas and public buildings; beyond this were commoner neighborhoods of artisans and laborers. Agriculture was intensified by the deliberate construction of raised field systems, and communities of llama and alpaca herders extended well into the mountains.

The residences of Tiwanaku’s rulers covered the summit of the Akapana, a terraced pyramid whose summit rises to 55 feet and whose base measures 835 by 640 feet. Adjacent to the north face of the Akapana was the Kalasasaya, a ritual enclosure 400 feet on a side. Multiple generations of archaeologists, from Carlos Ponce Sanginés to Alan Kolata and Juan Albarracín-Jordan, have worked to increase our understanding of urban Tiwanaku.

The Tiwanaku state expanded far beyond Lake Titicaca, though it is not always clear which regions it controlled and which ones it merely influenced. Tiwanaku-style pottery has been found within 20 miles of the Wari colony at Pikillaqta. To the south, settlements with Tiwanaku pottery were placed within sight of Cerro Baúl, a fortified Wari outpost in the Moquegua Valley (
Figure 71
). In other words, the Wari and Tiwanaku empires expanded until they literally came within a few miles of each other. At such meeting places they seem to have coexisted without bloodshed, perhaps realizing that an all-out war would not have been good for either empire.

Like the Wari, Tiwanaku established a number of patterns that were borrowed by the later Inca. Tiwanaku public structures were often built of stones so tightly fitted together that one could not have inserted a razor blade between them. Tiwanaku also built roads through the highlands that anticipated the later Inca imperial roads. Like the Wari, Tiwanaku nobles drank chicha from keros.

A number of imperial strategies served to communicate Tiwanaku’s subjugation of neighboring peoples. Its architects decorated a sunken court in the Kalasasaya enclosure with carved stone versions of trophy heads. Tiwanaku also captured and removed the stone monuments of the foreign groups it subjugated. For example, the so-called Thunderbolt Stela at Tiwanaku has turned out to be the upper half of a stone monument from Arapa, a community 150 miles to the northwest. This monument, carved before the rise of Tiwanaku, had been deliberately broken; half was left at Arapa and the other half taken to Tiwanaku. Such “monument capture” was a strategy borrowed by the later Inca.

After centuries of expansion, Tiwanaku finally declined. By 1200 the Titicaca basin was decentralized, broken down into a dozen or more small societies whose elites sought refuge in
pukaras,
or fortified settlements. Between 1450 and 1475, the Inca moved into the Titicaca basin.

THE THIRD-GENERATION ANDEAN EMPIRE

In Peru, just as in Mexico, Spanish officials produced manuscripts on the Native American societies they encountered. While a high percentage of these documents deal with the Inca, some record tales of a pre-Inca people called the Chimu, who ruled the north coast between
A.D.
850 and 1460.

The Chimu are named for the Kingdom of Chimor, whose capital lay in the same valley that gave rise to the earlier Moche. The Chimu state eventually became an empire stretching 600 miles along the coast.

FIGURE 71.
   Some 1,400 years ago, two empires spread over the Andean highlands. The Wari empire’s capital was in the Ayacucho basin of Peru; the Tiwanaku empire’s capital was in the Lake Titicaca basin of Bolivia. The two empires met at Cerro Baúl in southern Peru. There, Tiwanaku-influenced villages coexisted with a fortified Wari colony in what seems to have been an atmosphere of détente. (On this map, the distance from Moche to San Pedro de Atacama is 1,250 miles.)

The rise of the Chimu was facilitated by the gradual collapse of the Moche empire. At its peak, this empire had been divided into northern and southern regions. Collapse began in the southern region, where valleys such as Virú, Santa, and Nepeña achieved independence from their Moche overlords.

In the northern region the Moche shifted their capital from the Huacas de Moche to the site of Pampa Grande in the Lambayeque Valley. The task of administrating the Moche Valley was left to Galindo, 12 miles inland from Huacas de Moche. Galindo was a planned urban center covering more than two square miles. Some of its architecture anticipated that of the later Chimu.

Chan Chan

By 1000, Galindo was in decline, and the center of political power in the Moche Valley had shifted coastward to a place called Chan Chan. There the water table was so high that communities could create extensive
mahamaes,
or sunken fields, for gardening, as well as walk-in wells for drinking water. Chan Chan became the capital of the Kingdom of Chimor.

In the world of legend, the first Chimu king is said to have been a noble named Tacaynamo, who sailed to the Moche Valley on a balsa raft. In the world of political reality, the Chimu state is likely to have been created by a junior royal lineage that split off from a senior lineage somewhere on the north coast.

At its peak, the urban core of Chan Chan covered 2.3 square miles and had an estimated 60,000 inhabitants. Excavator Michael Moseley estimates that 6,000 of these inhabitants were nobles who lived in large adobe-walled residential compounds. The ten largest of these compounds, known as
ciudadelas,
are thought to have been built by a succession of royal families, while the lesser nobles lived in 30 smaller compounds. An estimated 26,000 craftspeople lived in their own
kincha,
or cane-and-clay houses. Three thousand commoners lived immediately adjacent to the royal compounds.

Oral histories report that the Chimu kings practiced a strategy called “split inheritance.” Upon the death of a ruler, his residential compound and any territory he had conquered were retained in his name and administered in perpetuity by a special bureaucracy. The new ruler inherited his office but not his predecessor’s property; he was therefore forced to build his own compound and conquer new territory, which would in turn be administered in his name. Just as the need to take captives for his inauguration forced an Aztec ruler to extend his conquests, split inheritance forced a Chimu ruler to add lands to Chimor.

FIGURE 72.
   Chimu emperors lived in huge royal compounds with patios, kitchens, servants’ quarters, storerooms, walk-in wells, royal burial platforms, and overseers’ rooms called
audiencias.
Lesser nobles lived in smaller versions of these compounds. Chimu commoners lived in neighborhoods of small room complexes. On the left we see a royal compound from Chan Chan, roughly 1,770 feet in length. On the right we see two adjoining complexes of rooms for commoners, totaling 75 feet in length.

No two ciudadelas were identical in plan, though all shared a number of elements. Walls more than 30 feet high ensured privacy for those who lived and worked there. Traffic flow inside the compound was strictly controlled. Workers, who entered during the day and went home at night, were monitored by officials sitting in U-shaped rooms, referred to by Spanish speakers as
audiencias.
There were open courts for craft activity and innumerable storage units to be filled. Thick walls separated the residence of the royal family from the rooms where their commoner staff worked (
Figure 72
).

One part of each compound was set aside for a massive adobe platform, where the ruler’s body would be hidden after death. The royal burial chamber was surrounded by subterranean cells for family members, sacrificed humans and llamas, and offerings of precious metals, pottery, fine textiles, and spiny oyster shells.