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By Root 1976 0

figure who could have taken over even more land than he did. Unfortunately for him, he lived at the same time that a previously little-known group, the Inka, acquired a new ruler, Pachakuti. In about 1450 the Inka army, led by Qhapaq Yupanki, Pachakuti’s brother, besieged the city-state of Cajamarca, in the foothills east of Chimor. Cajamarca’s leader had allied himself with Minchaçaman, who rushed to his aid with an army. He does not seem to have known what he was in for, possibly because he viewed the Inka as a gang of rustic thugs. Qhapaq Yupanki awaited him in an ambush. Minchaçaman and his army were forced to flee as Cajamarca fell to the Inka. Qhapaq Yupanki covered himself with so much glory that when he returned home to Qosqo his brother, sensing future trouble, promptly executed him.

In this rare aerial photograph—taken in 1931, before modern looting blasted the site—the ruined Chimor capital of Chan Chan sprawls across the northern Peruvian coast. One of the wonders of the fifteenth-century world, Chan Chan abruptly fell to the Inka in about 1450; eighty years later, Spanish diseases and Spanish soldiers destroyed much of what had survived the Inka.

A decade or so later—in 1463, if Spanish chronicles are correct—the emperor sent out another army led by his son and designated successor, Thupa Inka Yupanki. By that time nobody thought of the Inkas as hicks. Thupa Inka descended the Moche River and paralyzed Chimor’s defenses by the simple expedient of threatening to destroy its water supply. Minchaçaman was captured, taken to Qosqo, and forced to watch Thupa Inka’s victory celebration. Chimor’s conquerors were quick studies. Liking the courtly magnificence of Chan Chan, they hauled away what they could and, more important, forced the city’s gold, silver, and gem workers to accompany them to Qosqo. They were instructed to transform the city into a new Chan Chan, only more impressive. Seven decades later, when Pizarro held his victory celebration in Qosqo, it was equal in grandeur to any city in Europe.

MAKING THE WAK’A

Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer took me to Caballete, a narrow, dusty bowl, perhaps half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, a few miles up the Fortaleza River from the Peruvian coast. At the mouth of the bowl were three mounds in a rough semicircle that faced a fourth mound. In front of one mound, like a one-eighth scale model of Stonehenge, was a ragged circle of wak’a: sacred stones. Not far from the wak’a looters had dug up an ancient graveyard, pulling out the bodies and unwinding them from their sheets in a search for gold and jewels. When they didn’t find any, they threw the bones down in disgust. In a square perhaps fifty yards on a side the ground was carpeted with broken human bones and scraps of thousand-year-old fabric.

We walked a little further and were greeted by a curious sight: skulls from the cemetery, gathered into several small piles. Around them were beer cans, cigarette butts, patent-medicine bottles, half-burned photographs, and candles shaped like naked women. These last had voodoo pins stuck in their heads and vaginas. Local people came to these places at night and either dug for treasure or practiced witchcraft, Haas said. In the harsh afternoon light they seemed to me tacky and sad. I imagined that the families of the people who had been buried at Caballete so long ago would have been outraged if they could have known what would happen to the bodies of their loved ones.

The history of Andean societies is so rich and complex that it often leaves archaeologists feeling overwhelmed—there is so much to learn that they can never keep up. A single example: scientists did not confirm the existence of the Great Wall of Peru, a forty-mile stone rampart across the Andes, until the 1930s. And it still has never been fully excavated.

But then it occurred to me that my views may not have been shared by either the present or the past inhabitants of Norte Chico. I had no idea what people in Wari or Chimor would have thought of the scene before me. So far in