1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [38]
TAWANTINSUYU The Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D.
Highland Peru is as extraordinary as the Inka themselves. It is the only place on earth, the Cornell anthropologist John Murra wrote, “where millions [of people] insist, against all apparent logic, on living at 10,000 or even 14,000 feet above sea level. Nowhere else have people lived for so many thousands of years in such visibly vulnerable circumstances.” And nowhere else have people living at such heights—in places where most crops won’t grow, earthquakes and landslides are frequent, and extremes of weather are the norm—repeatedly created technically advanced, long-lasting civilizations. The Inka homeland, uniquely high, was also uniquely steep, with slopes of more than sixty-five degrees from the horizontal. (The steepest street in San Francisco, famed for its nearly undrivable hills, is thirty-one-and-a-half degrees.) And it was uniquely narrow; the distance from the Pacific shore to the mountaintops is in most places less than seventy-five miles and in many less than fifty. Ecologists postulate that the first large-scale human societies tended to arise where, as Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles put it, geography provided “a wide range of altitudes and topographies within a short distance.” One such place is the Fertile Crescent, where the mountains of western Iran and the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, bracket the Tigris and Euphrates river systems. Another is Peru. In the short traverse from mountain to ocean, travelers pass through twenty of the world’s thirty-four principal types of environment.
Highland Peru, captured in this image of the Inka ruin Wiñay Wayna by the indigenous Andean photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973), is the only place on earth where people living at such inhospitable altitudes repeatedly created materially sophisticated societies.
To survive in this steep, narrow hodgepodge of ecosystems, Andean communities usually sent out representatives and colonies to live up- or downslope in places with resources unavailable at home. Fish and shellfish from the ocean; beans, squash, and cotton from coastal river valleys; maize, potatoes, and the Andean grain quinoa from the foothills; llamas and alpacas for wool and meat in the heights—each area had something to contribute. Villagers in the satellite settlements exchanged products with the center, sending beans uphill and obtaining llama jerky in return, all the while retaining their citizenship in a homeland they rarely saw. Combining the fruits of many ecosystems, Andean cultures both enjoyed a better life than they could have wrested from any single place and spread out the risk from the area’s frequent natural catastrophes. Murra invented a name for this mode of existence: “vertical archipelagoes.”
Verticality helped Andean cultures survive but also pushed them to stay small. Because the mountains impeded north-south communication, it was much easier to coordinate the flow of goods and services east to west. As a result the region for most of its history was a jumble of small- and medium-scale cultures, isolated from all but their neighbors. Three times, though, cultures rose to dominate the Andes, uniting previously separate groups under a common banner. The first period of hegemony was that of Chavín, which from about 700 B.C. to the dawn of the Christian era controlled the central coast of Peru and the adjacent mountains. The next, beginning after Chavín’s decline, was the time of