1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [47]
Almost at a stroke, just 168 men had dealt a devastating blow to the greatest empire on earth. To be sure, their victory was nowhere near complete: huge, bloody battles still lay ahead. Even after the conquistadors seized Qosqo, the empire regrouped in the hinterlands, where it fought off Spanish forces for another forty years. Yet the scale of Pizarro’s triumph at Cajamarca cannot be gainsaid. He had routed a force fifty times larger than his own, won the greatest ransom ever seen, and vanquished a cultural tradition that had lasted five millennia—all without suffering a single casualty.
VIRGIN SOIL
I have just pulled a fast one. The Inka history above is as contemporary scholars understand it. They disagree on which social factors to emphasize and on how much weight to assign individual Spanish chronicles, but the outline seems not in serious dispute. The same is not true of my rendering of Pizarro’s conquest. I presented what is more or less the account current when Dobyns arrived in Peru. But in his reading he discovered a hole in this version of events—a factor so critical that it drastically changed Dobyns’s view of native America.
Why did the Inka lose? The usual answer is that Pizarro had two advantages: steel (swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses. The Indians had no steel weapons and no animals to ride (llamas are too small to carry grown men). They also lacked the wheel and the arch. With such inferior technology, Tawantinsuyu had no chance. “What could [the Inka] offer against this armory?” asked John Hemming, the conquest historian. “They were still fighting in the bronze age.” The Inka kept fighting after Atawallpa’s death. But even though they outnumbered the Europeans by as much as a hundred to one, they always lost. “No amount of heroism or discipline by an Inka army,” Hemming wrote, “could match the military superiority of the Spaniards.”
But just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England, steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists have long marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plentiful in the mountains, yet the Inka used metal for almost nothing useful. In the late 1960s, Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, suggested to “an eminent scholar of Andean prehistory that we take a serious and careful look at Andean metallurgy.” He responded, “But there wasn’t any.” Lechtman went and looked anyway. She discovered that Inka metallurgy was, in fact, as refined as European metallurgy, but that it had such different goals that academic experts had not even recognized it.
According to Lechtman, Europeans sought to optimize metals’ “hardness, strength, toughness, and sharpness.” The Inka, by contrast, valued “plasticity, malleability, and toughness.” Europeans used metal for tools. Andean societies primarily used it as a token of wealth, power, and community affiliation. European metalworkers tended to create metal objects by pouring molten alloys into shaped molds. Such foundries were not unknown to the Inka, but Andean societies vastly preferred to hammer metal into thin sheets, form the sheets around molds, and solder the results. The results were remarkable by any standard—one delicate bust that Lechtman analyzed was less than an inch tall but made of twenty-two separate gold plates painstakingly joined.
If a piece of jewelry or a building ornament was to proclaim its owner’s status, as the Inka desired, it needed to shine. Luminous gold and silver were thus preferable to dull iron. Because pure gold and silver are too soft to hold their shape, Andean metalworkers mixed them with other metals, usually copper. This strengthened the metal but turned it an ugly pinkish-copper color. To create a lustrous gold surface, Inka smiths heated the copper-gold alloy, which increases the rate at which the copper