by Peter Watson
It was a high-risk strategy, of course. Other elites, in other polities, were trying to do the same to them and this may be why so many Mesoamerican city-states met a sudden end: Monte Albán, Cerro de los Minas, Yucuñ, Chichén Itźá.
A second factor was that, as Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest point out, the Aztecs were worried that, in fact, the sun was under-nourished – this is why the demand for blood was greater than ever.32 What might this mean? If the volcanoes of the area were erupting, especially perhaps if they were volcanoes out of sight but the ashes of which nevertheless obscured the sun, this would explain why it was felt to be undernourished – it was too weak to appear, to rise in the morning. In turn this would explain the Aztec worries and would have fuelled what Carrasco calls their cosmic paranoia.
The volcanic evidence supports this possibility. The Aztecs were not discovered by the Spanish until 1519. But in that year, as we saw in chapter five, Popacatépetl (which could be seen from Tenochtitlán) erupted and it did so again the following year, and the year after that, and again in 1522 and 1523. The Smithsonian survey confirms that other eruptions were taking place at much the same time in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. We cannot be certain, because the records that far back are incomplete, but if Popacatépetl, and certain other volcanoes, were particularly active in, say, the last half of the fifteenth century, and the early years of the sixteenth, as the Smithsonian chronology strongly suggests, then this in itself might account for the increase in paranoia and violence in Aztec society. Either the sun was obscured a lot – undernourished – or people may have been killed by the eruptions, or crops may have failed because the sun was obscured or lava destroyed the fields. In such a scenario, earlier levels of worship would have been seen to have failed, as inadequate – the gods continued to be angry, they were unappeased by whatever level of sacrifice obtained at any particular point, and so efforts had to be redoubled, more victims had to be offered. Such a pattern of volcanic activity would certainly explain the profound level of anxiety which Carrasco believes underpinned Aztec society.
As all this showed, the Aztec ruler was the most powerful (and the most feared) man in Mesoamerica and his civilisation was at the peak of its power. But there were shadows not so far over the horizon. Under their system of beliefs, the Aztecs were forced to expand their territory simply to obtain more tribute and more victims. ‘Increasingly the empire became vulnerable to sedition and rebellion. There are signs in Aztec proverbs and verse that their society was one of growing philosophical ambivalence, between ferocious militarism and human sacrifice on the one hand, and notions of benevolence, humility and mercy on the other.’33 But, as with the Toltecs before them, the forces of militarism won the day.
Which in turn underlines the instability built into the system. With, at one point, perhaps 15,000 persons being sacrificed every year in Mexico, even if that figure is an exaggeration it meant that the Aztecs had to look further and further afield for victims. But they had no horses or chariots, only their fighting efficiency and their fanaticism to sustain them. Even so, they could not easily hold far-flung territories, which were constantly rebelling, or threatening to rebel. In an age before refrigeration, the outer provinces were too far off to contribute perishable foodstuffs. Instead, they provided luxury goods which boosted the self-image of the elite but did little to assuage the food shortages that existed nearer home – shortages which existed because the people who could labour in the fields had been already sacrificed.
Once the Aztec expansion faltered, and fewer victims for sacrifice were to be found, it followed that the gods would be even more dissatisfied. The Aztecs would then be required to redouble their efforts. But distant peoples had been encouraged by their victories, or successful resistance. If the Aztecs responded by requiring increased tribute, the outlying people could not easily be forced to produce more.
The fatal irony or paradox was that Aztec warfare destroyed the very system of subsistence on which it existed, because it killed thousands of food producers. The sacrificial cult, successful to begin with, turned increasingly maladaptive. It continued because the ritual calendar provided many dates suitable for sacrifice, by means of which the priests and warriors could move up the social scale. Ritual and subsistence were in conflict.
With the pace of expansion slowed, or even reversed, other ways to secure victims were needed. A class of slave-merchants emerged but part of the Aztec ideology required that war captives only be used in sacrifice, so slaves did not entirely fit the bill. So-called ‘flowery wars’ arose, in which states met periodically in a battle solely designed for each side to ‘capture’ warriors for sacrifice – a bizarre arrangement if ever there was one. But these were just a symptom of the inherent instability that lay at the heart of the system.
What would have happened to the Aztecs if the Conquest hadn’t come along when it did? Moctezuma II recognised the predicament his nation faced but, as with Tolpitzin Quetzalcoatl and the Toltecs, the forces of fanaticism won out and the reforms he proposed were rejected. It is clear that the Triple Alliance was coming to the end of its prominence whether or not the Europeans arrived when they did.
The legend that Quetzalcoatl would one day return from overseas only made the Aztec collapse before Cortés – who for a short time was regarded as that god – easier than it might otherwise have been.
IMMORTALITY AND INCEST
The Incas called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the ‘Land of the Four Quarters’. Accordingly, four great highways spread out from the central plaza of Cuzco, the capital, separating the kingdom into four suyus (quarters), which were in themselves modelled on the four quarters of the Inca heavens.34 At its greatest extent, the empire extended from the borders of modern Colombia and the coastal regions of Ecuador and Peru, down through highland Bolivia as far as north-western Argentina, and on into central and southern Chile, some 4,300 kilometres or 2,700 miles from end to end. It was the largest empire of antiquity ever to arise south of the equator, with a population of some 10 million.
It was a long, thin, curving strip of land, of high mountains, coastal deserts, and tropical rainforests.35 Its two most productive zones were at either end of this strip. The central Andes, around the capital city of Cuzco, was the heartland, comprised jointly of a flat basin northwest of Lake Titicaca, known as the altiplano, whose climate of very hot days and frosty nights made for productive potato fields where (as was discussed in chapter eleven) the foodstuffs were naturally freeze-dried, and with it extensive pastureland where large herds of domesticated llamas provided wool and carried loads. (In light of the overall thesis of this book, which is partly about the influence of large mammals on human history, we may note that it was reported in May 2011, as the final touches were being made to the typescript, that new research has shown it was the adoption of llama droppings as fertiliser, about 2,700 years ago, that allowed the Incas to switch from growing quinoa to the mass cultivation of maize, a more nourishing and easily stored crop. It was the ability to farm more efficiently that fuelled the territorial expansion of the Incas.)
Far to the north, the coastal desert would have been uninhabitable save for the fact that it was intersected by a number of relatively short, fast-flowing rivers, driving forceful irrigation systems that enabled the whole area to be richly populated. All this meant that the most populous areas of the empire were at opposite ends of Tawantinsuyu. The Inca achievement was to join these disparate regions together in a single civilisation, which was also the largest of its kind ever to exist using a technology based on bronze, copper and stone.
The Incas were later to give themselves a proud and long history but this is not supported by archaeology. (They never invented writing so there are no indigenous chronicles to consult.) They were in fact just one of several small groups – the Colla, Lupaca and Quechua were others – who existed in the wake of the fall of Tiwanaku (see chapter twenty) who competed for control of the productive altiplano. Like the Aztecs with the
Toltecs, the Incas sought legitimacy by claiming descent from Tiwanaku when, in fact, they were just one among many local farming cultures.
The early Spanish chroniclers specified up to eight rulers between AD 1200 and 1438 but the archaeology does not support this either. The earliest Inca ruler worth the name emerged when the village of Cuzco began to grow. This man, the eighth ruler allegedly, and known as Viracocha Inca, appears to have been the first leader who actually held on to the new territories he conquered.
But it wasn’t always as simple as that sounds. About 1438, Viracocha Inca’s lands were besieged by the Chanca, yet another rival people to the north, who attacked Cuzco. The now-aged monarch escaped to the mountains, leaving the defence of the city to his son, Yupanqui. Against the odds, the young and inexperienced Yupanqui trounced the Chanca and, in recognition of this exploit, became the supreme ruler of the city, adopting the name by which he was always known afterwards, Pachakuti, ‘he who remakes the world’ (a phrase that could have applied to Tolpitzin Quetzalcoatl). A charismatic leader, among Pachakuti’s achievements was the rebuilding of Cuzco, apparently in the form of a puma (a cat related to the cougar and the jaguar), with a great fortress as its head and a narrow triangle of streets in the east as its tail.36 It was said that no fewer than twenty thousand workmen were drafted in for this project from outlying areas, to quarry the stones and haul them over huge distances, using ropes of hemp and harnesses of leather.
Cuzco was made up of single-storey houses with steeply pitched thatched roofs. Its paved streets had stone-lined channels with fast-flowing water draining down the middle, providing effective sanitation. A river flowed through one of the central plazas, dividing the city into two halves or moieties, Cusipata to the west, Aucaypata to the east, which was larger and where the Incas’ palaces and ceremonial buildings were located. The palace featured impressive gates, built of multi-coloured stone, and a large hall, which held 4,000 people.
South of the central plaza was the Temple of the Sun, the Coricancha, boasting walls lined in gold and encircling a courtyard. In this courtyard (it had fifteen-feet-high walls) the Conquistadores came face-to-face with ‘many golden llamas, women, pitchers, jars and other objects’. There was in addition a garden of golden plants (replicas of maize with silver stems and ears of gold), and at the centre of the temple was a room with ‘an image of the sun of great size, made of gold, beautifully wrought and set with many precious stones’.
Almost as impressive were the ashlars, which the palaces and great houses were built of, stones fitted so neatly together ‘a knife could not be put between them’. Each had concave depressions carved out of their surfaces, to ensure the fit would be snug. Such elaborate stonework needed thousands of hours of work, ‘but time and labour were of no concern to rulers with abundant manpower and no western notions of time’.37
In addition to everything else, Cuzco was a massive warehouse. In a society without money, the Incas kept their supplies (and their tribute) in a row of identical storehouses ‘full of cloaks, wools, weapons, metal, cloth and all other goods that are grown in this country. There were weapons and thousands of tiny, coloured hummingbird feathers used to adorn the clothing of the nobility.’ Most exotic of all, certainly for the Conquistadores, was the building which contained clothes, in particular cloaks, covered as they were in ‘dense layers of gold and silver counters’.38
Above the level of the nuclear family, the basic unit of Inca society was the ayllu, essentially a kin group though it could extend beyond the village. Within it men were organised patrilineally and the women matrilineally, and though marriage was forbidden between couples who were closely related, the system was endogamous. The ayllu owned land communally and its leadership tended to be hereditary.39
Owing to the sheer extent of Inca territory, at so many different altitudes, a massive road system was developed that extended over some 19,000 miles. According to Spanish chroniclers, the roads were built into precipices, cut through rocks in the mountains, mounted as walls along rivers and were kept clean of refuse. They had lodgings and temples and storehouses spaced along them to aid travellers and were better than anything then available in Europe. Official runners used these roads to help administer the empire, the way-stations every mile and a half or so enabling messages to be sent over 125–150 miles a day – or Cuzco to Quito and back in 10–12 days. Llamas and armies moved along these roads in large numbers.
The Incas built large rafts of balsa wood, with rectangular sails, which enabled them to trade up and down the Pacific coast. Inca gold, silver and other valuable cargoes reached coastal communities far to the north. In fact, the first European contact with the Incas occurred when Francisco Pizarro encountered an Inca craft with cotton sails. ‘They were carrying many pieces of silver and gold as personal ornaments . . . including crowns and diadems, belts and bracelets . . . They were taking all this to trade for fish shells from which they make counters, coloured scarlet and white.’40
Apart from Cuzco, with its temples of golden walls, brilliant sanitation, and the empire-wide network of efficient roads, Pachakuti’s other main achievement was to begin to rebuild the state ideology, a project which was equally transformative. In the Inca context, Conrad and Demarest remind us once again that New World deities existed more as ‘complexes’ than as the more defined entities that Western gods were, who could vary their attributes and powers according to time and place. In the case of the Incas, their sky god had three important qualities (among others). He was Viracocha, the universal creator, Inti the sun god, and Illapa, ‘the deity associated with thunderstorms and weather generally’.41 They also point out that the Inca godhead seems to have been derived from the ‘Gateway God’ of Tiwanaku as a generalised creator/sky/weather deity (see above, chapter twenty). As Huitzilopochtli had been deliberately elevated among the Aztecs, so Pachakuti elevated Inti, the Sun God, as patron of the Incas. The people believed they were under the protection of Inti, and that their rulers were directly descended from him.
There was, perhaps, nothing especially noteworthy in all this, but there were two aspects of Inca religion that were remarkable. The first was the practice of capac hucha, or capacocha. This translates, roughly and literally, as something like ‘solemn sacrifice’ but in fact what was meant more often than not – and, again, this is a very new development in scholarship and research – is child sacrifice, and child sacrifice very often at extremely high altitudes, in the Andes mountains. There were several ceremonies which come under this heading. In one, boys and girls – especially good-looking boys and girls of five or six, from the families of chieftains as often as not, and up to a thousand at a time – were rounded up and brought to Cuzco ‘to serve the Inca’.42 Ceremonies in their honour were held in the capital but they were then sent back out, either to where they had come from, or to the huacas all over the empire, where they were sacrificed. In another ceremony, four children were sent to Cuzco every year, one each from each suyu. There they were, again, fĕted, before being sent back to where they came from and sacrificed to the sun (by strangling). The families who provided the children were elevated in status afterwards and it was a major offence if the family showed anything other than complete satisfaction and delight when their offspring were killed.
Associated with this, the most recent research has established that many sacrifices, including those of children, took place at very high altitudes, at 17,000 feet or more. It is also now known that the Incas and other Andean civilisations who came before them worshipped mountains and maintained a hierarchy of summits, and mountain gods, according to altitude, with the highest being the most important. Mountains were regarded as the source of water, which they were felt to attract from the sea, of other spirits, and many of them were volcanoes. Many sacrifices at high altitude were clearly related to rain and the weather (victims were sometimes deliberately frozen to death).43 Textiles, camelids, chichi beer and coca leaves all accompanied the sacrificial victims. Steve Bourget argues
that worship in the mountains marked the start of the humid seasons – water again.44
Some colonial accounts say that the Inca sacrificed hundreds of people a year. Archaeology suggests they were exaggerating but the Incas did sacrifice children in cases of drought, earthquakes, famine, war, hailstorms, lightning storms and avalanches, among other episodes. The face of a capac hucha victim who froze to death on top of Cerro El Plomo, in Chile (altitude 17,716 feet), excavated in 1954, was painted with red ochre and four jagged yellow lines, which may represent lightning, a motif also found on the miniature clothing encasing the small figures that accompanied other capac hucha burials.45*
Sacrifice in Peru seems to have been weather-related but why children should be chosen more often than not isn’t clear, unless they were felt to be either more easily replaceable (because they hadn’t lived as long as adults), or more precious, so that the gods would take more notice.
