06 Track 6

Unit 9

Unearthing the Past

Chapter 2

Where Inca kings Lie

Where Inca kings lie

Rising to the heights of power, a series of Andean rulers, subdued kingdoms, sculpted mountains, and forged a mighty civilization.

On a Peruvian island in the middle of Lake Titicaca, hundreds of people stand in silence as a priest recites a prayer. Descended in part from Inca colonists send here more than 500 years ago, they keep many of the old ways.

They weave colored cloth, speak the traditional language of the Inca, and work their fields as they have for centuries. Today, they are celebrating the festival of Santiago, or St. James.

Walking behind the priest, several people carry a statue of the saint, just as the Inca once held the mummies of their kings. For many years, there were few clues to give us insight into the lives of Inca kings.

The Inca had no system of writing so we have no written records of life back then. Any portraits that Inca artists may have made were lost.

The royal palaces of Cuzco, the Inca capital, fell swiftly to the Spanish, and a new colonial city buried or obliterated the Inca past. Yet archaeologists are now making up for lost time, near Cuzco, they are discovering thousands of previously unknown sites.

These new and exciting discoveries are shedding new light on the Inca. In the 1980s, most archaeologists believed that a young leader named Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (also known as Pachacutec) became the first Inca king in the early 1400s.

But Brian Bauer, an archaeologist from the University of Illinois at Chicago, believed the Inca dynasty had far deeper roots.

With the aid of a colleague and several assistants, they discovered thousands of previously unknown Inca sites in the Cuzco Valley. The new evidence revealed for the first time how and Inca state had risen much earlier than previously believed, sometime between 1200 and 1300.

The ancient rulers of the region had fallen by 1100, in part because of a severe drought, local leaders battled over scarce water and lead their people into neighboring villages in search of food.

The frightened villagers fled to cold windy hideouts nearly 4000 m up in the mountains. But in the fertile valley around Cuzco. Inca villagers stood their ground instead of fighting among themselves, these villages united into a small state capable of defending themselves.

Between 1150 and 1300 the Inca around Cuzco capitalized on a warming trend. As temperatures climbed, farmers moved up the mountains, creating crop fields by cutting green terraces into the cliffs, and subsequently enjoying large and successful corn harvests.

Inca kings began eyeing the resources of others. Local leaders in the valleys fell one by one until there was only one mighty state and one capital: the sacred city of Cuzco.

The kings next set their sights on the lands around Lake Titicaca. Sometime after 1400, the same Pachacutec set his sights on the south.

He successfully attacked the area in the mid-1400s. In the years that followed, Pachacutec and his sons subdued all the southern rulers.

Under Inca rule, Andean civilization flourished. Inca engineers transformed roads into interconnected highways. Inca farmers grew some 70 different native crops, often storing three to seven years’ worth of food in vast storehouses.

And Inca builders created architectural wonders like Machu Picchu, which continue to awe visitors today.

By the time the Inca king Huayna Capac took power around 1493, little seemed beyond the reach of the Inca. For his new capital in Ecuador, 4,500 people carried immense stone blocks all the way from Cusco, a distance of nearly 1,600 kilometers.

In the Inca heartland, a small army of people built an estate and palace for Huayna Capac and his family. To date, archaeologists have located the ruins of roughly a dozen similar states built by at least six Inca kings.

But things changed in 1531. Foreign invaders had landed in the north, amid a civil war. Covered in metal and carrying lethal new weapons, the Spanish easily overcame the Incas and took prisoner the Inca king, Atahuallpa.

Eight months later, they executed the royal captive. In 1534, a young prince, Manco Inca Yupanqui, was picked by Spanish leader Francisco Pizarro and allowed to rule as a puppet king.

Manco Inca was then only 15 years old and was easily controlled. He thought the Spanish were gods. However, in the months that followed, the Spanish seized the palaces of Cuzco.

Manco Inca tried desperately to drive them out, but his army suffered defeat. Over the next few decades, the Inca’s network of roads, temples and estates began falling into disrepair.

In 2001, Brian Bauer and two Peruvian colleagues went looking for the mummies of these Inca kings, hoping to restore to Peruvians an important part of their cultural heritage.

Bauer identified several possibilities for the burial site of Pachacutec and Huayna Capac.

Using special equipment, they scanned the likeliest areas and found what appeared to be an underground tomb.

Bauer and his Peruvian teammates were thrilled. But when the archaeologists finally dug down and opened the door of the dusty chamber, they found it empty.

Today no one can say were Peru’s greatest kings lie. Concludes Bauer sadly, “The fate of the royal Inca mummies remains unknown.”