Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (35 page)

And just as Pikillaqta had been the key military base of the Huari, so a nearby settlement, Cusco, became the hub of a reborn and highly militaristic Andean empire—that of the Inca. And when, in 1530, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru, they did not immediately proceed to build their own empire, but simply took over the Inca one for a short intermediate period. For three years the Spanish ruled their new acquisition through a puppet Inca emperor, and the Inca capital, Cusco, became the first official Spanish municipality in South America. Moreover, the Spanish took over the Inca (and probably former Huari) forced labor system and used it to underpin their new colonial economy.

The borders of the Inca empire became, by and large, the borders of the Spanish viceroyalty and therefore indirectly helped determine many of the borders of modern Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. So it was that out of the climatic events of the sixth century, an imperial tradition grew that survived even the coming of the Europeans and which has helped in no small way to shape the South America of today.

G L O R Y  A T  T H E  H E A R T
O F  T H E  C O S M O S

L
ong, long ago, according to an ancient Andean myth, God sent a terrible flood that destroyed all living things except for one man and one woman. This couple—the sole remnants of original creation—floated on the waters in a boat, and as the flood began to recede they were finally blown by the wind to a high plateau between the eastern and western sierras of the Andes.

The place the winds blew them to was called Tiwanaku, and it was there that God gave them their destiny. From the caves, rivers, and springs of the sacred landscape of creation, they were to call forth people over whom they would rule as the representatives of God.

But humanity was not yet fully obedient to the will of the Divine, so God decided to create the cosmos to give order to the chaotic mind of man. Thus it was that, on the high windswept plateau of Tiwanaku, the constellations, the moon, and the sun were brought into existence to eternally perform their preordained journeys across the sky—to help keep humanity similarly obedient to God.

In Andean religious belief, Tiwanaku—the place on the plateau—was the crucible of creation. And around this holy place, a sacred city took root. The city’s name, in the local Aymara language, was Taypikala, meaning “the stone at the center (of the cosmos).”¹

Initially, Tiwanaku/Taypikala—located just south of South America’s largest lake, Titicaca—may simply have been a local place of pilgrimage. But in the middle of the first millennium
A
.
D
. it became not just the spiritual heart of the cosmos but one of its political hearts as well.

It grew from being a locally important town of perhaps five thousand to ten thousand inhabitants to being the fifty-thousand-strong hub of an Andean superpower, with an immediate hinterland supporting a population of up to a million. As cosmic heart and political center, it became the South American equivalent of Mexico’s great metropolis, Teotihuacan.

In a sense, the expansion of Tiwanaku was the central Andean equivalent of the Huari expansion in the northern Andes. They were part of the same geopolitical phenomenon. Both were highland states that rose in the late sixth and seventh centuries to become imperial systems at the expense of coastal plain cultures. Like Huari, Tiwanaku rose to imperial glory following the dislocation of the Andean political system, which occurred at the time of the great mid-sixth-century drought. Although Tiwanaku had probably established a few isolated client relationships with remote areas in the fourth and fifth centuries, its major drive for empire took place in the latter part of the sixth century and then the seventh century and was accompanied by massive population expansion, monument building, and ritual activity in the imperial capital.²

This late-sixth-century takeoff was almost certainly facilitated by the demographic, economic, and military imbalance caused by the differential effects of the drought on highland Tiwanaku and the already arid coastal zone. Not only did Tiwanaku, like Huari, have a number of ecological zones to exploit economically in times of climatic stress, it also had South America’s greatest single resource of still fresh water, the 3,200-square-mile Lake Titicaca. And because it survived the drought better than the coastal cultures, it was also able to prosper and expand more rapidly once the long drought was over.

Thus, because it was less disadvantaged than its coastal or even highland competitors, it probably started to expand during the middle of the sixth century. It is also possible that the city’s obsession with monumental architecture started then. The drought itself may well have led to the creation or expansion of Tiwanaku’s largest temple—constructed, in all probability, as a large-scale attempt to propitiate the rain god.

Built as a vast cross-shaped, seven-stepped pyramid, 650 feet wide and 55 feet high, the temple was designed as a replica of a sacred mountain located three miles to the south of the city. Besides its symbolic shape, the pyramid replicated aspects of the southern mountain in two more specifically water-related ways. The summit of the temple was actually made, in part, of layers of distinctive bluish green (water-colored) gravel obtained from the slopes of the mountains to the south. The edifice also had a sophisticated hydraulic system that the temple priests manipulated to send cascades of water pouring down the stepped sides of the pyramid in a manner strikingly similar to the way water cascaded down the real mountain under good climatic conditions.³ Water was stored in a large reservoir sunk into the summit of the pyramid. Containing up to 1.8 million gallons of water, the reservoir—and the replica waterfalls—were probably manipulated by a series of plugs or sluice gates.

If the pyramid was built during the lengthy drought, rainfall obviously could not have been used to fill the reservoir. (What would be the point of propitiating the rain god if rain was already tumbling from the skies in adequate quantities?) Even in normal times, rainfall would probably not be sufficient to fill it to a level capable of creating a proper waterfall effect. It is likely that in time of drought, lake or river water, stored in animal-skin bottles, was laboriously carried up to the summit by human toil or on the backs of llamas.

The propitiation of the rain god would have been accompanied by sympathetic magic in which the imported water-colored gravel and the replica waterfalls were expected to help produce real rainfall.

The great temple, known as the Acapana (literally, “the place of the dawn”)—was the single largest structure in Tiwanaku and likely was decorated with textiles, metal plaques, and possibly carved and painted anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images. The temple priests—who were also possibly the city’s rulers—appear, at least at the end, to have lived in houses located on some of the terraces. Somewhere on the Acapana—perhaps in front of the sunken reservoir on its summit—stood a series of twenty-foot-tall statues (perhaps of deified rulers), tiny stone fragments of which have survived.

Just as Tiwanaku’s political power increased vis-à-vis its coastal competitors during the great drought, so its population also expanded. Political power increased its commercial, religious, and demographic importance. And so in the years immediately after the drought (or possibly during its latter stages) population pressure and the need for more food combined to force the Tiwanakans to develop new ways of increasing agricultural production.

Vast networks of artificially raised fields irrigated by thousands of miles of canals were created. The new systems were dependent not on direct rainfall but on underground springs and groundwater in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca. The Tiwanakans knew that growing a root crop—potatoes—on relatively low-lying land required them to marginally raise the ground level so that groundwater would not rot the all-important tubers. Whether the new irrigation system was forced on Tiwanaku by the drought or merely by the population increase in the immediate post-drought era, or by both, is not known. Whatever was responsible for jump-starting the system, it soon allowed the Tiwanaku area to increase its population from well under forty thousand to perhaps more than half a million.

Modern experimental archaeology has shown that such raised fields—between 13 and 33 feet wide and up to 660 feet long—were normally at least three times more efficient than conventional nonirrigated direct-rainfall-dependent agriculture in the area; in occasional cold conditions, the irrigated agriculture would have been a staggering nineteen times more efficient than the conventional systems.
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More than a quarter of a million such plots were ultimately created within a vast network of some fourteen thousand miles of ditch-sized canals.

Although the Tiwanakans could not possibly have understood exactly why their drought adaptation—the raised fields—worked so spectacularly, today’s science has succeeded in discovering why. Recent studies designed to adapt this long-forgotten agricultural technology to modern agriculture have shown that raised fields lose soil nutrients more slowly than ordinary fields,
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enhance nitrogen fixation,
⁶
and may well reduce soil salinity levels.
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The use of earth from canal excavations to create a raised growing platform guaranteed that the soil would be highly aerated and not compacted—two qualities that are essential in enabling plants to retain water and to absorb vital water-soluble nutrients.
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The canals were also an inexhaustible source of easily accessible natural fertilizer, in that they were quickly colonized by a vast number of aquatic plants, including azolla and other nitrogen-fixers. When this aquatic vegetation, with its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen, was removed from the water and dumped on the raised fields, it greatly increased the nutrient value of the soil.
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Research has also demonstrated that the raised-field system retains heat much more effectively than conventional agriculture, thus protecting crops from destruction by frost. Experiments showed that less than 10 percent of crops planted in raised fields were badly damaged by frost, compared with 70 to 90 percent in conventional fields.
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The mechanism through which this was achieved was simple yet effective. The canals soaked up solar heat during the day, achieving temperatures up to twenty degrees Fahrenheit higher than the surrounding air temperature. At night—the very time when crops are at risk from frost—the canal retained its warmth and surrounded the growing platforms with a “heat envelope.”
¹¹
Heat from the canal radiated upward into the cold night air, preventing air temperatures around and over the raised fields from dropping below freezing. The warmed water was also, through capillary action, drawn through the sides of the canal into the raised crop-growing platform itself, thereby warming the ground in which the crop was growing. The Tiwanakans’ life-giving potatoes were thus cosseted by heat from above
and
below.

The demographic consequences of this agricultural practice were spectacular in the extreme—especially when combined with other key religious and social changes directly or indirectly generated by the great drought and the agricultural boom that followed it. The population increased further, both as a result of improved nutrition and infant survival rates and also probably through immigration. Agricultural prosperity may also have enabled Tiwanaku to extend its political power by supplying food and alcohol for both daily consumption and ceremonial use to existing and potential future client tribes.

T
he Acapana temple to the rain/sky god was not the only great monument in Tiwanaku’s ceremonial city center. A second great pyramid, now called the Puma Punku (literally, “the gateway of the puma”), was roughly six hundred feet square but only twenty or twenty-five feet high; like the Acapana, it was fitted with a hydraulic system designed to produce replica waterfalls. Adjacent to the Acapana itself stood a 185,000-square-foot palatial complex that probably served as a temple dedicated to ancestor worship.
¹²
Surrounded by massive ashlar and sandstone walls and entered through a monumental staircase and gateway, the complex may have been a sort of palace of the dead. Some of its rooms appear to have been decorated with a series of sculptures, probably individual portraits of high-status Tiwanaku men—perhaps past rulers and dynastic ancestors. The rooms may even have been used as a last resting place for the mummified bodies of the rulers themselves.
¹³
Certainly mummified ancestors would have been important in ancient Tiwanaku, as they were in many other Andean civilizations, including that of the Inca, who used to “invite” their ancestral mummies to attend key state occasions and banquets. Occasionally, the living even arranged for the mummies to “visit” each other socially.

As in all religious and political systems, symbolism was a vital ingredient in the practice of power. The ancestors conferred power, as did affinity with the gods. But the symbolic presence of conquered or client peoples in a subservient position in the sacred heart of a city also conferred substantial power on its elite.

That is precisely what appears to have happened in a large sunken courtyard virtually at the foot of the ancestor temple’s entrance staircase. The internal walls of this sunken plaza were (and still are) decorated with hundreds of stone heads, all of different sizes and different styles—probably ancestral portraits belonging to conquered or client people who were subject to Tiwanaku.
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