Migration, colonization, and the shifting narratives of ancient Andean origins
Migration, colonization, and the shifting narratives of ancient Andean origins
In the Quechua-speaking highlands where the Incas built their empire more than 500 years ago, farmers and herders used the concept of pacha—movement across space and time—to shape local identities. They believed that their ancestors emerged onto wild landscapes in the South American Andes when the universe was created, and that they wandered until they found places they could transform for human habitation and subsistence. The first Cañaris descended from a sacred mountain in the Ecuadorean highlands; the ancestral Chancas of southern Peru followed the water flowing out of a high mountain lake. Daily tasks drew people from the here-and-now of their villages, into an ancestral tableau in which noteworthy landscape features recalled those original migrations.
The Inca nobility traced its origins to a cave located to the south of Cuzco, the imperial capital. During the mid-sixteenth century, Inca men told Spaniards of an ancient journey in which their powerful male ancestors turned to stone to establish Inca dominion over their city and its valley. Their female ancestors conquered and displaced local populations and helped to build the Coricancha, the temple-palace where the last surviving male ancestor founded his imperial house. Most Spaniards considered these dynastic stories to be factual, because Inca nobles used knotted-cord devices, painted boards, praise songs, and other memory aids to preserve oral histories.
Spaniards expressed a very different attitude when it came to the stories of universal creation that set ancestral Andean migrations in motion—they described them as fables or superstitions that were at best laughably misguided, and at worst constituted demonic misinformation that blinded Andean peoples to their true origins. Any account of universal creation that diverged from the stories found in Genesis posed a challenge to Spanish efforts to convert and colonize Andean peoples. Some of the anxiety over repeating Indigenous creation stories came from the lack of clarity regarding the origin of the peoples that Spaniards had come to call “Indians.” European Christians used biblical accounts of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel to help explain the diversity of cultures and languages that they lumped under that racialized rubric, but a fundamental question nagged at them: how did these people get to the Americas before we did?
To displace Andean creation stories and fit Native peoples into their own apocalyptic project of transatlantic colonization, Spanish writers concocted an array of apocryphal speculations. Some said that the first Indians were Phoenician or Carthaginian voyagers, while others claimed that they descended from a lost tribe of Israel or somehow originated in the mysterious lands of the Tatars or the Poles. The royal cosmographer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa wrote in 1572 that the first Indians descended from Noah’s grandson Tubal, who settled in Spain and whose offspring peopled the island of Atlantis before moving into the Americas. In effect, that account leveraged Plato’s philosophical writings to render Native Americans as long-lost Spaniards. (Not to be outdone, the English explorer Walter Raleigh justified his search for El Dorado on the basis that the Incas—or “Ingas” as he called them—came from “Inglatierra” and were thus his own erstwhile countrymen.)
Amidst this cacophony of unfounded speculation, the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo hit much closer to the mark in 1653, arguing that “Indians” first crossed into the Americas via a yet-undiscovered land bridge from Asia. Although this speculation has proved prescient, it was built on a racialized argument that no archaeologist today would accept. Cobo devoted several chapters to reducing the vast human diversity native to the Americas into a few general “Indian” features—reddish skin, dark eyes, straight black hair, and pronounced phlegmatic and sanguine humors—that he considered similar to populations in east Asia. Cobo did more than describe phenotypic similarities, however: he claimed that both populations possessed similarly undesirable personalities, being cowardly, unreliable, and easily led astray.
Cobo’s natural history remained unpublished until the late 1800s, but a similar mix of physical stereotyping, medieval humoralism, and ethnocentrism resurfaced in the eighteenth century in the work of Carolus Linnaeus, the father of binomial taxonomy. In his Systema Naturae, Linnaeus distinguished the supposed red skin of Homo americanus rubescens (Indians) from the brownish tone of Homo asiaticus fuscus (Asians), noting supposed differences in their humoral imbalances, which made them choleric and phlegmatic, respectively. Linnaeus characterized the Indian race as governed by “custom,” and Asians as governed by “opinion.” This pseudoscientific classification helped to inspire later writers, such as the German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the American physician Samuel Morton, to collect human skulls and measure human bodies to demonstrate racial differences. In the Andes, skull collection and other racialized metrics were entangled with the earliest archaeological research—for example, when Hiram Bingham mounted his second Peruvian expedition to return to the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1912, he brought along an anatomist to measure the bodies of living Quechua people, to determine whence they had originated, and how long their ancestors had lived in Peru.
Archaeologists today reject the racial judgments that run through such work, but they continue to collect evidence about ancient migrations. Researchers now use a battery of geochemical methods to identify the origins of different kinds of pottery and stone tools, and new studies of stable isotopes and DNA from ancient human remains are adding unprecedented new data about the ways that people moved throughout and settled in the Andes. As scientific methods have improved, research practices have become more sensitive to the rights and interests of descendant populations, who continue to make ancestral claims to their local landscapes as a way to maintain identity and defend what is theirs. The increasing commitment to community engagement in Andean archaeology reminds scholars of the enduring power of narratives of origin and migration, whether they come from an oral tradition or laboratory science.
Featured image by Adèle Beausoleil via Unsplash.