February 2, 2000 - AP
Each June for at least the last four centuries, farmers in 12 mountain villages in Peru and Bolivia follow a ritual that Westerners might think odd, if not crazy. Late each night for about a week, the farmers observe the stars in the Pleiades constellation, which is low on the horizon to the northeast. If they appear big and bright, the farmers know to plant their potato crop at the usual time four months later. But if the stars are dim, the usual planting will be delayed for several weeks.
Now Western researchers have applied the scientific method to this seeming madness. Poring over reams of satellite data on cloud cover and water vapor, Professor Benjamin Orlove, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis, and colleagues have discovered that these star-gazing farmers are accurate long-range weather forecasters. High wisps of cirrus clouds dim the stars in El Nino years, which brings reduced rainfall to that part of the Andes. In such drought conditions, it makes sense to plant potatoes as late as possible.
Orlove's work, which was reported in January in the British journal Nature, is just the latest example of indigenous or traditional knowledge that has been found to have a sound scientific basis. In agriculture, nutrition, medicine and other fields, modern research is showing why people maintain their traditions.
Take the Masai of East Africa, who are famous for the kind of high-fat diet, rich in meat and milk, that would make a cardiologist swoon. Timothy Johns, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and Environment, has long studied the Masai to determine how they stay healthy.
The Masai add the roots and barks of certain plants, including a species of acacia high in antioxidants, Johns said. They also chew a natural gum, related to myrrh, that helps to break down fats.
"It's not a magic bullet protecting the Masai against heart disease," he said. "But there is a benefit from what they are doing."
In a 1998 study, two Cornell University researchers analyzed the spices used in 36 countries and found a correlation between average temperature and cooking with spices like cumin, turmeric, ginger and chili peppers, all of which have antimicrobial properties. The hotter the climate, the hotter the food -- in part, at least, to keep it from spoiling.
Sometimes, however, the benefits of traditional knowledge are not so obvious to those outside the culture. In Bali in the 1970s, the Indonesian government, persuaded by international advocates of the "green revolution," forced rice farmers adopt new growing schemes. Among other things, the farmers were made to stop their centuries-old ritual of meeting in small groups at a series of water temples set at the forks of rivers, to negotiate seasonal schedules for flooding their paddies.
The new techniques resulted in disaster. Farmers were pressured to plant as often as possible. With little coordination of irrigation, water shortages and pest infestation were the norm.
At about this time, J. Stephen Lansing, an American anthropologist, began to study the water temples. What he found, which was supported later by computer modeling, was that the old system was quite sophisticated and efficient, encouraging cooperation among thousands of farmers. Water was shared and controlled through a process involving reciprocal altruism.
"Everybody gets more rice and variation in harvest disappears, so there's no reason to be envious of your neighbors," said Lansing, who now teaches at the University of Arizona. "It's a bottom-up system of management that's worked very well." The green revolution, he added, "was very much top down." The traditional system has been re-established.
Orlove has studied similar traditional resource management around Lake Titicaca, on the border between Bolivia and Peru. A distinctive feature of the lake is the reeds growing in its shallows. The people around the lake use them for rafts and livestock feed, among other things.
"They are a major component of the household economy," said Orlove. The residents replant the reeds, which also serve as a spawning ground for some of the 22 species of fish that are unique to the lake.
But indigenous knowledge can be faulty. "Traditional people sometimes get things right, and sometimes get them wrong," said Alan Fiske, a psychological anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Some things people do are bad for them." Other anthropologists have challenged the notion that all indigenous groups have somehow developed a blissful oneness with their world.
The problem, Fiske noted, is that verifying traditional knowledge is not easy. The scientific method can be expensive, and data can be difficult to obtain. Orlove's research on the potato farmers would have been impossible even 10 years ago, because the type of satellite data he needed did not exist.
There may be a shortage of data, but there's no shortage of traditional knowledge that awaits possible confirmation by science. James Lynch, an American scientist who has spent the past two decades helping Costa Rican farmers, said he has learned from them the importance of timing. A tree cut down during a new moon, he said, will quickly be ravaged by the insects, while one felled several days before a full moon will stay free of termites for years.
Lynch now follows the practice. "But I've never seen any scientific study to back it up," he said.
Reuters - Salta, Argentina - April 29, 1999
The 500-year-old girl's face looks tranquil despite the method behind her untimely demise. They got her drunk on beer and she was numb from the altitude and the freezing snow before she was wrapped in blankets and brightly colored cloth and buried alive.
The little Inca girl's face is the most perfectly preserved of its age ever found. She, another girl and a boy were mummified naturally by the extreme cold and the lack of oxygen at 22,000 feet up on the summit of the Llullaillaco volcano in the northwestern Argentine Andes.
Modern CAT scans show their organs are still intact. There appears to be frozen blood in their veins and the remains of their last meals are still in their bowels.
The girl, whose face can be seen poking through her dusty rags, was about 14. Her cheeks are swollen but she looks like one of the dark-skinned children who play in the streets of the provincial capital Salta today under the shadows of the arid mountains worshipped by their ancestors.
"The children offered to the gods were messengers from humanity to the divine world," said Juan Schobinger, an expert in the Inca civilization and high mountain archaeology from Argentina's National University of Cuyo.
Adults were not sacrificed because they did not perhaps have that special force which children have.
The Inca empire was the largest of the American civilizations destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors. In only 90 years it had spread as far north as Quito in modern Ecuador and south to central Chile by the time Francisco Pizarro took the Emperor Atahualpa hostage, released him in exchange for a room full of gold and then had him garroted anyway in 1533.
The mummified remains of sacrificed children have lain on mountaintops in Peru and elsewhere in the Andes for half a millennium. They were buried with small quantities of food, beer and narcotic coca leaves to chew on their journey to meet the gods and were accompanied by male and female figurines of gold and seashells and tiny statues of llamas.
The Incas' theocratic state held annual festivals where children were offered to the gods to ensure the functioning of the sun and bountiful crops. Children were also brought in from the far-flung provinces to take part in ceremonies and be returned to mountains near their homes to be sacrificed.
Schobinger believes the young victims were sometimes selected and prepared years in advance. Near the icy summit of the tallest mountain in the Americas, Aconcagua on the border of Argentina and central Chile, he found the mummified body of a 7-year-old boy who had been fed nothing but corn for the last two years of his life -- possibly as a ritual preparation.
Maize had its set of symbols. This is all impregnated with symbolism, which we do not fully understand.
The crown of the boy's skull is as bare as an eggshell and a crack caused by the heavy blow that killed him exposes his shrunken brain. But he still has a face, contorted in what looks like fear, and his adult teeth were just coming through.
To be sacrificed was considered a great honor for the Incas. Their ceremonies were humane in comparison with the bloody rites of the Aztecs in Mexico, who shocked the Spaniards with mass sacrifices of war prisoners.
Honored parents sacrificed their young
An early Spanish chronicler copied an oral history of a famous sacrifice made by the chief of a Peruvian valley who offered his own daughter to the emperor, known as the Inca. The girl was renamed Tantacagua, or yellow corn, by the emperor.
"It is told that they carried out a ceremony, dressed her in the finest robes, prepared a special funeral chamber and buried her alive. From that moment the place was venerated as a 'huaca,' a sacred place inhabited by someone who had not died but continued to live in the other world," Schobinger said.
Archaeologists believe victims were led to the place of sacrifice in a procession lasting days, climbing up rugged mountains and stopping at bare stone shelters. A scientist who went on the expedition up Llullaillaco -- one of the world's tallest volcanoes -- almost died from a pulmonary edema caused by the altitude, but the Incas had no such equipment and carried heavy loads, sometimes including stones.
The victims were probably offered to the sun god, who was associated with the emperor himself. But the mountains were also venerated as gods, known as apus in the Quechua language spread by the Incas and still spoken throughout the Andes.
One of the girls found on Llullaillaco had her skull deformed by tight binding from birth so that it took the shape of a conical mountain. Other deformed skulls have been found bound into the form of mountains with multiple peaks, which were considered the breasts of female mountain gods.
Lust for gold still endangers Incas
The same lust for gold that led the Spaniards to conquer the Incas still endangers their holy places. Treasure hunters brave snow and altitude to ransack Inca sites, often using explosives to break through the frozen soil in search of gold and statuettes to be sold to rich collectors.
Archaeologists climbing the Quehuar volcano found a mummy frozen in a block of ice. Without the equipment to get it out, they decided to retrieve it on a later expedition. But treasure hunters had wrecked the site by the time they returned.
They found one of the mummy's ears encrusted in an old Inca wall by the force of the dynamite, Maria Constanza Ceruti, a member of the Llullaillaco team, said.
The dark-skinned Andean peoples often suffer discrimination in predominantly European Argentina. But their old beliefs still survive in the remote mountain villages of northern Argentina, mixed with fervent Catholicism.
Country people still climb high to leave offerings of food and grain at the Inca sites to appease the apus. One old Salta man swore that human sacrifice goes on quietly today as well. Local sugar plantation bosses kill and eat one of their workers every year to ensure a sweet crop, he said.
"It's because they sign pacts with the devil," he told Reuters as pitch-black night closed in on the road to Chile, which winds through empty mountains.
AP - Kevin Gray - Buenos Aires - April 7, 1999
Three 500-year-old Inca mummies, apparently victims of a ritual sacrifice, have been discovered frozen and in near-perfect condition on an Andean volcano peak in northern Argentina.
Johan Reinhard said Tuesday that the exceptionally well-preserved remains of two boys and a girl found last month atop the 22,000-foot Mount Llullaillaco near Argentina's border with Chile may offer scientists a rare opportunity to conduct DNA testing on centuries-old bodies.
The mummies apparently contain frozen blood in their heart and lungs, which could reveal ground-breaking clues about diet, disease and conditions during the time of the Incas, the U.S. archaeologist said.
Speaking with The Associated Press, he said the mummies had to be removed from under nearly six feet of dry rock and earth from a burial platform.
Reinhard said two of the mummies were wrapped in intricately woven textiles, but an exact cause of death was not immediately clear. He said CAT scans of the mummies showed all of their internal organs were intact.
"These bodies were frozen, as opposed to past bodies which were freeze-dried," said Reinhard, speaking in an interview from Salta, a northern Argentine city near the site. "They are very lifelike."
"I expect that when we unwrap them, we will even be able to see the expressions on their faces," he said. "The arms looked perfect, even down to the peach fuzz hairs, and the CAT scans have shown that even the kidneys are intact."
Scientists said the burial platform also held offerings to the Inca gods, including 35 gold, silver and shell statues. Also recovered were ornate woven and embroidered textiles, moccasins and pottery, some still containing food.
"Almost all of the statues are in a state of perfect preservation, including lids on the pottery and even food offerings of meat jerky," said Reinhard.
The expeditionary force that recovered the mummies included American, Argentine and Peruvian researchers who had to brave sometimes extreme conditions such as snowstorms and high winds. A grant from the National Geographic Society partially funded the dig.
Reinhard's crew needed 12 days at the volcano's peak to recover the bodies.
Reinhard said he decided to search the area because he had read that Inca ruins had been found on Mount Llullaillaco, which he had climbed several times since 1980.
The three mummies are being kept at a university in Salta, where at least two of them are to remain until the Argentine government finishes building a research facility to house them next year.
Reinhard said at least one body was expected to be sent to the United States for extensive testing.
The discovery was the latest for Reinhard and his mummy hunters.
Last September, they found six frozen mummies on the El Misti volcano in southern Peru, believed to be sacrificial offerings to Inca gods. That burial site included a rare find of ceremonial pots of gold and silver, shedding new light on ancient Indian culture.
The Inca empire once stretched some 2,500 miles along South America's western coast from present-day Colombia to central Chile and an edge of northwestern Argentina. The 90-year empire collapsed in 1532 under the Spanish conquest. The Incas offered human sacrifices to their gods.
Working in Peru in 1995, the same team of archaeologists led by Reinhard also discovered the so-called "Ice Maiden," then considered the best-preserved mummy of the pre-Columbian era.
David Hunt, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, said Tuesday that finding mummies so well-preserved is extraordinary.
"What separates this discovery from other similar finds such as 'The Ice Maiden' is the presence of well-preserved soft tissue," Hunt said by telephone from Washington.
"It's as if they had been placed in a giant deep freeze. We're really quite lucky that they're in such good condition."
This tiny statuette of a llama, found near the burial site,
was an offering made by the Incas to bring fertility to their
September 30, 1998 - Reuters
Archaeologists said Wednesday that a group of preserved frozen mummies sacrificed to the Inca gods 500 years ago has been discovered on top of a snow-clad volcano in Peru's southern Andes.
The unearthing of the six mummies, wrapped in alpaca wool and surrounded by silver and gold figures, is one of the biggest finds in a mountainous region that over the last few years has revealed a treasure-trove of well-preserved Inca corpses. They are six mummies which were found near the crater of the Misti (volcano). This is the mountain which features the greatest number of human offerings in the world.
The find in the crater of the 19,096-foot volcano by U.S. archaeologist Johan Reinhard and Peruvian Jose Chavez comes after the same scientists discovered in 1995 the first so-called "ice maiden" on a nearby mountain close to the southern city of Arequipa. That mummy, also wrapped in fine alpaca wool and nicknamed "Juanita" and "The Lady of Ampato," drew thousands at exhibitions in the United States in 1996.
The vast Inca empire, with its advanced culture and powerful armies, spanned most of the Andes along South America's western coast at the time of Spanish conquest in the early 16th century.
The discovery of the Inca "ice women" -- believed to have been sacrifices to the Incas' mountain gods -- has brought comparisons with the 1991 find in the European Alps of a 5,000-year-old frozen corpse dubbed the "iceman." Although many "dry" Inca mummies have been found in the Andean region, these frozen ones are expected to reveal unique information about Inca lifestyle.
by Harold T. Wilkins, 1952, reprinted 1998 by Adventures Unlimited Press, pages 151 and 152
Tales of tunnels under the Andes are very old... and quite commonplace..in Ecuador. And one of these tales dates back to before the Spanish conquest and involves Huayna Capac, the ninth Inca emperor.
In 1485, then-prince Huayna Capac was given command of the army and ordered by his father, Inca Tupac Yupanqui, to extend the borders of Tawatinsuyu (the Incas' name for their South American empire--J.T.) northward from Quito.
After much campaigning, Huayna Capac laid siege to Otavallu (modern Otavalo, Ecuador, 100 kilometers north of Quito).
"The war lasted for two years. It was a very modern war, in duration, and none got the upper hand."
Otavallu, you see, was a fairly advanced civilization, like the Incas. The city was already thousands of years old when Manco Capac and his sister-wife, Mama Ocllo Huallpa, left their home in Bolivia to wander the Andes, eventually founding the Inca capital of Cuzco around 900 A.D.
The city was ruled by a young and beautiful woman named Quillago. She was a heichera-colla (Quechua for sorceress-queen--J.T.) and, in addition to her queenly duties, presided with the high priestess over a religion devoted to a goddess of the moon, whose name, unfortunately, is lost to history.
"At last the queen was captured. The Inca sought to gain her over with rich presents, which she would not accept. Then he ordered her to be liberated."
Returning to Otavallu, Quilloga plotted with the elderly high priestess, Pichamba, to assassinate the Inca prince. She told Pichamba to hide a knife in the temple's subterranean chamber and then invited the Incas to a feast at her palace.
During the feast, Quilloga invited Huayna Capac to the temple to see their magical cenote (sacred well), which was supposed to lead to Uru Ticsi, the world below. The catch was, only the three of them could visit the subterranean chamber--the Inca prince, Quilloga and her high priestess.
Huayna Capac was no fool. He had Quilloga and Pachimba searched by Inca "chosen women," just as the queen knew he would, and when they were found to be unarmed, he agreed to accompany them to the temple.
"Hand in hand, Inca and Amazon queen descended the stairway to the inner chamber where the snare was all set."
There was something strange and eerie about the dank, stone-rimmed cenote. Strange hieroglyphics marked the well. At Quilloga's invitation, Huayna Capac leaned over and peered into the well. And surprisingly, a soft perfumed wind blew into his face. He couldn't believe it. A wind? This far below the ground?
The circular well seemed to fall away into infinity. At the bottom was a queer glimmer. Almost like a pinprick of daylight. As he looked into the well, the Inca felt disoriented. He later told his friends that he felt as if he were at the bottom of the well, looking upward towards a tiny spot of sunshine.
He struggled against a surge of vertigo. Seeing her chance, Quilloga glanced at the priestess. Pichamba's gaze darted to a nearby stone altar. The queen went directly to the spot, lifted a chahuar (alpaca shawl) and found the knife.
Maybe it was ESP or fate, or maybe it was just dumb luck, that saved the Inca. Closing his eyes, Huayna Capac stepped away from the cenote, then turned just in time to see Quilloga coming at him with the knife.
He "caught the lintel of the door, with his left hand, and fixing his feet strongly against the top of the well, heaved his body against the Amazon queen and caused her to stumble and pitch headlong," screaming, into the cenote.
"A shouting virago," Pichamba, "came at him with tooth and nail, but she, too, he siezed around the waist and sent her to join the queen at the bottom of the well."
The women's screams lasted for minutes, faded to whispers, and then there was silence. Hayna Capac listened carefully, but he never heard them hit the bottom. He also had no further desire to peer into Quilloga's magic well.
Instead, he marched out of the temple and took possession of Otavallu for the Inca empire.
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