About Cerro Baul: Empires of the Andes

The people huddled in their impregnable fortress atop the high mesa called Cerro Baúl, their last refuge as the mighty Inca legions swept through the valley far below. With its sheer walls and single, tortuous route to the top, the citadel defied attack by storm, so the Inca army laid siege to Cerro Baúl. For 54 days, the people held out. But with little food and no water, they found their redoubt was not only a grand bastion but also a grand prison.

Then, in hopes of saving their starving children, the defenders sent the youngsters down from the beleaguered mountaintop. The Inca received the children with kindness, fed them, and even let them take a few supplies to their parents - along with a promise of peace and friendship.

That was enough for the hungry and hopeless people of Cerro Baúl. They surrendered unconditionally to the new imperial order about A.D. 1475. The siege of Cerro Baúl was but the final chapter in the legendary history of what 500 years earlier had been the southernmost outpost of the Wari, the first of the great empires of the Andes. The Inca siege was described by Spanish chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, and our two seasons of excavations at Cerro Baúl lend credence to this historical lore.

The mesa today is a sacred mountain, sanctuary of El Señor de Cerro Baúl, a spirit that's widely venerated throughout the region. But our investigations confirm that it was, for nearly five centuries, a majestic city that dominated the frontier between the Wari and the neighboring Tiwanaku empire.

The story of Cerro Baúl begins in the time archaeologists call the Middle Horizon, when the two empires ruled the central Andes. The Wari, secular and militant, governed most of highland and coastal Peru from their upland capitol at Ayacucho. The Tiwanaku, a trade-based state with a religious core, controlled parts of what is now Bolivia, southern Peru, and northern Chile from a capitol near Lake Titicaca. The Moquegua Valley, dominated by Cerro Baúl, is the only place where the two civilizations are known to have come face-to-face.

The Moquegua Valley had been in the Tiwanaku orbit until the Wari made their bold thrust into the region. To secure their political outpost, the Wari intruders strategically settled the towering Cerro Baúl and the adjacent pinnacle of Cerro Mejia. Unraveling the nature of this intruding colony and its relationship with the surrounding Tiwanaku is a long-standing concern of the Asociación Contisuyo, a consortium of Peruvian and American scholars investigating the region. Recent mapping and excavation at Cerro Baúl and adjacent sites are beginning to reveal pieces of this puzzle.

Where the two competing nations met, their citizens apparently chose cooperation over conflict. Our excavations find no evidence of warfare during the centuries (from about A.D. 600 to 1020) in which the Wari and the Tiwanaku shared the valley and its scant water. Goods and ideas almost certainly were being exchanged; interaction was inevitable, if for no other reason than to discuss rights to the most critical resource of the arid desert. Water streaming from mountain rainstorms had to pass by a Wari canal before it reached Tiwanaku fields.

Furthermore, we recovered a Tiwanaku-style kero (a drinking vessel used in ceremonies) among the Wari's most sacred ceremonial offerings yet found at the site - a strong argument for ritual interaction between the two groups who shared the valley.

Cerro Baúl was a bustling city of one- and two-story houses organized around plazas where people raised guinea pigs (for food and fuel), prepared feasts, created obsidian projectile points, and made necklace beads of turquoise, lapis lazuli, onyx, and polished shell imported from the Pacific coast. The 25-hectare (62-acre) summit of Cerro Baúl - some 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet) above the valley floor - was clearly the political and social crown of the Wari outpost. Yet most of the empire's citizens lived not on the top, but on terraces cut into less lofty heights.

When the Wari arrived in the valley, they introduced an agricultural technology of terracing steep slopes and digging long, serpentine canals across the broken land. A 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) canal wound from the Torata River through the El Paso Divide between Cerro Baúl and Cerro Mejia, where the water course split to irrigate expansive terraces that stairstepped the flanks of both hills. This high-country irrigation system may be the key to the Wari's successful expansion into the extremely arid Moquegua Sierra, especially during severe droughts from A.D. 562 to 594 and from A.D. 650 to 750.

The summit of Cerro Baúl is divided into two areas of very different architecture. A monumental core comprises one- and two-story masonry buildings, while the eastern occupation, extending to the edge of the mesa and overlooking the route of ascent, is crowded with more modest, one-story stone dwellings similar to those found on the terraces of the slopes.

Building atop the mesa was a daunting task. Earth for mortar and silt for plaster came from the banks of the Rio Torata, two hours away by foot. Water for mixing those materials was hauled uphill from the El Paso canal. For construction stone, Wari builders turned to the mesa itself, quarrying the western half of the summit so heavily that it resembles a cratered lunar landscape.

Fine masonry construction was restricted to important buildings that adhered to the strict architectural canons of the imperial capital at Ayacucho. D-shaped structures are among the rarest and most distinctive buildings at the political nexus, where they likely were at the sacred center of Wari culture, an area of sacrifice and propitiation of the gods. At Cerro Baúl, we find at least one and possibly two of these temples. In our investigations of one of them, several fine artifacts were found in a ritual offering. These include entire polychrome ceramic vessels, an engraved gourd bowl, and a silver-alloy foil camelid 2.5 centimeters (about an inch) across.

Another potentially important religious complex at Cerro Baúl is the plaza of the sacred stone, an architectural compound built around a large boulder at the center of the summit. Sacred stones were prominent features in Inca cosmology, and a similar structure has been uncovered near the Wari site of Pikillacta in the Cuzco region. These stones were the centers of ritual and received offerings of special libations (such as maize beer or sacrificial blood) or of sacred items. Common Inca sacrificial offerings included llamas, coca leaves, gold or silver work, and in extreme cases, human children. The massive boulder of Cerro Baúl likely played a similar role.

The most common architectural form at the capital and other Wari cities is an enclosed plaza flanked by impressive stone halls. These halls included residences of governors and wealthy citizens, government offices, and beer houses for state-held parties that rewarded the loyalty of important subjects. The most interesting of the long halls that have been excavated so far contained a burnt deposit of classic vessels and keros, some of which were decorated in a hybrid Wari-Tiwanaku style. Six fine necklaces were also recovered from this burnt offering. Each had an average of 970 shell beads, some with a few lapis lazuli or chrysocolla tube beads as well. The evidence suggests the fire that destroyed the hall was intentionally set, and the beautiful ceramic vessels, many of them probably brought more than 500 miles from the Wari capital, were deliberately smashed and thrown into the smoldering flames.

The fire and destruction clearly were ceremonial and not a general sacking of the site. As part of the final sacramental drinking episode in this hall - perhaps as part of the abandonment of Cerro Baúl itself - Wari priests ceremonially interred the building. The offering of bead necklaces was made after the fire had been extinguished.

Similarities in their religious iconography are impressive and suggest intimate contact between the Wari and Tiwanaku. The Tiwanaku influence on hybrid Wari keros reflects the incorporation of Tiwanaku ideas in the highest realms of Wari religion, and the existence of a Tiwanaku-style kero in the most sacred of Wari ritual offerings on the summit documents the inclusion of Tiwanaku artifacts in Wari religious ceremonies.

By studying relationships between the Wari and the Tiwanaku, we can observe how ancient empires communicated with each other. In our own age of internationalization and globalization, the Andean past may tell us a great deal about the nature of confrontation between nations and the successes and failures of strategies of imperial interaction and control.

PATRICK RYAN WILLIAMS is visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Educated at Northwestern University and the University of Florida, he has directed the Cerro Baúl Excavation Project since 1997.

MICHAEL E. MOSELEY is Professor and Associate Chair of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Educated at Berkeley and Harvard, he was a founding member of the Asociación Constisuyo and has conducted archaeological research in the Andes for more than 30 years.

DONNA J. NASH is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida. She is currently directing excavations at the site of Cerro Mejia and is a Supervising Archaeologist on the Cerro Baúl Excavation Project.

The ancient greeks,the incas and the altomesayoq

Anthropologist Alberto Villoldo reports the comments of his informant (and mentor), Prof. Antonio Morales, regarding the great civilizations who had developed North of the equator, as been characterized by a “descending God”, where “the divine comes from the heavens and descends to the Earth” (Villoldo 1995:172).

The Greeks were amid those ancient civilizations who had this marked “descending” character attributed to their divinity. The Incas – unique great culture developing South of the Equator – conversely, had an “ascending” god-force, raising, like the golden maize stalks in the garden of the Koricancha Temple, from mother earth to heaven. Still, we believe there are oversimplifications in this pattern of reconstruction, which do not take into account the many, complex overly-articulated aspects of ancient Greek perception of the divinity, the different phases and stages where these religious ideas were manifested and expressed in -sometimes – conflictual forms, which make any “descending” statement tout-court a bit of an issue in terms of reflecting the actual way these different visions of the world were perceived and channelled in cultic and ritual practices by our Greek ancestors.

This is not the place for a treaty on ancient Greek religion, therefore we shall dwell only on those aspects of this ancient Greek sense of divinity – those archaic cults linked to the earth-goddess, and then prophecy and divination as they were practiced in the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, and to a specific cult of Zeus, worshipped as “Kataibates” – which lend themselves to be seen with a more sympathetic eye to the explorer of Inca shamanism.

By all means, a few millennia before the Incas, Ghe’ – Gaia, the primordial Earth Mother – was worshipped by the ancient Greeks. One of the attributes of the later, Olympian deity of Apollo was Pythios, and – as the myth goes – Python was the dragon-snake, son of Gaia, who guarded the ancient oracle at Delphi. Here, the Pythia, priestess of the Oracle, divined in trance, uttering inexplicable, enigmatic prophetic announcements, intoxicated by the vapours coming from a rocky chasm in a special area of the sanctuary. Her words were later interpreted by a special class of priests, devoted to the de-codification of the prophetic response. Python was the guardian of this chasm, from where the inebriating vapours ascended from the depths of the earth. The power of prophecy was – in primordial times – originating directly from Ghe’, the Earth Mother. It came, ascending from the earth. In later times, Apollo, a later, solar Olympian deity, stole the role of this primordial divinity, killed Python and took over in the cult at Delphi, becoming himself the god of prophecy.

The Incas worshipped Viracocha, their creator god, Inti, the Sun, Quilla, the Moon goddess, and had in the cosmological temple of Koricancha – in Cusco – a whole section dedicated to Venus, the Pleiades and all the stars. Here, Garcilaso de la Vega informs us, there was a room “dedicated to lightning, and to thunder, which they were both expressed by the single name, illapa. [...] This room was entirely covered with gold, but neither thunder not lightning were represented there [...]. The fourth room was devoted to the rainbow, which they said descended from the Sun [...]. It was entirely covered with gold and the rainbow was painted, in beautiful colours, across the entire surface of one of the walls. They called the rainbow cuichu and revered it very specially. [...] The fifth room and last room was reserved for the high priest and his assistants, who were of royal blood. [...] The name of the high priest was uilac-umu [...] This means “he who speaks of divine matters” [..]“.

Cusco was for the Incas what Delphi was for the Greeks: an esoteric centre of the world.

So far, we have seen an ascending Greek goddess, Ghe’, and had a glimpse of the special status that Cuichu, the rainbow descending from the sun, had for the Incas. Far from mirroring the complexity of the dimension of religious cults and vision of the world in either culture, the statements of Prof. Morales – as reported by Villoldo – do not seem to pay full justice to the reality of facts. There is no clear-cut view of Inca shamanism, religion and cultic practices versus ancient Greek civilization and, escaping poetic and simplified views, more than antithetical and opposite visions of the world we are strongly bound to believe that there is much more ground to dwell on similarities instead.

We do not know in what form the uillac-umu, the high priest of the Incas who spoke of divine matter may have – if at all – survived in contemporary Andean religion and cults. But we know that the Q’eros, who repute themselves direct descendants of the Incas, distinguish (alongside other indigenous communities of the high Andes) between two different types of different shamans: the Altomesayoq (or Alto mesayoq), a higher shaman – invested by the the power of prophecy and seeing – elected by the Apu (“Lord”, Sacred Mountain Spirit) and stroke by lightening (up to) three times, and the Pampamesayoq (or Pampa mesayoq) – a “normal” shaman, of lower status than the Altomesayoq. Both are called Paqos (or pakos).

The lightning cults of ancient Greece, where individuals and areas struck by lightning benefited in certain cases of an exceptional sacred status, and the election process of the Andean Altomesayoq bear a close intrinsic resemblance: both benefit from a special sacred condition and elective affinities.

In ancient Greece, one of the epithets with which the figure of Zeus was worshipped (as we know from Aischylos, as early as 467-458 BC) was that of Kataibates – the god “who descends” as a thunderbolt, or (as later sources translate the epithet) he “who makes to descend” the thunderbolts, denoting in either case the fall of the striking lightening from heaven to earth.

Zeus Kataibates was worshipped for many centuries in different regions of Greece, and the ground adjoining the altars of the god was at times regarded as an ábaton, or inviolable sacred place, innermost sanctuary or shrine. We know that there were lightning ábata, called enelýsia, holy grounds of the god, which were essentially spots struck by lightning and reputed to be the living place of Zeus Kataibates.

The closest Andean equivalent to the Greek enelýsia may be seen in the spot hit by Illapa (deity of thunder, lighting and rainstorms), where the future Altomesayoq – the “shaman of the high table” – will find the sacred stones that will become part of his or her own mesa (sacred space with medicine objects) and will be the aid in the direct communication with the Apu.

The most striking parallel between the specially elected and higher condition of the Altomesayoq and the ancient Greek world (at least from the 5th century B.C.) is probably offered by the status of the Dioblés, the “Zeus-struck man”. The god descended as a lightning flash and the one on whom he fell was considered Diόbletos – “struck by Zeus” – and held in an especially sacred status. In ancient Greece, the divinity of the god was conveyed on the individual struck by the lightning – i.e. by Zeus Kataibates – who was made immortal, or imperishable.

In the Andes there is a special relation between lightning and the make of a high shaman. The Altomesayoq, who can communicate directly with the Apus and Illapa – receives his or her shamanic powers after been struck by lightening. The initiatory process develops essentially along three phases, which are all deeply remnant of traditional shamanic initiations: at the outset Illapa strikes (one to three times) and kills the chosen person, then his or her scattered body parts are put back together, and finally the person is brought back to life. When the candidate future Altomesayoq re-awakes from the shock and regains consciousness, he or she must look for special stones that the Illapa left on the ground when it stroke. Nobody must see – or interfere with – the future Altomesayoq (who may otherwise die).

These stones – called Khuyas stones – are invested of special powers and sacredness, and will become part of the mesa of the Altomesayoq. These will be the intermediary in the direct communication that the high shaman establishes with the Apu and Illapa.

References
Cook, A. B. Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, Cambridge University Press, 1925Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, translated by Maria Jolas, Lima 2002