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| Evan Clark ('20) |
My five-week study in Cusco, Peru this summer was, in many ways, an ideal trip abroad for me. Not only did I have the opportunity to practice my Spanish daily with my host family and to learn from my professors and fellow students, but I also had the opportunity to visit dozens of unique sites from Peru’s pre-Columbian and colonial past. Coupled with the information about the Inca and their predecessors that I learned in my class on the history of the Inca civilization, these educational visits throughout the Peruvian Andes gave me a deeper appreciation of the cyclical nature of Peruvian history. Although I had studied the Inca and the cultures that preceded them in the past in my spare time, I had never devoted extensive study to cultures like the Caral Supe civilization and the Paracas civilization, the latter of which I had not heard of before my study abroad. I expected to learn about cyclical processes of cultural continuity and adaptation through the rises and falls of civilizations in Peru, but I did not realize that Peru’s history can be regarded as cyclical as that of ancient and medieval China with its myriad dynasties. By investigating Peru’s ages-old history, we can not only appreciate the ingenuity of the pre-Columbian societies of Peru, but can also recognize particular contributors to the downfall of many a civilization in ancient Peru. The lessons we can glean from the collapse of cultures like the Chavín, the Nazca, and the more widely-known Inca are immensely relevant to the modern United States because the same kinds of factors that brought down their cultures also threaten our own. Therefore, we should not just admire the Inca and the cultures that came before them for the beauty of their ceramics, the precision of their stonework, or the sophistication of their political organization. Rather, we must also delve into the causes of these cultures’ demise, and in doing so recognize what any culture, including our own, must do to lessen its chances of falling in the same way as the civilizations of ancient Peru.
Before coming to Peru, I had heard of the Caral Supe civilization, but I had never studied it in great detail. My knowledge about this ancient culture paled in comparison to my knowledge of the Inca and other pre-Columbian civilizations of Peru. Hence, I was eager to soak up all the information I could about the mysterious people of the Caral Supe valley. Based upon the material I learned in my history class in Peru, the first civilization in Peru arose in the Caral Supe valley around 5,000 years ago. The location of the civilization made excellent sense, for its people lived along a river that carried fresh water and silt from the Andes Mountains every year. This river ran through a valley that was sheltered by rugged terrain and that extended to the Pacific Ocean. Thus, the people of the Caral Supe civilization could raise plentiful crops, had access to abundant fresh water, were protected by the mountains, and could reap the bounty of the ocean to their west. These people could rely upon the Humboldt Current, which brought cold water from around Antarctica up as far north as Peru. Given fish and other sea creatures’ general preference for cold water, they move northward along with the Humboldt Current in great quantities every year so that even penguins come to coastal Peru during part of the year. With this extensive supply of food, water, and protection, the people of the Caral Supe culture built impressive structures, cultivated cotton for the first time in South America, developed a kind of early perfume, made charming pan flutes, and created what could be a predecessor to the quipu system of knots that the Inca would later use to keep records of numbers and other information. Despite the long prosperity of the Caral Supe civilization, it collapsed after many centuries, likely due to a particularly strong instantiation of the climatic phenomenon known as El Niño, which warms the waters off of South America to an extent that the plentiful fish off the coast do not migrate to Peru for a time. This decrease in the food supply proved critical to the fall of the Caral Supe civilization.
The successor civilization to the Caral Supe culture was the Chavín civilization, the first theocracy in South America. The religious ideology of this intriguing culture would have profound implications for later ancient Peruvian peoples. Rather than conquering other peoples through military aggression, the Chavín used the persuasive power of their religious beliefs and the hallucinogenic drugs they had at their disposal to convince neighboring chieftains to become part of Chavín society. Unlike their Caral Supe forerunners, the Chavín developed pottery, albeit of a kind that was primitive by comparison with the later Moche culture. Also, the Chavín built intricately carved monoliths of stone and emphasized a belief in the importance of dualism – the union of two entities that depended upon one another for life and the stability of the natural environment, such as the sun and the moon, day and night, and male and female. Yet, for all their cultural developments, the Chavín appear to have fallen due to causes similar to those that brought about the breakdown of the Caral Supe civilization – dramatic changes in the environment with which the Chavín did not know how to cope. A civilization that arose after and to the south of the Chavín, the Nazca, also likely collapsed as a result of environmental processes. The Nazca, known the world over for their mysterious, iconic geoglyphs called the “Nazca Lines,” lived in a desert climate near the Peruvian coast. Although I learned that some scholars believe the Nazca fell after extraordinarily long droughts, a popular theory among scholars is that the Nazca civilization may have collapsed because its people cut down too many trees that served as a buffer to the winds of the desert. With many of these trees gone, the harsh winds may have proved too much for the Nazca.
While these civilizations and other ancient Peruvian peoples declined after changes in their environment, whether natural or brought about by humans, other cultures of pre-Columbian Peru met their demise for reasons other than climatic changes. For instance, the Wari Empire, a predecessor state to the Inca Empire, created the first empire in South America by conquering much of the Peruvian Andes and the Peruvian coastal desert. The Wari dominated their territory through military might and through the establishment of regional centers of power, such as Pikillaqta, a Wari city near Cusco that I visited with my Inca history class. Pikillaqta was founded at an unusual location for a city; it does not border a river or a vast lake of fresh water. It did have access to fresh water from a lagoon that is a remnant of the ancient lake that once filled the site of modern Cusco. However, this lagoon is about a mile away from Pikillaqta, and it did not provide abundant fresh water from the 10,000 or so inhabitants of Pikillaqta at its height. As I was touring the ruins of the ancient city, I learned the Wari had chosen to construct Pikillaqta where it stands in order to be near mines from which they could obtain the materials to make plaster. This plaster would be used to coat the walls of buildings within the city. Despite the advantage of being in close proximity to the mines, the inhabitants of Pikillaqta likely lived in conditions that were not ideal to their health, especially without a source of fresh water immediately next to the city. Through cities such as Pikillaqta, the Wari sought to maintain control over their vast empire. Yet they seem to have collapsed due to internal divisions and overextension, expanding their territories so much that they did not have the resources to hold onto them.
After the collapse of the Wari and the Tiwanaku civilization that existed alongside the Wari, the Chimú civilization became the dominant force in northern, coastal Peru, while the Chachapoyas, the “warriors of the clouds,” established the only prominent civilization in pre-Columbian Peru to be centered in the rainforest rather than the Peruvian highlands or coastal desert. Both of these cultures, along with many others, were conquered by the Inca as the Inca ruler Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui and his descendants carved out the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas. This colossal state called Tawantinsuyu, meaning “the four parts,” was divided into four general administrative units called suyus and stretched from what is now southwestern Colombia to central Chile and northwestern Argentina. The Inca monarch, called the Sapa Inca, whose title meant “great ruler,” oversaw the administration of the empire from his capital in Cusco. Before arriving in Peru, I had already read about Inca imperial administration and its extraordinary sophistication. Upon studying the Incas in the classroom, I gained much deeper insight into the Inca administrative system, which divided administrative duties into civil and religious categories. The city of Cusco itself was split into four parts, two of which were for civil and religious officials and buildings. Only the Sapa Inca could cross from the area of the city devoted to civil administration to the area dedicated to religious matters. The Sapa Inca and other imperial officials received reports about happenings in the empire by reading quipu, intricate series of knots that could be used to record numbers and possibly even narratives. Although the Inca did not possess a two-dimensional writing system such as those descended from Mesopotamian cuneiform or based upon the ancient Chinese writing system, their quipu allowed them to keep precise records and ensure the oversight of the empire ran smoothly.
Such a powerful civilization, not even one hundred years old by 1532, might have lasted for centuries had it not been for the arrival of the Spaniards to the Inca Empire that year. That is, the Inca state might have lasted for centuries had the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac not died of smallpox that spread to the Inca Empire ahead of Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors. The death of Huayna Capac and his heir left a power vacuum that two of Huayna Capac’s sons, Huascar and Atahualpa, sought to fill. Huascar, who was supported by the religious and political elite in Cusco, waged war against his brother, who had the support of the armies that had been fighting to expand the empire’s borders into modern-day Colombia. The clash between the brothers ended in a near-victory for Atahualpa, but it brought division and civil war to an empire that desperately needed to stand united when the conquistadors arrived. In fact, the division between Atahualpa and Huascar had grown so severe by 1532 that when Pizarro’s men captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca, the Inca ruler ordered the execution of his brother so as to prevent him from assuming the throne while Atahualpa was held hostage. Atahualpa’s decision to kill off his brother, though grounded in the conviction that his brother posed a grave threat to his rule, proved costly for the Inca, for if Huascar had assumed the position of Sapa Inca, he could have lead the Inca against the Spanish while Atahualpa was in their custody. Still, if Huascar had taken the throne, he may have just used his newfound power against his brother, just as Atahualpa used his power against him, even in captivity. After several months, the Spanish accepted Atahualpa’s enormous ransom of gold and silver before executing him anyway and installing his younger brother Manco Inca as a puppet ruler of the Inca Empire. Though Manco Inca would launch an ambitious rebellion against the Spanish a few years later and the Inca political leadership would escape to the jungle settlement of Vilcabamba after his failure to retake Cusco, the Spanish eventually captured the last Inca ruler in 1572. As Inca rule crumbled, peoples that had been conquered by the Inca often fought with the Spanish against their Inca overlords, seeking to regain their autonomy. These native allies proved decisive in the Spanish conquest of the Inca, a lengthy process that was never quite complete. Devastating European diseases and Spaniards’ steel weaponry did much to debilitate Inca resistance to the Spanish, but internal divisions in the empire played a critical role in its downfall as well.
So how does the collapse of these pre-Columbian civilizations in Peru pertain to the United States today? At first, the causes of the downfall of ancient Peru’s civilizations do not seem to have much in common with the factors that threaten the United States in the early twenty-first century. For instance, El Niño has little bearing on Americans’ food supply, whereas it had a decisive impact on the food supply of the Caral Supe and Chavín civilizations. However, the apparent irrelevance of the ancient Peruvian civilizations’ fall is nothing more than an illusion, for the United States has much to learn from the downfalls of these civilizations. By studying how societal order broke down in these ancient cultures, we can better understand how to bolster our own culture’s capacity to overcome threats to its stability and survival. It is vital that we recognize that the ancient Peruvian civilizations typically collapsed for multiple reasons, each of which likely would not have been enough to bring those civilizations down but in tandem proved too much for them to handle. Not only did societies like the Inca succumb to disease; attacks from disgruntled, conquered peoples and well-armed invaders; and internal divisions, but also cultures like the Classic Maya civilization likely collapsed due to chronic warfare, prolonged droughts, overuse of natural resources, and political upheaval. The Western Roman Empire, too, suffered from a variety of complex political, military, and environmental developments that fed off of one another, such as climatic changes, inflation, and political instability. These developments weakened the empire’s ability to resist the influx of Germanic peoples moving westward out of the path of the Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries AD.
Americans should glean two key insights from the observation that civilizations usually collapse under the strain of many processes that threaten them, rather than under the strain of one threat. First, Americans should refrain from pronouncing the impending doom of our country based upon individual factors that divide and enervate us. Some Americans on the political left point to accelerating climate change, as well as perceived intolerance and bigotry on the part of some of their fellow Americans, as severe threats that could cripple the United States if left unchecked. Likewise, some Americans on the political right portray a perceived breakdown of commitment to family and Judeo-Christian values on the part of many Americans, as well as the increasing secularization of American society, as existential threats to the country’s survival. Instead of adopting a pessimistic attitude and proclaiming one political, social, economic, or climatic development to be a specter of doom that looms over our country, we must trust that our nation is strong enough to overcome individual threats to its survival. So long as we strive to look beyond our differences and unite as Americans to confront the challenges that face us, we can prevent single factors from bringing the United States to heel militarily, politically, socially, or economically.
A second insight we Americans should gain from studying the fall of the Inca civilization and its predecessors is that the social and climatic changes that are affecting our society, our internal political divisions, and threats to our nation from rivals like China and Russia can contribute collectively to bring about our destruction if we let them do so. Many of these changes or dangers to our country can be interrelated. Just as the collapse of the Caral Supe civilization was likely the result of a breakdown of social order in the wake of an unusually long El Niño, changes in the climate could greatly weaken the economic health of the United States and may seriously endanger coastal cities, depending on how severe the climate change turns out to be. The inability of the federal government and state governments to stop these developments could shake Americans’ faith in the authority of the federal government and their state governments. Other factors, apart from or alongside changes in the climate, could compound one another to pose a grave threat to the United States and our republican form of government. Materialistic preoccupation with the self; a want of civic engagement and involvement in community associations on the part of too many Americans; disagreements about morality; divisions within American families; a lack of respect for authority; and acute partisanship are all concerning developments in our country individually. Together, they threaten to undermine the fabric of trust and civic virtue that is crucial for our society to maintain its cohesion and for our country to maintain its status as a democratic republic. The United States cannot afford the bonds between its citizens to wither as external dangers to our nation grow more severe. As China continues its development as a geopolitical titan that can challenge Western norms and institutions around the globe and as Russia continues its interference in U.S. elections, the United States must stand firm against its enemies, rather than allow internal bickering over political and social divisions to impede it from defending its national interests. If we allow mistrust and tribalism to pervade our hearts, if we turn against our fellow Americans, and if we give up hope in our republic and in our capacity to overcome obstacles, we will neither have the focus nor the resolve to resist our foreign rivals and the climatic changes that face us in the years ahead. Internal infighting breeds weakness in the face of external threats and jeopardizes the integrity of our political system and our national security. We must not follow the path of the Wari, who through overextension of their military capabilities and internal dissensions were unable to maintain their grip over their conquered territories. Rather, we would do well to heed these words from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, on the cusp of the American Civil War: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Evan Clark, of Owensboro, Ky., is a member of the McConnell Scholar Class of 2020. He studies political science, history and Spanish at the University of Louisville.