Andean Peoples

Andean religion is organised around huacas, a word covering any place, object or being charged with power: a spring, a boulder, a mummified ancestor, a line of sight. Gary Urton's study of an Andean cosmology describes how the sky is read as part of the same system, with the dark cloud shapes in the Milky Way named as animals and the river of the sky answering the river below, so that landscape and heavens are read together rather than separately.

The social unit holding those obligations is the ayllu, a descent group with rights in land and duties to its ancestors. Reciprocity is the governing idea. Offerings, called despachos or pagos, are made to the earth, Pachamama, and to the mountain lords, the apus or wamanis, in the expectation that the relation runs both ways and that failure on either side has consequences. Catherine Allen's ethnography of a Peruvian community places the coca leaf at the centre of that exchange, shared before work, before travel and before any request is put to a place.

Much of this survived the colonial extirpation campaigns by moving inside Catholic practice rather than beside it. Mountain shrines carry Christian names, saints receive the offerings that apus receive, and the pilgrimage to Qoyllur Rit'i draws tens of thousands to a glacier beneath a Catholic sanctuary. The atlas treats this as one system with two vocabularies, which is broadly how its practitioners treat it.

Andean is a regional label, not a people. The sequence runs from Chavin de Huantar in the first millennium BCE, whose sunken plaza and underground galleries drew visitors from a wide area, through Moche and Nazca on the coast, Tiwanaku on Lake Titicaca and Wari in the highlands, to the Inca state that absorbed most of it, and on to the Quechua and Aymara communities who are its living continuation.

What holds the sequence together is a set of practices rather than a single ancestry: terraced agriculture at altitude, the use of many ecological zones by one community, camelid herding, and the treatment of the dead as continuing members of the group who are fed, dressed and consulted. The khipu, records made of knotted cords, are the region's distinctive administrative technology. Gary Urton's analysis of their binary features shows a system capable of far more than accountancy, and whether some khipu encode narrative rather than number remains an open question.

Alphabetic writing arrived with the Spanish, so nearly every early written account of Andean religion was produced by or for the people dismantling it. The extirpation records are detailed precisely because they were investigations, and they remain a principal source. Reading them requires holding both facts at once, because they preserve what they were compiled to destroy.