This famous site caught the imagination of the world when National Geographic magazine, in the United States, featured Macchu Picchu in their April 1913 issue; in fact, it was the sole topic covered, and included a full fold out center spread. Such exposure raised the profile of an otherwise unknown American archaeologist, Hiram Bingham III, to that of a media star; with his tan wide brimmed hat, Khaki clothes and leather shoulder strapped bag, he became the model for the fictional movie icon Indiana Jones.

Machu Picchu had eluded the Spanish, and most explorers up until Bingham’s time because of its location. At the northern end of the Sacred Valley of Peru near Cusco, elevated from the valley by more than 1000 feet, and cloaked in dense tropical vegetation, Machu Picchu was several miles away from any well known Inca site. There were also only 2 narrow roads, or more properly trails that connected the citadel with the outside world, one being the famous well trodden tourist trail in fact called just that, the Inca Trail that approached from the south, and a lesser entrance on the west side.

Other adventurers had in fact, it is thought have found Machu Picchu prior to Bingham, Simone Waisbard, a long-time researcher from Cusco, claims that Enrique Palma, Gabino Sánchez, and Agustín Lizárraga left their names engraved on one of the rocks at Machu Picchu on 14 July 1901. Also in 1904, an engineer named Franklin supposedly spotted the ruins from a distant mountain. He told Thomas Payne, an English Christian missionary living in the region, about the site, Payne’s family members claim. They also report that in 1906, Payne and fellow missionary Stuart E. McNairn (1867–1956) climbed up to the ruins.

The site may have been discovered and plundered in 1867 by a German businessman, Augusto Berns. There is some evidence that a German engineer, J. M. von Hassel, arrived earlier. Maps found by historians show references to Machu Picchu as early as 1874.

Hiram Bingham was under contract from the National Geographic Society, and his aim in fact was to attempt to find the lost city of Old Vilcabamba, the last Inca hold out from Spanish aggression, in which one of the last Inca rulers, Manco, was able to hide from the conquistadors for 30 years. In 1911 Bingham was a lecturer in history at his alma mater, Yale, which wound up with all of the artefacts that he was eventually able to unearth at Machu Picchu; a collection that was finally repatriated to Peru in 2010…well, perhaps 5 percent of what Yale held, and still has.

While Bingham was in the Sacred Valley near Ollantaytambo, which is now the main train stop to get to Aguas Calientes, the village below Machu Picchu, and built in large part to service the tourist trade, an 11 year old Native boy, Pablito Alvarez, guided him up the side of a mountain called Machu Picchu, Quechua for Old Bird. Pablito’s father had told Bingham, who was supposedly pestering the local people about the whereabouts of “old stone buildings” told him that what he sought was up on Machu Picchu.

Bingham, guided by Pablito up an old trail choked in places with lush tropical vegetation cast his eyes upon huge white granite walls and buildings within and rising above the thick jungle. Yet, the two were not alone… In fact, Bingham stumbled across two native farmers, named Richarte and Alvarez, who had cleared some of the Inca terraces and had been growing potatoes, corn, sugarcane and other crops there for 3 or 4 years, and were living there, possibly full time, in or very near the central ceremonial square.

Over the following years hundreds of local Natives were hired by Bingham to clear away the dense foliage that had cloaked the site since it had been abandoned by its builders, the Inca, nearly 400 years before. And in this cleaning process, numerous poisonous snakes, the deadly Fer de Lance were also killed, sometimes after they had taken the lives of some of the workers.

The name Machu Picchu was what Bingham named this amazing find, simply due to the fact that Pablito’s father had told that the ruins that Bingham sought were on a mountain of that name. The name stuck, and ever since then the citadel itself has been called that; however, that is not the name by which the Inca called it. Jesus Gamarra, Cusco historian and student of the megalithic structures for more than 40 years, preceded by his father Alfredo, states that the original name of the “lost city” is and was Yllampu; Quechua for “the Dwelling Place of the Gods.” Jesus and his father have, over the course of their exhaustive studies identified at least 3 distinct construction techniques used at Yllampu and other Cusco and Sacred Valley locations which conventional scholars completely dismiss, due to the earth shattering implications that they reveal. But more of this later…

Choquequirao (Cradle of Gold in Quechua) is regarded as having been a “sister city” of Yllampu, located in the department of Apurimac, about 30 km southwest of her famous “sibling.” The building of Chocquequirao is thought to have been the work of Inca Pachacutec successors Tupac Inca Yupanqui (1471-1 493) and Wayna Capac (1493-1527), with Pachacutec being the presumed builder of Yllampu. Household and ceremonial pottery has been found at Choquequirao that bears both the classic Cusco style and also from other populations who came to live here to build and permanently populate the area. Most likely, they were experienced farmers who knew how to build and use farming terraces in high Amazon forest areas. Located at 3 050 masl on the border with department of Apurímac, the Choquequirao archaeological compound was not built to be a place of easy access. Reaching it demands two days of disciplined march, largely compensated by the beauty of the landscape that wayfarers cross from the beginning of their expedition. Hence, Choquequirao averages less than 20 visitors per day, while Yllampu has 2000 or more.

Choquequirao’s first non-Incan visitor was the explorer Juan Arias Díaz in 1710. The first written site reference in 1768 was made by Cosme Bueno, but was ignored at the time. In 1834 Eugene de Santiges rediscovered the site. In 1837 Leonce Agrand mapped the site for the first time, but his maps were forgotten. When Hiram Bingham, visited Choquequirao in 1909 the site gained more attention. The first excavations started in the 1970s.

It is clearly the lack of easy access to Choquequirao that has impeded mass tourism, while Yllampu has service that basically takes you to its doorstep. A bus takes you from the center of Cusco to Ollantaytambo, where a train the carries you in comfort to Aguas Calientes. From there, another bus takes you up the hair pin turns of a road built after Hiram Bingham’s time to the ticket gate.

Approximately 40% of the Choquequirao Inca ceremonial center has been cleared of vegetation. The remaining area is formed by a complex terrace system built on extremely steep slopes. A very impressive stairway of 180 terraces has been recently spotted; it descends from one of the ceremonial center flanks and reaches the river open to swimming. Yllampu has been largely excavated, on the other hand, but newly found agricultural terraces are currently being cleared as of the writing of this article.

Choquequirao was probably one of the entrance check point to the Vilcabamba region, which includes Yllampu, and also an administrative hub serving political, social and economic functions. Its urban design has followed the symbolic patterns of the imperial capital, with ritual places dedicated to the Sun (Inti) and the ancestors, to the earth, water and other divinities, with mansions for administrators and houses for artisans, warehouses, large dormitories or kallankas and farming terraces belonging to the Inca or the local people. Spreading over 700 meters, the ceremonial area drops as much as 65 meters from the elevated areas to the main square.

According to this mind set, Yllampu was thus the northern entrance check point to the Vilcabamba region, supposedly protecting the Inca epicentre of Cusco and the Sacred Valley from invasion from Amazonian tribal people. A third site, Pisaq, east of Cusco, which is another massive mountaintop construction, is thought to have protected the eastern flank of the Vilcabamba area from entrance from the Amazon region as well.

Although both Yllampu and Choquequirao are claimed by archaeologists and historians alike to be exclusively the work of the Inca, in the 15th century, there is tantalising evidence, in stone, of previous occupations. The brilliant Jesus Gamarra, carrying on the work of his father Alfredo has documented curious stone structures at Yllampu, Choquequirao, as well as numerous sites in Cusco and throughout the Sacred Valley which clearly seem to predate the Inca by possibly thousands of years, based on the weathering of the surfaces of the rock.

Jesus and Alfredo believed that two evolved civilizations existed long before the Inca, called the Uran Pacha and Hanan Pacha, whereas the Inca period is include within what they call the Ukan Pacha. These are not the actual names of the cultures, but more represent timelines or levels of consciousness. The Inca had a belief system based on three levels of being, all co-existing; the Ukan Pacha (lower world), Uran Pacha (middle world) and Hanan Pacha (upper world.) These approximately equate with subconscious, conscious and super-conscious states of being.

The Gamarras used this concept to name the Inca and two previous civilizations because it is their belief that the Inca, being the most recent, in fact created the least sophisticated stone structures, and that the more impressive ones, such as those that employed the largest stones and highest levels of precision, belong to the earlier “lost” cultures. In simple terms, the constructions employing polygonal, surgically precise and mortar less fitting stones are regarded as Uran Pacha. Examples of this at Yllampu include the wall surrounding the Temple of the Sun, as well as the buildings leading up to the Intihuatana (Hitching Post of the Sun.)

Hanan Pacha, the older and more obscure style, which seems to largely consist of sculpted protruding bedrock, may have the Hitching Post of the Sun itself and the stone enclosed within the Temple of the Sun as examples at Yllampu. A large and beautifully shaped stepped stone structure at Choquequirao may be another, but the author, truthfully, has never been there, so bases this solely on seen photographs.

I do (of course) recommend that you read one or more of my e-books for greater detail and discussion of the “Pacha” concepts, especially: Inca Footprints; Walking Tours of Cusco and the Sacred Valley of Peru, as well as Machu Picchu: Virtual Guide and Secrets Revealed. Both, as well as my other e-books about ancient Peru, and Hawaii, are available on this site here.

Jesus Gamarra has a website: theorigintour.com which highlights his research and tours, and his student and associate Jan Peter de Jong has made a DVD, along with Jesus, called “The Cosmogeny Of The Three Worlds” which is available through his website: ancient-mysteries-explained.com.

Therefore, it would seem to be a perfect place for people to live. Stone tools, of various forms and styles of shaping have been found in the area, and cursory analysis has established dates of as old as 8000 years. The greatest of Peruvian archaeologists, in my estimation, Julio Tello, made studies in this area in 1928 and performed excavations on the north side of the peninsula, in the central area of the large semi-circular bay there. He discovered and excavated a massive and elaborate graveyard, where each tomb contained an entire family, each one ornately wrapped in multiple layers of highly stylized, woven and coloured cotton cloth. He also found the sand filled remains of subterranean houses, which turned out to be numerous; so numerous in fact, that the village stretched out for between 1 and 2 km.

But, the most amazing finds were the skulls, some enormously elongated. The scientific name for this is dolichocephally. Most skulls exhibiting this condition were clearly the result of the practice of head-binding. And so how was this achieved?

A very young child’s skull is pliant at birth, and remains in this way for months. It is therefore possible, by lashing a rope around the head, with a board placed at the back of the skull, and perhaps the front as well, to alter the shape of the head over time. Many authors state that the time period to perform this shaping was about 6 months to 3 years, but since the practice is no longer performed to my knowledge, no one really knows. Examples of this technique, supposedly last performed on infants in the Congo of Africa and the Island of Vanuatu in the south Pacific Ocean area known as Melanesia, well into the 20th century, have also been found in Egypt, during the Amarna period, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Russia, the island of Malta, as well as many places in Peru and Bolivia, and amongst the Olmecs of Mexico.

What you are capable of doing via this technique is to change the shape of the skull, but not the actual volume; you can alter the shape, but not the size. However, Tello found several skulls, at least 90 at the site called Cerro Colorado adjacent to the main graveyard in Paracas, which had cranial volume larger, and in some cases 2.5 times larger than a conventional modern human skull. How is this possible? As I have said, deformation can alter shape, but not the volume of bone material, and certainly not twice as much.

It is therefore obvious that we are dealing with 2 different phenomena; elongation through binding, and elongation via genetics. The Paracas skulls are the largest found in the world, but from what root race stock would they have originated? To suggest that the natural elongation was the result of hydrocephaly or some other clinical condition is ridiculous, when one takes into account that again, at least 90 of them were found by Tello, and no one knows how many are still under the earth, in private collections, or gathering dust in museum warehouses in Peru, and beyond. Hydrocephaly would tend to make the skull expand evenly, making them more round than elongated.

Tello believed that the Paracas were related to the people of the Chavin culture, who created the famous megalithic site of Chavin de Huantar, mainly based on the fact that he saw similarities in pottery designs and motifs, especially feline figures. However, to my knowledge, no elongated skulls have been found in the area where the Chavin lived, north of Lima in the Ancash district, so that clearly is not the answer as to their origins. But, since Tello was the expert and main archaeologist at Chavin, where he placed an origin date of at least 3000 years ago, he then simply applied this for the Paracas as well, and no one has dared or bothered to refute his time line until now.

The Paracas people, living by the coast, were clearly fishermen, as evidenced by netting which has been found buried in the sand, as well as ancient middens, which are heaps of sea shells. No actual and extensive carbon 14 dating has been performed on the organic matter of the archaeological sites, and this was certainly not done by Tello, as his work was performed in 1928, whereas carbon 14 dating was not established until the 1940s. Also, very little work has been done at Paracas since the time of Tello, and the subterranean houses have once again filled up with sand.

It seems evident, although unproven at this time, that the Paracas may be the descendants of an earlier culture that were sea farers. Since the Chavin-Paracas link set forth by Tello seems improbable, due to the lack of elongated Chavin skulls, it is a worthwhile hypothesis.

I went to the excavation sites, most notably those of the graveyard and adjacent village, which stretches and hugs the shoreline for supposedly 2.5 km, in May of 2011, with the film crew from the US based Ancient Aliens television series. All of the subterranean homes and graves had become filled in with sand, due to the constant wind, blowing in off the ocean.

The site of Cerro Colorado, which was the burial place of the priestly and ruling class of Paracas people, located across the main road which takes visitors through the ecological reserve, is strictly forbidden to visit. This is mainly due to the fact that huaqueros, or grave robbers, have been looting these locations since at least Tello’s time, mainly looking for clay pots, gold and silver figurines, and the finely woven fabrics which the Paracas are famous for having made.

Mr. Juan Navarro, owner and director of the local museum, called the Paracas History Museum, has a fine collection of artefacts from all of the cultures known and believed to have lived in this area, including the Paracas, Nazca, Chincha and Inca. Amongst his displayed collection of stone implements and clay pots is an elongated skull. Upon inquiring as to its age, he stated that he is a firm believer of the time line set forth by Tello, that the skull could possibly be 3000 years old, and not more recent than 2000. That is because the prevailing theory is that the Paracas people died out by about the time of Christ, having been absorbed into the Nazca, who were the next major culture to live there, spreading out from the area that bears their name.

What is intriguing about this, is that we see, from viewing the very large skull collection at the Regional Museum in nearby Ica, that the physical presence of the elongated skulls does dwindle as the time line of the Nazca progresses. This would indicate that either the process of head binding itself died out gradually, and/or that the genetic trait of the elongated cranium faded as fewer and fewer of the Paracas people existed. The Paracas people also seem to have occupied the Nazca area prior to the arrival of the actual Nazca tribal people, and may have been the makers of the famous animal figures on the Nazca plain; the lines themselves having been made later. Amongst the most famous of the figures is one called “The Astronaut,” and it is not only human like in form, but shows signs of having a less than normal shaped head. Whether this was the result of artistic license, or a realistic portrayal is not known.

The only way to establish the actual age, and possible genetic origins of the Paracas people is through DNA analysis of the skulls themselves. Fortunately, Juan Navarro has a somewhat large collection of the elongated skulls in his possession, and just recently put them on display at his museum, due to my urging. Numbering at least 15, and collected as the result of the huaqueros leaving the skulls abandoned on the surface after looting graves, Juan has allowed me to take samples from 5 of the skulls. I was able to procure hair, including roots, a tooth, skull bone samples, and skin, and carefully documented the extractions with the use of high definition video; 10 samples in all.

The samples were sent to Lloyd Pye in the US, famous as the caretaker of the Star Child skull, who has now delivered the samples to his geneticist in Texas. We are hoping to get results of DNA analysis by late August, which we anticipate will give us information about the genetic root stock of the Paracas people.

As I have said, the phenomenon of the elongated skull is not unique to the Paracas area. The Egyptians, at the time of Pharaoh Akhenaton, seem to have exhibited this cranial feature, as did people on the island of Vanuatu in Melanesia, Malta in the Mediterranean, and the Olmec of Mexico, amongst other locations. However, as far as I know, most of these skulls are elongated as the result of artificial binding; whereas a number of the Paracas ones show specific characteristics that would seem to indicate that they were in fact born this way. Of the 5 physical factors, pointed out by Lloyd Pye and myself, which are not at all common to Homo sapiens, are two that I will mention. One is the presence of 2 small holes in the back of the skull, perpendicular to the cranial suture present in the parietal plate of the skull. Every normal human skull is composed of 3 major bone plates; the frontal plate, which ends at the upper part of the forehead, and the 2 parietal plates which lie behind this, intersecting the frontal plate making a “T” shape. The holes are thought by Lloyd to be natural; every human jaw has a small hole on either side which is for nerves and blood vessels to exit and feed the tissue there; these 2 holes at the back of the skull may perform the same function for the elongated skull.

The other factor is that there is only one parietal plate, where there should be 2.

David Hatcher Childress and I are presently collaborating on a book, delving into the global phenomenon of cranial elongation. We presently have a working title of “The Enigma Of Cranial Dformation,” and are thinking of a publishing date after the release of the DNA results from Lloyd Pye, as well as the airing of the television series Ancient Aliens. Both are due out in August of 2011, and the book will be published some time in October. Juan Navarro has made me the assistant director of the Paracas History Museum, and I look forward to greeting any and all of you personally, should you wish to visit us, and explore the elongated skull phenomenon with us.

But the main attraction still awaits; a fabled “lost city” abandoned by the Inca in the 16th century, its location outwitting the Spanish Conquistadors lusting after any gold they could snatch, and then found by a lanky American scholar, Hiram Bingham III, in 1911.

Do I even need to name the place? Okay, Machu Picchu, Quechua words that mean “old bird” or “old peak” and a name that Mr. Bingham used casually at first, because he had been told by Natives of the area that Inca remains could be found in the vicinity of Machu Picchu, the name of the mountain upon which much of the site rests. The name stuck, and has been used ever since by the 2000 plus tourists that visit it every day, 365 days of the year.

So, after perhaps a visit to other Inca centers such as Pisaq, mainly to cruise through its famous “Indian market”, back on the tour bus or into the taxi one goes, destination Machu Picchu, or more correctly, the train station that links Machu Picchu to the outside world.

This place is called Ollantaytambo, and there happen to be major Inca stone works there, so why not have a visit, for say an hour or two, before catching the train?

Unfortunately, this is the most common scenario that I witness; and not that I blame the visitor, because the tourism business model of Cusco is to hype Machu Picchu to the maximum, while all of the other great Inca works sit in the shadows. Oh, by the way, are you aware of the fact that the real name of the “lost city” is Yllampu, meaning “resting place of the gods?”

Ollantaytambo is, from a historical and symbolic point of view, equally as significant as Yllampu, but it needs a better publicist. It is an immense complex, covering 600 hectares, and in fact takes up much of a valley, next to and in fact including the Inca era village that shares its name.

Main Ollantaytambo complex showing Inca andene (agricultural terraces.)

And what does Ollantaytambo mean, anyway; doesn’t sound as exotic as Machu Picchu, and a lot harder to pronounce? It was named after a warrior named Ollanta, whose family, the Anta, were lords of the area during Inca times. They were related by blood to the royal Inca line, but not full blooded themselves.

Ollantaytambo: Temple of the Sun and andene.

Ollanta, unfortunately for him, fell in love with the daughter of the Sapa (high) Inca of the time, either Pachacutec, who ruled from 1438 to 1471, and was the great builder of Yllampu, or his successor Tupaq Inca Yupanqui (1471 to 1493.) As Ollanta was a noble but not a “true” Inca, the love affair was forbidden, until events took place by which he saved one of the royal sons of the Sapa Inca from the evil clutches of, most probably the Chanka people of the Apurimac region near Cusco.

It is probably the result of this heroic deed that gave Ollanta not only the hand of daughter of the Sapa Inca in wedlock, but also resulted in the town and complex being named after him.

The more formal and ancient name of the complex, is believed by F.E. and Edgar Elorrieta Salazar, in the book “Cusco and the Sacred Valley of Peru” to be Pacaritanpu, “House of the Dawn” or “House of Windows.” This should not be confused with the small town, near Cusco called Pacarectambo, from which erroneous stories have been written stating that it was from here that the Inca originated.

In fact, Pacarectambo was not founded until after 1571, almost 40 years after the beginning of the Spanish “conquest” of the Inca. Yet, many tour guides in Cusco, and some scholars, still point to this little town as being the Inca birthplace.

What is curious is that the Spanish chronicler Sarmiento (1572) who was possibly the first European to write about Pacarectambo, consulted with, according to him, 42 Quipumayoc (readers and recorders of the knotted cord system used by the Inca called quipu) who all told him the same lie! It is quite possible that they were misleading him and others, in order to save what little sacred knowledge was left of the Inca. And this included the true site of the House of the Dawn, which was Ollantaytambo.

And why should we care about this anyway?

What is intriguing about it, is that it means that a place outside of Cusco, for a certain period of time, but in the vicinity, may very well have been culturally more important than the capital itself, and may in fact predate it.

For example, the Salazars write: ‘continuing along his way, Tunupa (another name for Viracochan, the great teacher who appeared soon after the Flood) arrived at a place which he called Cusco, and there he prophesized the arrival of the Incas. Then he traveled to the Sacred Valley, where he was lovingly received by the lord of Tambo. Here he left his knowledge engraved on his staff…’

Viracochan (Tunupa) face profile.

Close up of Viracochan (Tunutpa) profile.

Another chronicler, Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti (1613) picks up the thread from there; ‘ the staff left by Viracochan (Tunupa) was transmuted to gold at the moment when one of the descendants of the Tambo lord was born. He took the name of Manco Capac and taking up the staff of gold, he directed his steps to the highest parts of a mountainous land where he founded the city of Cusco.’

What Pachacuti is saying here is that the first Inca, Manco Capac, did not come from Tiwanaku, near lake Titicaca, the presumed birthplace of the Inca, but from Ollantaytambo…

In 1542, the earliest Spanish report about the origins of the Inca and Cusco, written by Vaca de Castro, from information he obtained from an Inca Quipucamayoc stated ‘ …that Manco Capac, the first Inca, was the Son of the Sun and came out of a window of a house and was engendered by a ray, the splendour of the sun…then he went to the heights of a mountain where the valley of Cusco can be seen…and later founded the city.’

Again from the Salazars’ book we have this reference to a “window” of some kind that exists at Ollantaytambo: ‘…they trod upon the splendid valley of Yucay, today known as the Sacred Valley of the Incas (after having left Titicaca) and following the banks of the river that flows through it (the Willcamayu or Sacred River) they arrived at Tambo. There they entered the deep basements of the Pacaritanpu, which means “House of Dawn or House of Windows.”

The windows referred to seem to be the two depressions in the ground at the lower right corner of the photo. I saw them myself some months back, and they are now used as cornfields. If you look at this photo in it’s entirety, you will notice that it forms the shape of a pyramid, albeit with only two sides visible.

The 2 dimensional pyramid of Pacarictanpu.

This intriguing “structure” is rarely if ever shown by guides to Ollantaytambo, mainly because most of them don’t even know it is there! And no one, in all of the research that I have done, has a clue who made it or when.

On the winter solstice of each year, June 21, the rays of the rising sun enter and strike the right one of the two windows of the pyramid. This coincides, more or less, with the celebration of the Inti Raymi, which is the Inca celebration of the rebirth of the sun, and of the history of the whole Inca civilization.

According to the Salazars’ interpretation of this event and effect, ‘the sun’s light entering this space symbolizes the union between the Sky and the Earth, and the “illumination” of its heroes is a product of its communion, which is why they were called the Sons of the Sun.’

Hence the name “House of the Dawn” has a double meaning, typical of many oral traditions; dawn as in morning, more specifically the morning of the display of the solstice, and dawn as in place and time of origins of a people; the Inca in this case.

It is my hope that Ollantaytambo no longer needs to take a back seat to any great Peruvian monument, and that more research will be done about it in the future. If academia is not up to the task, then I and others are.

There are many other features at Ollantaytambo which are seemingly of great antiquity and are not well understood, and have not been well studied by academia as far as I know. One is the 400 foot tall stone profile of the face of Viracocha (Tunupa) across the valley of Ollantaytambo on the side of Pinkuylluna mountain.

Another is the Temple of the Sun high up on the western flank of the Inca built andene (agricultural terraces) in the main part of the Ollantaytambo complex. Conventional archaeology states that was unfinished, but seems to give no explanation as to why. I think a more logical answer is that a massive cataclysm caused it to fall apart, with multi ton stones having been flung hundreds of feet away.

Temple of the Sun (remains of) and great wall at Ollantaytambo.

And the Temple of the Condor, at the other end of the andene; with large andesite cubes having been removed from it’s surface by unknown means, leaving neither tool or even sanding marks. Also, there are ruins here, consisting of stone blocks of varying sizes, with planed surfaces and square depressions eerily similar to those found at Puma Punku in Bolivia.

Temple of the Condor enigmatic feature (Ollantaytambo.)

In my next article I would like to focus on the mysterious elongated skulls, not unique to Peru, and seemingly concentrated here. Examples can be seen in the small museum below the Coricancha in Cusco, and are labelled as being Inca, while others have been taken from digs at Tiwanaku; the proposed Inca homeland. Also, the largest and oddest have been found near Paracas, a small fishing town south of Lima on the Peruvian coast. I will attempt to show how all three locations may tie in historically.

The greatest mystery about the Inca is not their accomplishments, but their origins. Where could such a sophisticated culture have come from?

It is well written through accounts of the conquistadors, and Inca descendants that these people came to Cuzco as a fully developed society; teaching agriculture, metallurgy, animal husbandry, textile weaving, and the arts of warfare and politics, amongst other civilizing pursuits, to seemingly less developed people who were already inhabiting the area.

Cultures clearly don’t appear out of no where fully developed, unless they just climbed out of a space ship; and I am not going to entertain this idea in this paper; such an idea is both too far fetched and too easy, at the same time.

Tiwanku and the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca are the most commonly believed source places of the Inca. This is based on the fact that very old stone ruins, and traceable archaeological remnants have been found in both locations which clearly predate the most commonly believed Inca age of Cuzco, that being that the city was first entered by the Inca about the year 1200 AD.

( or Tiahuanaco ) is clearly a mysterious place. Many writers have questioned how such an advanced culture could have survived and even thrived at its 13000 foot high elevation. Rainfall is scant here, and the only crops that grow are potatoes and quinoa, an Andean grain.

Yet archaeologists suggest that the population of Tiwanaku was between 100,000 and 1,000,000 at it’s height, about 600 to 800 AD. A rather ingenious system of raised bed agriculture, called Suka Kollus allowed the Tiwanakans to produce up to 21 tons of potatoes per hectare, while modern agriculture techniques at lower altitudes produce 14.5 tons per hectare, and non Suka Kollus production in the Bolivian altiplano produces a meagre 2.4 metric tons per hectare.

The raised bed system allowed such high yields because the soil could contain and hold more water, and daily heating by the sun kept the crops from freezing overnight.

Tiwanaku is believed to have been abandoned about 1000 AD as the result of a combination of things; an El Nino event that lasted 40 years, and the attack by war-like Aymara speaking Wari people. It is probable that the El Nino induced drought heavily weakened the population, thus allowing the Wari to easily overtake them.

The more radical thoughts about the age of Tiwanaku are most often attributed to the Bolivian engineer Arthur Posnansky, who postulated its age as being in the area of 12,000 years ago, and his claims were made in 1943 in his final and most important book Tihuanacu, the Cradle of American Man.

He calculated this date based on archeoastronomy, as follows. Since Earth is tilted on its axis in respect to the plane of the solar system, the resulting angle is known as the “obliqueness of the ecliptic” (one should not confuse this with another astronomical phenomenon known as “Precession”, as critics of Posnansky have done). If viewed from the earth, the planets of our solar system travel across the sky in a line called the plane of the ecliptic.

At present our earth is tilted at an angle to of 23 degrees and 27 minutes, but this angle is not constant. The angle oscillates slowly between 22 degrees and 1 minute miminum to an extreme of 24 degrees and 5 minutes. A complete cycle takes roughly 41,000 years to complete. The alignment of the Kalasasaya temple at Tiwanaku depicts a tilt of the earth’s axis amounting to 23 degrees, 8 minutes, 48 seconds, which according to astronomers, indicates a date of 15,000 B.C.

Between 1927 and 1930 Prof. Posnansky’s conclusions were studied intensively by a number of authorities. Dr. Hans Ludendorff (Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Potsdam), Friedrich Becker of the Specula Vaticana, Prof. Arnold Kohlschutter (astronomer at Bonn University), and Rolf Müller (astronomer of the Institute of Astrophysics at Potsdam) verified the accuracy of Posnansky’s calculations and vouched for the reliability of his conclusions.

site called Puma punku, which is very close to Tiwanaku, is perhaps the most perplexing archaeological site not only in the Andes, but all of South America. What is left of Puma punku (the gate of the Puma) is only a small percent of what must have once been there. Today we find the shattered remains, in red sandstone and diorite, of what must have once been an incredibly sophisticated technological culture. Much of Puma punku, and Tiwanaku have been removed over the centuries by local people and government officials in La Paz, Bolivia, to make other buildings, and indeed, many of the stones which made up these places were crushed to make the rail bed of the train transport system.

Yet what is left of Puma punku is truly awe inspiring, not in volume, but in the incredibly carved surfaces that remain. Even a cursory inspection of the diorite stones shows an incredibly high precision of detailed cutting and sculpting. Tool marks are not visible, and the flat surfaces and 90 degree angles and plane interfaces are essentially perfect.

this have been achieved using bronze tools and obsidian tools? Highly unlikely. Indeed, the suggestion of such an idea is preposterous. Several holes, some as small as less than a centimetre in diameter, were clearly achieved with drills. And channels cut in others, some longer than a meter, must have been done with a router like tool.

The most famous and enigmatic structure at Tiwanaku is the Sun Gate; one solid slab of diorite about 8 feet high and 10 feet across with a door in the center. The image of Viracocha, the creator god, is carved in low relief above the doorway entrance, the rest of the upper portion of the stone, where a lintel would be had the structure been made of three or more pieces, is adorned with “birdman” characters. A massive diagonal crack in the structure shows that it was, in the distant past, the victim of some sort of catastrophic event. Erosion along the edges of the crack, and the fact that diorite is one of the hardest stones in the world, would lead one to believe that the damage took place in deep antiquity, and not the result of it having simply fallen over.

Also, most of Tiwanku is composed of red sandstone blocks, with the odd diorite one added in, in a somewhat haphazard manner. The reconstruction of the site was conducted during the 1960s?, and the workmanship can hardly be called high quality. In fact, the rebuilding was probably undertaken as guesswork, as no blueprints or even oral traditions exist that could help in the reconstruction.

What seems to be original, just like in some of the megalithic sites in Cuzco and the Sacred Valley of Peru, are the largest of stones, being made of hard limestone or sandstone. These form what are the outline of the Kalasasaya complex. Though filled in with the red sandstone/diorite walls today, there is no reason why these large “marking stones” which are approximately 20 feet apart, could not have been separate standing stones (like Stonehenge) in the distant past.

The huge size would have dissuaded plunderers from attempting to convert them into smaller building materials, and thus they may in fact be in their original locations. The Sun Gate, it is known, has been moved from its original location; but where would that have been? The most obvious place is Puma punku, as that is where we find the majority of diorite stones, and those of high precision finish and sculpting.

Also, on top of the Akapana Pyramid, which is next to the Kalasasaya, is another diorite Sun Gate. This one lies flat on the ground, and is in pieces, but is of the same shape and size as it’s more famous twin. It has also clearly been moved from its original place, which again I suggest is Puma punku.

Moreover, there are two more Sun Gates, same size and shape again. And where do we find these; Puma punku. Both are lying flat and broken, but their original shapes are self-evident. Could these four Sun Gates have been originally positioned at the four cardinal points? It seems quite obvious that this could have been so.

All of the main structures or “compounds” at Tiwanaku are square in shape, except the Akapana, which is 12 sided, yet sits within a square courtyard, and all are more or less in perfect alignment with each other, except for the Akapana, which is slightly askew. Puma punku, on the other hand, is about 45 degrees “off” in relation to the other buildings in the area. It is not being suggested that the planet had shifted so dramatically in it’s axis that Puma punku was once aligned with north and south, but it’s odd positioning has not been explained by other researchers.

Perhaps even more interesting is the presence of what Cuzco researcher Jesus Gamarra, based on his father Alfredo’s earlier work, calls Hanan Pacha stone work. This is defined as large and exposed bedrock, often andesite, which has clearly been manipulated by human hands, often in the form of cut out “seats” or similar depressions.

But this is not at Puma punku, but situated in a field, abandoned and covered with tall grass, northeast of the Kalasasaya complex. No one has even dared to date these stones, or discover who shaped them, as they are categorized under the topic of what researcher Michael Cremo would call “forbidden archaeology”; structures or artefacts that don’t fit within the theories and timelines of general archaeological thought, and are thus either hidden or ignored.

By far the greatest quantity and quality of Hanan Pacha structures are found in the area above Cuzco, in the proximity of Sachsayhuaman, and in the nearby Sacred Valley. So numerous are these “forbidden” artefacts, some, such as Qenqo, Chinkana and Amaru Machay, which are bigger than a house, that Jesus Gamarra suggests that there are possibly 5000 of them in the general area.

If, as theorized, Hanan Pacha works are as old or even older than Tiwanaku or Puma Punku, then could Cuzco and the Sacred Valley of Peru be much more ancient than most archaeologists suggest? It would seem so.

As has been discussed earlier, general consensus by academia would have us believe that Cuzco was first inhabited by the Inca in 1200 AD, and that they “civilized” the inhabitants found there. Then who made the andesite Hanan Pacha works, which are clearly, based on weathering patterns alone, several thousand years old?

Indeed, all works universally attributed to the Inca become very suspect when the Hanan Pacha works, and others, are looked at and taken into account.

The Coricancha, or “Courtyard Of Gold” which has been well established as having been the center of the Inca world since their arrival, has not been satisfactorily explained as to the date of construction, or even how it was achieved.

The great outer wall that faces the Avenida del Sol, and has a major protruding curve in its design, on top of which stands the Church of Santo Domingo, of Spanish colonial origin, is composed of curved basalt blocks, approximately 2 feet on each side. The basalt of which it is constructed was quarried from a site 60 km away.

Are we led to believe that a culture that has just arrived in a new place goes to the trouble of accessing stone from this great distance to build its first major structure? It is far more plausible that the Coricancha was already there, and that the Inca adopted it, and expanded on it over time, as can equally be said for Sachsayhuaman, the grand “fortress” that stands on a hill just north of Cuzco.

The latter is probably the most famous of “Inca” achievements due to its grand scale. It is a zigzag wall consisting of three levels, with the largest stones being employed on the first or ground level. Each block is unique in shape and size, with some being at least 18 feet tall, 4 feet in depth, and perhaps approaching 100 tons, or more, in weight.

The stone on this level is a highly crystallized limestone, having a creamy colour. Aside from the grand size of each stone, is the fact that many show shallow depressions, some rectangular in nature, as if the stones were moulded and shaped like dough or soft concrete. Moreover, if the surface of these stones had been finished, in terms of shaping, with hard stone such as obsidian, why are there no tool marks? Were they sanded down as some would propose?

Palace enclosures, such as that where the Sapa Inca Pachacutec was born, just across the street from the Coricancha, show marks on the outer surface of the stones of white dots, which are tool marks left by the builders. So if Sachsayhuaman is contemporary with this building, give or take 100 years, where are the tool marks?

The suggestion that quartz sand and water were used as a way to polish the stone surfaces of Sachsayhuaman, and thus reduce or erase the presence of tool marks is preposterous. If this had been the case, then why had the shallow depressions described above have been left? Aesthetically, that would be the equivalent of a furniture maker polishing a table top, and leaving hammer marks in the surface behind.

And what of the curious nodes that project out of stones, for example, inside the Coricancha, and more impressively, in the green granite polygonal blocks of the palace attributed to the Sapa Inca, Inca Roca, and perhaps best seen in the alleyway called Hatunrumiyoq, a few blocks from the Coricancha.

Coventional scholarship states that these nodes were left, on purpose by the builders, as a projection under which a rope could be placed in order to assist in the raising of the stone to its present position. But why then would the builders, who cared so much about making the stones interlock so perfectly, so that a “human hair could not fit in the joints” leave these nodes behind? Surely they would have been chipped off and smoothed so as to not leave a trace of their presence?

The greatest proof that the Inca did not construct everything attributed to them is easy to see once you observe a simple example of how three distinct styles of construction, greatly different in quality and materials, can be found in the same exact space. As an introduction, and returning to the Coricancha, or more exactly, a wall across the lane on its east side, is an interesting corner. At the base, and north side of this corner, and moving up about 8 feet, one finds perfectly fitting green granite polygonal blocks. Continuing up, the stone changes to being andesite, with the stones being smaller, and more uniform in size. And on the east side, crudely put together unfinished stones, held together with clay mortar, complete the wall.

An aberration? Not so. Walking north, along Loreto street, which once led from the Coricancha to the present Plaza de Armas, the current nucleus of Cuzco, the wall (of an Inca palace) on the left hand side is made up of stones that are approximately one foot long on each side, and show the white point marks, indicating where the builder had used a pointed hard stone to finish the surface. Yet, on the other side of this street, is a wall, again of a palace, where the stones are more tightly fitted together and show no sign of tool marks.

How could these two walls, which would be more or less contemporary, be so different in finish. And why would the Coricancha be the only large structure in the whole city having at least one wall made of basalt, and be curved with a flat surface, while the others are of andesite or granite, with each stone having a slightly pillow like convex shape. The whim of the builder?

The so-called Hanan Pacha constructions are at least as bewildering, if not more so. Again, these are areas of seeming bedrock that have been clearly shaped and/or sculpted. None seem to be present in the city of Cuzco itself, but in the hills above, some being close to Sachsayhuaman, they are in great abundance.

Due north of the zigzag wall of Sachsayhuaman, perhaps half a kilometre away, is the Chinkana; a single stone the size of a large house, composed of andesite. All over its surface, and especially on its crown, are hundreds of carved out impressions, forming what look like seats and round pits, many being more than a foot deep.

Also, on the north side, there are three large cut out “thrones” on which the Sapa Inca, his Coya (first wife) and the highest Nuestra (Virgin of the Sun) would sit during special occasions. The odd thing is, that less than 30 feet away there is the base of a hill that rises up several hundred feet. So what would these regal people be looking at from these hewn out thrones? A corn patch?

On the south side we find a great example of where this Hanan Pacha “temple” for lack of a better word meets with other styles and probably ages of construction. Butting into the Hanan Pacha structure are two polygonal walls of tight fitting stones that form perfectly into its curved surface. The former has been called, by Jesus and Alfredo Gamarra, Uran Pacha, which is thought to be a later form of construction than Hanan Pacha.

Indeed, the Gamarras also believe that the zigzag wall of Sachsayhuaman, and the green granite walls of Hatunrumiyoq are of this Uran Pacha period. Polygonal tight-fitting and uniquely shaped stones seem to be the hall marks of this time and style of building. Adjoining the Uran Pacha walls at the Chinkana are other walls, which again meld into and even cap the Uran Pacha ones; these the Gamarras call Ukun Pacha, and are believed to be the style most used by the Inca.

Ukun Pacha is best described as constructions employing small (a foot or less long on each side) reasonably tightly fit together, with the white points still observable of the makers finish, or even cruder stones, of random and yet small size “glued together” with clay based “adobe” or mud.

The finest display of this, perhaps, is to be seen at Ollantayatmbo, a huge site in the Sacred Valley which is now also the terminus of the Machu Picchu train.

The great agricultural terraces that climb up the northern hillside of the main part of this complex is Ukun Pacha; clearly constructed during Inca times to feed an expanding population. However, to the left of this area, and more than 100 feet above the beginning of the terraces is a beautiful polygonal Uran Pacha wall, composed of blocks averaging 4 feet or more on each side. The joints are technically perfect, and there are many of the protruding nodes that have been described earlier in this paper.

Even more spectacular than this wall is the now heavily damaged Temple of the Sun. The stones here, most in a state of disarray, are made of pink granite. In the whole complex of Ollantaytambo, a site that takes up hundreds of acres, only here do we find pink granite, aside from individual Herculean blocks, clearly originally from here, that lay on the valley floor, far below.

Some of the pink granite stones are 15 feet long, and 6 feet high and deep. Conventional archaeologists suggest that this was an Inca project which was abandoned before the arrival of the Spanish, but it takes little or no imagination to see that a cataclysm had destroyed what was once an intact temple.

Far off to the right of the terraces, away from where most tourists venture to spend time, is the Temple of the Condor. This andesite rock face, at least 200 feet high, takes the form of a giant bird, complete with head, beak, neck, and wing. It could very be a natural formation, but what is not are the multiple Hanan Pacha “cut outs” and “stairways” that literally cover the area.

Also, at the base are the scattered stone remains of different buildings, long ago destroyed. And I mean destroyed, not damaged. The archaeologists, unable to figure out which block goes where, have simply stacked these stones in neat piles. Some are andesite, and others basalt. Many are simple yet finely finished, while others have impressions or large square notches which remind one of the ruins of Puma punku, back in Bolivia. So was all of this conceived and built during the time of the Inca, from about 1200 to 1532 AD, when the Spanish arrived. Hardly.

And finally, let us visit the crown jewel of all of the Inca`s great accomplishments, or at least the most lauded, Machu Picchu. Again, conventional knowledge states that this great and lofty citadel was built, exclusively, by Sapa Inca Pachacutec, over the course of his reign of perhaps 30 years.

If the above is true, then why are there explicit examples of Hanan Pacha and Uran Pacha there, and strategically placed. Like many ancient cities or large sacred places, it is easy to see where the first constructions of Machu Picchu are.

The Intihuatana, or Hitching Post of the Sun is not simply a finely shaped large piece of stone. It is the highest example of exposed bedrock in the area, and clearly Hanan Pacha. Also, the interior of the Temple of the Sun, which is nearby, has all of the hall marks of being either Hanan Pacha, or Uran Pacha at the latest. It is exposed bedrock with the same type of moulded depressions that one finds at Sachsayhuaman.

Surrounding both the Intihuatana and the Temple of the Sun`s core are the finest wall constructions to be found at Machu Picchu. The stone is white granite, as is most of the whole city, and here the stones, some 10 feet long and 8 feet high, at the base of the Intihuatana, fit perfectly together. The farther one goes from these two famous constructions, in general, the poorer the craftsmanship.

It is not hard to theorize that the Intihuatana and Temple of the Sun, as well as the Temple of the Condor which is not far away, form the early nucleus of this complex, and are far more ancient than most archaeologists believe. Like any major sacred place, later cultures came and added to it. In the case of the Inca, the last of its inhabitants, the huge system of agricutural terraces and most of the houses were most likely built under the watchful eye of Pachacutec.

In the next paper I would like to more deeply probe into Ollantaytambo, because this place, which very much takes a back seat to Machu Picchu in the eyes of scholars and the general public alike, holds deep secrets about the Inca and their origins as a distinct people.

The early writer Fernando de Montesinos, much maligned by his contemporaries, may hold keys to the early stages of the Inca. According to him, more than 60 rulers, in succession, called Amautas, preceded Manco capac, who is commonly thought of as the first Sapa Inca; the one who left the Titicaca region about 1000 AD and founded Cuzco about 1200 AD.

The Amautas did not live in Cuzco, according to Montesinos, but at Ollantaytambo, whose original name was House of the Dawn.

Brien Foerster

Samples of Khipus

The khipu system, a woven series of cords of different colours that were tightly twisted together and had strategically positioned knots in them, is believed to have mainly been an arithmetical system much like the abacus, according to experts such as Gary Urton of Harvard University. Dr. Urton speculates that not only may the khipus have base 10 as their arithmetical system, but that they may also be of binary code, the same as a computer language. Other researchers speculate that the khipus are a form of coded language.

However, the Spanish destroyed all the khipus that they came across, as a way of destroying any recorded system of the Inca, and to this day the quechua ( also known as runa simi ) language spoken by the Inca is frowned upon by the Peruvian government and clergy. Also, as result of the half-Inca Atahuallpa massacring the vast majority of the Inca royal family just prior to the arrival of the Spanish in 1532, and the foreign diseases that had arrived even earlier, including smallpox, we are left with little or nothing of the history of the Inca from their perspective, because few survived, and those that did had no records to refer to, except memory.

I spoke of the glimpses we have from some of the earliest Spanish chroniclers and what was left of the Inca descendants that the Inca family, which controlled all affairs of the Tahuantinsuyu ( four corners of the Inca world, ) that the Inca were a distinct race of small population. These writings speak of them as having red or even blonde hair, very light complexion, and being very tall with possibly larger than normal crania

Inca skulls in the Coricancha Museum in Cuzco

Viracocha, the creator God, must not be confused with Viracochan, who were the people descended from, and the ancestors of the Inca, whose home and center was the enigmatic city, or city state of Tiwanaku ( Tiahuanaco ) in present day Bolivia.
A large sculpted stone face profile, and by large I mean more than 300 feet tall, looms above the Sacred Valley near Cuzco and looks down upon the site of Ollantaytambo, a place attributed to the Inca which is as large and complex in nature as Machu Picchu.

Oral tradition states that it is the portrait of Viracochan, a Christ like figure who arrived and taught the seemingly “savage” people of the area agriculture, metallurgy, astronomy, and the other “civilized” arts and sciences. He is described as being tall, and perhaps had light coloured hair and a beard; opinions and stories differ, as does the timeframe in which he showed up, but it was most likely before the time that the Inca entered the Sacred Valley and Cuzco which occurred in the 12th century. As the Sapa (high) Inca was Manco capac, it seems clear that Viracochan was an earlier visitor/teacher.

Most tour guides in the area will say that the local villagers carved this monumental face, complete with beard, to honour the teacher Viracochan, but that is like saying that slaves with mud ramps and wooden rollers made the pyramids in Giza, Egypt; completely preposterous.

Carved stone head of Viracochan; Ollantaytambo Peru.

Another ancient group of people who lived in what is now called Peru and possibly had reddish blonde hair and fair skin were the Chachapoyas. Their main center of habitation was at a site called Kuelap, approximately 750 km north of Lima. The conquest of the Chachapoyas by the Incas took place, according to the Inca descendant and chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, during the government of Tupac Inca Yupanqui in the second half of the 15th century.

The Chachapoyas were not receptive to Inca expansion and annexation, and fought long and hard battles but eventually surrendered. When civil war broke out within the Inca “empire,” the Chachapoyas were located on middle ground between the northern capital at Quito, ruled by the half blooded Inca Atahuallpa, and the southern capital at Cuzco, ruled by Atahuallpa’s brother Huascar, who was Inca of full blood. Many of the Chachapoyas were conscripted into Huascar’s army, and heavy casualties ensued. After Atahuallpa’s eventual victory, many more of the Chachapoyas were executed or deported due to their former allegiance with Huascar.

Once the Spanish had murdered Atahuallpa in 1533, and had taken over what is now present day Peru, the last of the Chachapoyas succumbed to disease and starvation, thus their bloodlines if present at all today, would rarely display the much debated reddish blonde hair and light skin characteristics.

They had no written language, and since none survive to this day, the Incas and the Spanish conquistadors are the principal sources of information on the Chachapoyas. Indeed, so little is known, that the name that they called themselves is lost. The name Chachapoyas was one given, or more likely imposed upon them by the Inca, and loosely translates as the “warriors of the clouds.” The meaning of the word Chachapoyas may have been derived from sacha-p-collas, the equivalent of “colla people who live in the woods” (sacha = wild p = of the colla = nation in which Aymara is spoken). Some believe the word is a variant of the Quechua construction sacha puya, or People of the Clouds.

Writings by the major chroniclers of the time, such as the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega were based on fragmentary second-hand accounts. Much of what we do know about the Chachapoyas culture is based on archaeological evidence from ruins, pottery, tombs and other artifacts.

The chronicler Pedro Ciezo de Leon offers some picturesque notes about the Chachapoyas:

“They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen in Indies and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.”

The main complexes of the Chachapoyas are believed to have been constructed about 800 to 900 A.D. It is thus possible that they are an off-shoot of the Viracochan culture of Tiwanaku, as this is also the time period when environmental pressure caused the priest kings of that civilization to abandon Tiwanaku and become the Inca. Of course, this is complete speculation, but the timelines do fit.

Or were they Europeans? This area of thought I wish to completely steer away from, as many will brand me a racist. The truth is, no one knows, except the Chachapoyas themselves, and they are silent, since they are extinct.

Sarcophagi of the Chachapoyas at Kuelap

The Viracochans according to the oral traditions, after having taught the people the ways of civilization left by sea in the direction of the setting sun, as in west. It is not written as from where they left, but one such candidate spot is very intriguing.

Due west of Tiwanaku, on the Peruvian coast is a seaport called Matarani. This area has had human occupation since before the demise of Tiwanaku. The name itself stands out because it is neither a quechua nor an aymara name, it is Polynesian. Mata means “eyes” and rani is “heaven.” What I find curious is that such a name could imply that the eyes are either looking down from heaven, or looking up. If looking down we could easily stray off into a discussion of sky ancestors or UFO, which I won’t do here, though it is tempting.

If looking up, this could refer to astronomy and celestial navigation, and amongst the finest star navigators in the world were and are the Polynesians. The closest land mass west of Peru is Rapanui, also called Easter Island, and is populated by Polynesian people. The first European to land at Rapanui, which he named Easter island was Jacob Roggeveen. On his expedition of 1722 he gives us our first description of the islanders. They were “of all shades of color, yellow, white and brown” and they distended their ear lobes so greatly with large disks that when they took them out they could “hitch the rim of the lobe over the top of the ear”.

In the oral traditions of the people of Rapanui, the first colonizer was a seafaring chief called Hotu Matua. The translation of this is Hotu=star and Matua=father, so sky father. Again, like the discussion above, does it maybe mean “father from the sky” or “father who looks at or watches the sky.” If it is the latter, then could could simply mean that Hotu Matua was a celestial navigator, if the former, well no, we are not going to go there in this paper.

It is said that Hau-Maka had a dream in which his spirit travelled to a far country, to help look for new land for King Hotu Matua. In the dream, his spirit travelled to the Mata ki te rangi (Eyes that look to the Sky).

The seaport of Matarangi and the original name of Rapanui are almost identical, which may be a coincidence but maybe not. It is very common for people to name a new land after their homeland ( remember Plymouth rock in the USA; where did they come from?)

Hotu Matua was a “Long Ear” as were the other nobility that made up Rapanui. The other class of citizen were called the “Short Ears.” Interestingly, the process of lengthening of the ear lobes by inserting metal objects in them was also a practice of the Inca.

There is much debate as to when the first migrants reached Rapanui; the carbon 14 based studies of Thor Heyerdahl suggest a date of around 400 A.D., but other researchers claim the date to be closer to 800 A.D. This time frame fits in with the culture at Tiwanaku either being still vibrant, or in decline. Thus the theory that Hotu Matua (probably having an ealier quechua or aymara name that was changed through time) was the founding father so to speak could have been the result of exploration and expansion, or survivors from Tiwanaku seeking a new home.

Some plants on Easter Island clearly come from South America, such as the islanders’ staple food the sweet potato (which is known by its Quechua name kumara), and also manioc and gourd. Similarly, two species of freshwater plants, found in Easter Island’s crater lakes but nowhere else in the Pacific, and both useful to man, come from South America. One of them was the totora reed, which dominated the banks of South America’s Lake Titicaca and was cultivated in vast irrigated fields in the desert valleys on the coast below; it was used for making mats, houses, and boats. The other was known to the islanders as tavari, and was used as a medicinal plant. Like the totora, it grew in Lake Titicaca. This last information supports the case for contact with Tiwanaku.

The arrival of the “short ears” is hotly debated; they either arrived before or after the “long ears” obviously, but this has not been proven. What is clear is that the “short ears” were a lower class than the “long ears” and were the working class. It is believed that a rebellion of the “short ears” was what caused the civil war that all but destroyed the entire population.

Moai and altar on Rapanui. Notice the red top-knots.

The “short ears” amongst other duties, was to carve the Moai, the giant heads that dot the landscape of the island and are of course world famous. They are clearly meant as depictions of the “long ears” due to the, well, long ears that they have. However, other interesting characteristics of the faces are the thin lips, which are not a Polynesian feature, the inset shell eyes which is not common in Polynesia, the long thin noses which Polynesians don’t have, and the red top knot.

The Inca are believed to have had very long noses which extend directly to the forehead as do the Moai, and the red top knot hints that their hair was also red. Some may say that the red was used because it is the common colour of Polynesian royalty, but I tend to differ.

Then of course we have two other interesting characteristic to the story. The only hieroglyphic or writing system found in all of Polynesia is the Rongorongo of Rapanui. If the major wave of migration had come from Polynesia, why would we not find Rongorongo or something similar in the Society Islands (Tahiti, Marquesas and Tuamotus) which is the reputed Polynesian homeland, and the closest inhabited islands to Rapanui?

Some will immediately jump on the fact that the Inca and Tiwanakans also had no written or hieroglyphic language, but this is not necessarily the case. The early Spanish chronicler Fernando de Montesinos, author of Memorias Antiguas y Historiales del Peru (1642) (Ancient Memories and Histories of Peru) wrote that the early Inca did indeed have at least a hieroglyphic system which was banned by Sapa Inca Pachacutec (also known as Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui) out of the fear that the general public might learn it. The Inca were supposedly generous and kind rulers, supposedly, in many ways, but the public were restricted as to what they could do and learn.

It was clearly documented by early missionaries that even the most intelligent and well informed islanders could provide the meaning for any of the signs or provide ideograms for the simplest of words. The following quotes come from Heyerdahl’s excellent treaty on ‘Early Man and The Ocean’

‘They knew each tablet to represent a specific text, but disagreed about which text belonged to which tablet. If one tablet was substituted for another in the middle of their recital, the continued the original text uninterruptedly. The text was recited with singing rather than speaking voice. They piously copied the original old tablets on new boards, and regarded them as magic objects of the greatest value’

Although there were several claims that the script had been deciphered, none have proven worthy of scrutiny. Script itself is a non-Polynesian characteristic and the search for its origin was eventually rewarded through one of its particular characteristics, which is that it is ‘arranged in boustrophedon, i.e. in a continuous serpentine band where every second line is turned upside-down. Europeans, Chinese and the Indus Valley people never wrote in boustrophedon, and the language had been forgotten by the time of the Europeans first arrival. In fact, the only place in the world where this particular style of writing can be found is in South America; Peru to be precise.

The Easter islanders themselves are specific in their tradition of the first immigrant king, Hotu Matua, having brought with him sixty-seven written tablets when he came from his home in the far-east. Heyerdahl mentions that on the arrival of the Europeans, the Indians of Lake Titicaca area still ‘continued a primitive form of picture writing’. This conforms with the observation by Russian rongo-rongo expert J. V. Knorozov, that the only two places where ‘reversed boustrophedon’ occur in the world are Easter Island and ancient Peru.

Replica of a wooden Rongorongo Tablet from Rapanui

Sariemento Gamboa, upon consulting as assembly of forty-two learned Inca historians recorded the following in reference to the ninth Inca ‘Patchacuti Inca Yupanqui’:

‘…after he had well ascertained the most notable of their ancient histories he had it all painted after its order on large boards, and he placed them in the house of the sun, where the said boards, which were garnished with gold, would be like our libraries, and he appointed learned men who could understand and explain them…’

It was later on that these boards were destroyed for reasons stated above.

The other interesting thing is the birdman cult that developed on Rapanui. Are birdman depictions or legends prevalent in the rest of Polynesia? Not to my knowledge. But how about in Tiwanaku? Of course. One look at the Gate Of The Sun at Tiwanaku shows more birdman transformation characters on it than any other. This style of depiction is also found in other Peruvian cultures.

And then we have the Ahu, or altars which are found on Rapanui. Even a quick glance at them by someone who has been to either Tiwanaku or Cuzco and the Sacred Valley of Peru will note the startling similarity in design and execution.

The finest platform masonry, such as that found at Ahu Tahiri (one of the two ahu at Vinapu), consists of ‘enormous squared and tooled stones, that turn the edge of the toughest modern steel’. The best facade slabs commonly weigh 2 or 3 tons. At Vinapu one of the polished basalt slabs measures 2.5 by 1.7 m (8 by 5.5 ft) and weighs 6 or 7 tons, while one at Ahu Vai Mata is 3 by 2 m (10 by 6 ft), and weighs 9 or 10 tons.

John Macmillan Brown writes:

The colossal blocks are tooled and cut so as to fit each other. In the Ahu Vinapu and in the fragment of the ahu near Hangaroa beach the stones are as colossal as in the old Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, they are as carefully tooled, and the irregularities of their sides that have to come together are so cut that the two faces exactly fit into each other. These blocks are too huge to have been shifted frequently to let the mason find out whether they fitted or not. They must have been cut and tooled to exact measurement or plan. There is no evidence of chipping after they have been laid. Every angle and projection must have been measured with scientific precision before the stones were nearing their finish.

Stone altar on Rapanui. Eerily like Inca stone construction

A recent expedition by Dr. Robert Shock, a geologist, to Rapanui revealed interesting results. According to him, based on his knowledge of the wear patterns of stones due to rain and wind driven sand, for example, the Moai made of basalt are the oldest, as are the altar platforms. He was unable to find large basalt deposits near to where the Moai presently stand, but speculate that the basalt source is presently under the ocean.

There is an oral history in New Zealand of an ancient race of peoples that sailed there from the east and populated the country many years before the Maori – these people were called the Waitaha. They are not recognised as a race in NZ officially because to do that would succeed tribal rights over areas of land in treaty compensation negotiations away from Maori tribes but basically it is said that the Waitaha people sailed to NZ, populated it and lived in peace there for many years.

The difference between this race and the Maori at the time is that the Waitaha were totally peaceful and that they were white. They were fair skinned people some with blue eyes some with green, they had blond hair a lot of them and some had red, they were tall and lithe and were mainly vegetarians. They had no martial arts or war structure as they were totally into peace so that when the Maori came they were easily over run and eaten or taken as slaves because they refused to fight – the memory of them is kept alive through their decendants who were taken as slaves and assimilated into Maori society. That is why many Maori have red hair and some have green eyes. They were expert gardeners and the garden beds they made can still be seen in some areas.

In 1995 a book by Barry Brailsford, Song of Waitaha: The Histories of a Nation, claimed that the ancestors of the “Nation of Waitaha” were the first inhabitants of New Zealand, a pale-skinned people who had sailed there from Easter Island more than 2000 years before Polynesians arrived. It was claimed the “secret” Waitaha story had been suppressed for 200 years and the evidence of their occupation and existence, such as stone structures, had been mistaken for natural formations or Maori artifacts.

Although a series of further books, web sites and New Age events have been based around these claims, they have been widely dismissed as inaccurate by conventional scholars. Historian Michael King noted: “There was not a skerrick of evidence – linguistic, artifactual, genetic; no datable carbon or pollen remains, nothing – that the story had any basis in fact. Which would make Waitaha the first people on earth to live in a country for several millennia and leave no trace of their occupation.”

No trace of their occupation? How about the Kaimanawa wall? Near the southern end of Lake Taupo, New Zealand there is enigmatic wall called Kaimanawa Wall. The wall is composed of megalithic blocks with symmetrical corners. The level top suggests it may have been a platform pyramid, similar to those found on several islands in the South Pacific. Until the jungle is cleared and a full excavation takes place, the Kaimanawa Wall remains a mystery.

Barry Brailsford has been the chief investigator of the Kaimanawa wall, aided by American D.H. Childress, and others. Childress, who investigated the site in 1996 when it came to the attention of the outside world, wrote (in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Armageddon) that:

“…the blocks seem to be a standard one point-eight meters long by one point-five meters high. The bottom block runs straight down to one point-seven meters and beyond. The stone is local ignimbrite, a soft volcanic stone made of compressed sand and ash. The nearest outcrop of such stone is five kilometers away. The blocks run for twenty five meters in a straight line from east to west, and the wall faces due north. The wall consists of approximately ten regular blocks that are seemingly cut and fitted together without mortar.”

Supporting the contention that a pre-Maori people lived in New Zealand are the bones of the kiore, a type of rat alien to New Zealand, which was likely introduced by the first settlers. Some kiore bones have been dated as 2,000 years old — centuries before the first Maoris arrived.

Kaimanawa stone wall near Lake Taipo in Aotearoa

A cursory look at a map of the currents of the southern Pacific Ocean shows that strong currents move from the Peruvian coast to Rapanui, and continue on in a curve to New Zealand. They then continue on, hook up with the Humboldt Current and return to Peru.

Thor Heyerdahl in his 1947 Kon Tiki raft expedition left the port of Callao near Lima and 101 days later reached the Tuamotu Islands. The balsa craft was clearly not as hydrodynamic as a canoe or other ship would be, and the sail configuration, being square and not very “tuneable,” much more like a Viking ship, would not be very efficient.

It is quite possible that Heyerdahl chose this shape because it was in line with the proposed design of his Viking ancestors’ sails, and that there is no record of ship and sail designs in Peru from the distant past, or are there?

Early Spanish depiction of balsa craft off Ecuador

In fact, drawings made by early Spanish seafarers show that the balsa crafts that Pizarro and his crew saw ( and boarded ) had sails which are very similar to those of Polynesian sailing canoes; the so-called crab-claw design; still inn use on the Hawaiian voyaging double hull canoe Hokule’a, and more historically accurate on the Hui O Wa’a Kaulua of Maui’s Mo’olele canoe. Had Heyerdahl chosen instead to depart from Matarani, he may well have wound up landing at Rapanui.

The ability to reasonably easily sail from Aotearoa to Hawaii is a given; as the Maori originally came from Tahiti, according to the archaeological data as well as their own oral traditions. The ancestral homeland of the Maori, at least those of the main wave in the 12th century is called Hawaiiki, and is at the present day named Tahiti.

Marae of Taputapuatea on the island of Raiatea, Tahiti

More specifically, Hawaiiki is the island of Raiatea, which for hundreds of years if not millennia has been the center of Polynesian seafaring. The marae (temple) of Taputapuatea (most sacred white place) was the wayfinding or traditional navigating university of the Polynesian people; for one reason, it is strategically located in the center of the so-called Polynesian triangle.

This triangle is composed of 3 points, designated by the lands of Hawaii to the north, Rapanui to the southwest, and Aotearoa to the southwest; all three are clearly people of the same genetic source, as evidenced in their oral traditions.

Also, their language is almost identical, aside from minor differences in pronounciation. The name which they call themselves, Maoli in Hawaii, and Maori in Tahiti, Aotearoa and Rapanui, simply means “people.” The k and l sounds of Hawaiian words, such as Moku ‘ula ( Red Island, a sacred place on Maui ) in the other three places would be Motu ‘ura.

The major wave of migration to Hawaii occurred about the 12th century from Raiatea, under the leadership of the priest Pahao. They, however, did not find the islands inhabited. There was a peaceful race of people named the Mu who had been there since time memorial, and Pahao, who had visited the islands previously on a spying mission, now came with a large force of warriors in order to subdue the Mu.

The origin of the Mu people is somewhat lost in the mists of time, though most archaeologists claim that they came from the Marquesas Islands somewhere between 0 and 300 A.D. This is solely based on the idea that artefacts discovered, especially on the island of Kauai resemble those found in the Marquesas.

Some of the Hawaiians themselves say that their people have always been there, the Mu that is. The Tahitians began conquering the islands and did so in a northerly direction; and the seemingly gentle Mu retreated as the advance continued. The last major island on which they existed was Kauai, and it is here that most of the stories about them have been written.

The Tahitians called them Menehune, or the little people, because the Mu were a gently, agrarian, and peaceful people. This term is still in use in the modern day, comically referring to mythical leprechaun-like people who are shy and hide in the forests. The real name is probably the Mana huna, or people of mana=spiritual power and huna=secret wisdom. They were, therefore, a people with psychic and other mind abilities that were not appreciated by the Tahitians.

Through genocide and assimilation the Mu ceased to exist several centuries ago, but an interesting characteristic occasionally shows up even today. Some descendants from the island of Ni’ihau, which is close to Kauai and became privately owned by the Francis Sinclair and Elizabeth Hutchinson in 1864, having purchased it from King Kamehameha V. As part of the agreement in the purchase, Hawaiian language and cultural traditions were to be protected, and in some ways enforced. Even to this day, radios, televisions and telephones are banned from the island.

The isolation of these islanders, who are almost all full blooded Hawaiians, has resulted in there being a very small gene pool. Some of them, who have moved to Maui for example, and whom the author has met, have red hair. This could very well being the result of inheriting genes from the first race of Hawaiians, the Mu, who in turn may be the descendants of the same ancient race of people that first populated Rapanui, and Aotearoa. The possibility is that they are the children of the priest kings of Tiwanaku.

Brien Foerster

Something that has perplexed most if not all researchers of Peruvian history is the creator deity named Viracocha. Deemed to have been the ancestor of the Inca, it was he who created the first Sapa (high) Inca, Manco capac, as well as his full blood sister (and wife) Mama ocllo from the waters of Lake Titicaca, and told them to move from that place and create a new civilization.

One thing that is often overlooked is that Viracocha and Viracochan are two completely, yet related names. Viracocha was the Creator, but Viracochan and the Viracochan family were flesh and blood people.

Evidence clearly shows that the Inca originated indeed in the area of Lake Titicaca, but did not physically rise out of the waters of the lake itself; like many oral traditions, stories such as this are actually poetry, filled with symbolism.

The Inca were the last of the priest kings and queens of Tiwanaku (or Tiahuanaco), which is presently 13 miles from the shore of Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, and thousands of years ago rested on the shoreline of what would have been a vastly larger lake. This is well documented by many researchers, including Graham Hancock in his book “Fingerprints of the Gods.”

Tiwanaku itself is one of the most mysteries places of human habitation on the planet, as it contains, even to the present day, the remains of structures which defy conventional archaeological timelines. What is commonly suggested by most academia as originating about 300 B.C. to 300 A.D. as a developed culture has more intriguingly been dated by the Bolivian engineer and archaeologist Arthur Posnansky in the early 20th century as more along the lines of 15,000 B.C. His career was of course destroyed by such an assumption.

Yet modern science has been unable to explain how such a clearly highly evolved culture as that of Tiwanaku, and the even more technologically advanced one at nearby Puma punku were able, at a barren and bone chilling 13,000 plus foot elevation, to sculpt and hew precision stone works, some of immense size and astonishing precision, with the tools of presumed primitive man?
The stone used at Puma punku, for example, is diorite, so hard that the only material known which is harder is diamond. And yet, a so-called primitive culture was able to achieve seemingly perfectly flat planes, ninety degree angles, and exacting holes and channels in this material.

No matter what age of these structures turns out to be correct, the people themselves are also an enigma. It is known that due to an extensive El Nino event in the area, about the year 900 to 950 A.D., which lasted 40 years, and as a result of attacks of nearby Aymara speaking tribal people, the priest kings of Tiwanaku had to flee that place, and this is where we tie back into the story of Viracochan and the first Inca.

The Inca are known to have been an incredibly organized group, quite small in size, that entered Cuzco and the Sacred Valley of Peru around the 12th century A.D. give or take 100 years, and quickly became the dominant civilization. It was in Cuzco of course that they made their capital city, from which they expanded, forming the largest civilization in the Americas up until 1532, when Francisco Pizarro and his band of 160 (plus or minus) soldiers of fortune captured the last of the Sapa (high) Inca Atahuallpa, executed him, and thereby brought the almost immediate downfall of the military, religious, and governmental aspects of this great culture.

What is lesser known about the history of the Inca is that the so-called civil war which had been raging since the death of a previous Sapa Inca, Huayna capac around the year 1527, was pivotal not only in the outcome of the arrival of the Spanish, but in the ending of the lineage of the Inca themselves.

Huayna capac was Sapa Inca from 1493 to 1527, his demise came at the hand of foreign disease, most probably small pox, which had worked its way down the coast from Panama, an early Spanish colony and stronghold. On his deathbed, Huayna capac decreed that the Inca civilization ( empire being an incorrect term that I will not get into in this paper ) should be divided between his two eldest sons. In fact, these diseases not only would affect the Sapa Inca and people of Ecuador, but would rapidly work its way south.

Tradition had been consistent, from the time of the first Sapa Inca Manco capac, that the first born son would become the heir. This process was supposedly strictly obeyed by the next 9 Sapa Inca.

During Huayna capac’s reign, in 1527, both he and his first born son Ninan cuyochi became infected with small pox, and Ninan cuyochi died first. Thus, the next in line, Huascar, was to be appointed Sapa Inca ( remember, this was a first.) Possibly in a state of illness induced delusion, or, with the situation of the line of succession being interrupted, Huayna capac decided to give the newly acquired area in which he lived ( that of present day Ecuador ) to Atahuallpa, his son of an Ecuadorian noble woman, and the rest to Huascar, which was composed of all lands south of there, a territory which bordered the Pacific Ocean and edged the Amazon basin inland, as far south as Santiago de Chile.

After Huayna capac’s death the two brothers lived in relative harmony for a few years, but then tensions began to appear. As it was always the duty of a Sapa Inca to expand the territory of the Tahuantinsuyu (four corners or quarters of the Inca world) during his time as ruler, Huascar was in a quandary. He clearly could not expand north into Atahuallpa’s land, for that had been given to him by their father to care take. To the west was the Pacific Ocean, and to the east was problematic, as the Amazon was seemingly quite full of Indigenous people who were possibly not eager to join, by treaty or force, the Tahuantinsuyu. An attempt by the Inca to move in by force would have involved jungle warfare, and the natives would clearly have the upper hand in such a densely foliaged area. Also, a southern expansion perhaps would have meant that the military and other supply lines would be stretched beyond what was practical from the center at Cuzco. So this Sapa Inca was denied any ideas of territorial expansion.

Huascar was probably a little edgy about the intentions of his half brother as well. Atahuallpa was a half-blood Inca, and it is not clear the two had ever had much contact face to face. Huascar had grown up Cuzco, with the other full blood children of Huayna capac and his full blooded sister/wife. Atahallpa on the other hand had grown up in Quito, where Huayna capac had chosen to live out the last years of his life by choice, surely unaware that a foreign disease would overtake he and his first son well before their natural time.

So Huascar sent a message to Atahuallpa, trying to suss out the latter’s state of mind and level of contentment.

“You are certainly aware of the fact that, according to the laws of the first Inca, Manco Capac, the kingdom of Quito and all of your provinces belong to the crown and to the Empire of Cuzco. By rights, therefore, I was in no way obliged to relinquish the government of this kingdom to you, and if I did so, it was not because I was forced or compelled, but merely no to oppose our father’s wishes. Now that he is no longer with us, I am willing, out of respect for his memory, not to go back on this decision, but on two conditions. These are: first, that you will make no attempt to add so much, as a particle of land to the extent of your kingdom, since any newly acquired land belongs by rights to our Empire; the other is that, leaving everything else aside, you will swear allegiance to me and acknowledge that you are my vassal.” The above is quoted from the Inca descendant Garcilaso de la Vega, in the 17th century, in his book “The Royal Commentaries of the Inca.”

Atahuallpa sent word back, by Chasqui (royal messenger) that he agreed to these terms, and, in fact, if Huascar so wished, Atahuallpa would return all lands given to him in stewardship by their father, and would return to Cuzco to serve the Sapa Inca in whatever capacity he deemed suitable.

Feeling a sense of ease, Huascar confirmed the titles to Atahuallpa that Manco capac had bestowed on him, and invited to half-brother to Cuzco to pay his respects, and take the oath of faithful, loyal allegiance. To this Atahuallpa agreed, and suggested that representatives from all of the districts of Quito could accompany him to Cuzco, in order to witness his pledge of allegiance, and to celebrate the life and works of their father, Huayna capac.

Huascar was delighted by these ideas, and gave free reign to Atahuallpa to bring whom he wished, and to depart for Cuzco at a date that he chose himself.

This is where the plot against Huascar began to take root; Atahuallpa chose, as his representatives, experienced army personnel who were secretly armed; the delegation was in fact a war party, 30,000 strong, whose intent was to capture Huascar and hold him prisoner. The elite of the Inca army had been stationed in Ecuador, both to protect Huayna capac, and also that is where their last military campaign had been conducted.

Just before Atahuallpa`s forces were about to enter the Cuzco area, they were observed by Huascar`s advisors, who warned the Inca that a delegation of 30,000 was far too large to be on a peaceful mission. They recommended that Huascar form a defensive strategy, immediately, which he did in earnest. All fighting men were summoned to Cuzco from the Tahuantinsuyu, and though they numbered 30,000 in number, few if any of them was in a battle-ready state, as peace had been the norm in this area for years.

Atahuallpa`s forces destroyed Huascar`s defenses in the course of a single day. He was captured and held prisoner under guard, day and night, and Atahuallpa sent news of this throughout the Tahuantinsuyu in order to discourage any ideas amongst Huascar`s loyal followers of rescuing the sovereign.

His next moves were even more insidious. He summoned all Inca family members of full blood to hasten to Cuzco at once, in order to formulate new laws that would ensure peace and tranquility between the two kingdoms. This was in plain fact a ruse; as soon as these royal descendants arrived, all were murdered in heinous ways, from Huascar`s uncles, aunts, and cousins, down to people of a fourth degree of familial relationship. Therefore, the majority of the bloodline of the Inca had been destroyed, forever, by the hand of one of their own, or at least a half blooded one.

All of this occurred while Atahuallpa himself was out of harm`s way in the city of Juaja, some 860 kilometers from Cuzco. It is also possible that he was in the city of Cajamarca, farther to the northeast; accounts differ. Soon afterwards the Spanish conquistador Pizarro and his contingent of approximately 160 soldiers of fortune would in turn dupe Atahuallpa into what Pizarro stated was to be a peaceful meeting. The result was the capture of Atahuallpa, and the beginning of the further destruction of the Inca state. My reasoning behind this perhaps overly drawn out description of the fall of the Inca is to show that most of the full blooded Inca had been exterminated by Atahuallpa prior to the arrival of the Spanish. As the Inca had no written tradition, at least nothing that has survived the Spanish onslaught except the knotted chord system called the Khipu which are still largely not deciphered, we depend upon Spanish accounts to describe who they were, and what they looked like.

What is intriguing is that early Spanish accounts may give us insight into what set the Inca apart from other people in the area aside from their amazing organizational skills; they may have had red hair and been of light skin.

Thor Heyerdahl, in his now out of print book Aku aku, found accounts of this amongst the Inca, and other Indigenous races amongst the islands of the Pacific Ocean.

The conquistador, Pedro Pizarro, reported in his account of the great Spanish invasion of South America in the 1500s, that while the masses of Andes Indians were small and dark, the members of the ruling Inca family were tall and had whiter skins than the Spaniards themselves. He mentions in particular certain individuals in present day Peru who were white and had red hair. (Heyerdahl, ibid., page 351).

Heyerdahl reported that this is reflected in the mummies found in South America – on the Pacific coast, in the desert sand of Paracas, there are large burial caves in which numerous mummies have been perfectly preserved.

Some of the mummies were found to have the stiff black hair of the Indians, while others, which have been kept in the same conditions, have red, often chestnut-colored hair, “silky and wavy, as found amongst Europeans, they have long skulls and remarkably tall bodies.” (Heyerdahl, ibid., pages 351, 352).

Pizarro asked who the white skinned redheads were. The Inca Indians replied that they were the last descendants of the Viracochas. The Viracochas, they said, were a divine race of white men with beards. They were so like the Spanish that the Europeans were called Viracochas the moment they came to the Inca Empire. The Incas thought they were the Viracochas who had come sailing back across the Pacific. (Heyerdahl, ibid., page 253).

According to the principal Inca legend, before the reign of the first Inca, the sun-god, Con-Ticci Viracocha, had taken leave of his kingdom in present day Peru and sailed off into the Pacific with all his subjects.

When the Spaniards came to Lake Titicaca, up in the Andes, they found the mightiest ruins in all South America – Tiahuanaco. They saw a hill reshaped by man into a stepped pyramid, classical masonry of enormous blocks, beautifully dressed and fitted together, and numerous large statues in human form. They asked the Indians to tell them who had left these enormous ruins. The well known chronicler, Cieza de Leon, was told in reply that these things had been made long before the Incas came to power. They were made by white and bearded men like the Spaniards themselves. (Heyerdahl, ibid., page 253).

The White men had finally abandoned their statues and gone with the leader, Con-Ticci Viracocha, first up to Cuzco, and then down to the Pacific. They were given the Inca name of Viracocha, or “sea foam’, because they were white skinned and vanished like foam over the sea.

I wish to continue on with this thread in next month’s article, to see the other traces of these mysterious red and or blonde haired Viracochas found in the islands of Rapanui ( Easter Island, ) Aotearoa ( New Zealand ) and Hawaii.

An intriguing tidbit to this story is that an ancient seaport on the coast of Peru, which is in use today and carries it’s ancient name, is Matarani. This is due west of Tiwanaku, and is not an Incan quechua language word; nor is it aymara, the other dominant ancient language. It is in fact Polynesian, meaning mata=eyes and rani=heaven, thus, the eyes of heaven.

Brien Foerster

References:

• De la Vega, Garcilaso (2004: reprint) The Royal Commentaries Of The Inca; Peru Books, Lima
• Hancock, Graham (1995) Fingerprints Of The Gods; Three Rivers Press, New York
• Heyerdahl, Thor (1958) Aku-Aku: The Secret Of Easter Island; Allen and Unwin, London

I have always been fascinated by Indigenous cultures. As a child growing up on the west coast of Canada, I developed a keen interest in native Haida and Kwagiulth art and oral traditions, when my grade 4 teacher read native “mythsEto my classmates and me.

What struck me, even at that early age, was the way that the indigenous story writers treated all of creation, whether animal, plant or human in form, as being equal; there was no social hierarchy as compared with European story-telling. Raven, human, salmon, and cedar tree, for example, are treated as being on the same intellectual and spiritual level, while European stories anthropomorphise animals, and definitely treat them as being of a lower order of life.

This led me to learn to carve totem poles and other wood arts from native mastercraftsmen, including my adopted uncle Jim Gilbert. My native inspired sculpture became a full time profession for me at the age of 25, and continues to this day, in a somewhat muted way. A university degree in biology was cast aside so that I could live this passion.

At 36, I moved the island of Maui, Hawaii, and spent two years with a mainly Hawaiian crew building a double-hull sailing canoe, the “Mo’okiha O Pi’ilani E( Sacred Lizard That Pierces The Heavens.) At the same time, in order to make a living, I learned to make outrigger racing canoe paddles, and now 2500 of these are in use from Japan to Germany, and northern Manitoba, Canada, to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, with many points in between.

The double hull canoe, which was destined to sail to Tahiti, with I hoped with me on board, was never finished due to internal personnel problems. Not to be dissuaded, however, I flew to Tahiti in order to explore its history myself ( along with some outrigger paddles of course!)

This was more than 10 years ago, and coincided with my introduction to the works of Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. The big Hawaiian canoe, under the construction and design guidance of Keola Sequiera, was based on Sacred geometry and his own study of Graham’s research.

The study of Polynesian origins was of course a major aspect of the canoe, since it is well known that the Hawaiians came from Tahiti originally.

But what about the sweet potato, which is prevalent throughout Polynesia, and is known to have come from Peru; or Totora reeds, found on Easter Island ( Rapanui) but native to Lake Titicaca?

Since my studies in Tahiti satisfied my interest in the Polynesians ( for the time-being at least) what else could possibly be as interesting? I had already satisfied my need to visit the lands of my own ancestors in Europe, and Egypt seemed to be almost analyzed to death, so Peru became my focus, and more specifically, the largest civilization in all of the Americas, the Inca.

Quite coincidentally, I began to develop a relationship with a young woman, now my fiancée Irene, who is Peruvian. She invited me to visit her family in Lima, which I did, and travelled quite independently for over a month all over Peru. While this small country has an amazing diversity of ecological and cultural habitats, it was the Sacred Valley of Peru that captured both my heart and intellectual fascination.

The amazing precision of their seamless and mortar free stone masonry, exacting celestial observations, and complicated but humane societal structure was not only fascinating to me, but has been the subject of scholars and academics for 500 years.

On this first trip, I scoured the bookshops of Cuzco for a nice, small, and affordable book, in English, that described the Inca culture, from origin to their downfall, with no luck. How could this be?

There were beautiful full colour “coffee table books,Eand scholarly treaties, but no small pocket books that satisfied my need.

Upon my return to Canada, I continued to learn what I could from library books and the internet about the Inca. And on 6 more trips to Peru over 3 years, my taste for Incan information was still not quenched, and the elusive little Inca book was still nowhere to be found.

So, upon the encouragement of my fiancée and her family, I began to compile what would become “A Brief History Of The IncasEin the winter of 2009/2010, and had the book published in Lima in April of this year. I chose a Peruvian based publishing company because the owners are friends of my Peruvian family, and since the topic is the Inca, as much of the business side of the book should profit the descendants of their land.

The main question that really puzzled me after much research and “on siteEobservations was, how could 160 mainly untrained Spanish soldiers of fortune defeat an army of at least 10,000 trained Inca warriors? Even ( and pardon the bad joke ) if each of the Inca soldiers had one rock, or indeed a potato, they could have stoned ( or potatoed ) the Spanish to death.

The answer to this question is much more complicated than most people realize, and why it takes up almost one half of my book. I obviously will not give details of this, because I want you to read the whole version, and to do that you have to buy the book!

However, in a nutshell, as they say: from the dawn of the Inca civilization about the year 1200, until the reign of Huayna capac, about the year 1527, one thing was certain; the title of Sapa (highest) Inca was always transferred from father to the eldest son. The logic behind this may have been that since the Sapa Inca had to be knowledgeable in all aspects of Inca society, from warfare to government to agriculture and religion; his training had to begin almost at birth.

Therefore, to concentrate this education in the first born male heir made sense to them.

However, due to the introduction of western diseases that spread through the native population beginning in Panama, where the Spanish had a strong presence, down through Columbia and then Ecuador, Huayna capac and his first born son, Ninan cuyochi, both became infected. They were living near Quito, Ecuador at the time, more or less the northern border of the Inca civilization, called the Tahuantinsuyu (four corners of the world) and it was here that Huayna capac’s favourite, son, Atahuallpa was born, of a royal Ecuadorian mother.

Ninan cuyochi died first, and this left Huayna capac with a true dilemma; the chain of father to first born entitlement was now broken, so what could he do? As the Tahuantinsuyu was now at its height of size and power, stretching from Quito and its northern environs south to present day Santiago de Chile, west to the Pacific, and east into the Amazon jungle , Huayna capac decided to divide it into two parts.

He gave Atahuallpa (the half breed Inca) the area of Quito and the surrounding area which had been Atahuallpa’s mother’s traditional land, and the rest was left to Huascar, his second born full blood Inca son. Soon after Huayna capac died.

All was reasonably serene for about 5 years, and then Atahuallpa, not satisfied with his share, sent the highly trained Inca armies which had been in Quito to protect his father south, to confront Huascar.

It was at this very time that Francisco Pizarro, on his third voyage to try to find the legendary Eldorado, or city of gold that Native informants to the north had told him existed in a southern land called “PeluE arrived on the scene. The rest you will have to explore for yourself by buying and reading my book!

If Huayna capac had not succumbed to an introduced disease and died, Pizarro probably would have had zero chance of achieving anything, because Huayna capac had access to a military force of at least 100,000 trained warriors, if not more. The division of the Tahuantinsuyu after his death caused immediate fracturing of all levels of Inca society, because instead of having one supreme Sapa Inca in control of every aspect of the society, now they had two, neither of which was fully trained to “walk in his father’s shoes.E

My book ends with the sacking of Cuzco, the royal, military, and governmental capital of the Tahuatinsuyu by Pizarro and his rag tag ( yes I am biased) group of soldiers of fortune, and the establishment of Lima as the new Spanish capital, in the 1530’s. The descendants of the Inca did try to rebel against the Spanish over the course of many decades, but were unsuccessful. This period I have found too depressing to write about.

So, in a nutshell, my book covers the origin of the Inca in Tiwanaku ( or Tiahuanaco ) in present day Bolivia, through their rise to become the largest, and perhaps most progressive Native American ( meaning all of the Americas, not just the U.S.A.) culture as regards social cohesion and human rights, through to their rapid downfall at the hands of the gold seeking Spanish.

I have not only gleaned the information that makes up the book from scholarly texts written by Spanish and somewhat brain-washed Inca descendants, but also from oral traditions of the people of Peru who have secreted away what they know of their history, and have only recently revealed it to lucky searchers such as myself.

My present situation is this; I am now living in Peru most of the year, and every day is filled with learning more about the Inca, through trips to Sacred sites and consulting with my Native informant friends. What is becoming most intriguing is where the Inca came from and who they were.

How could a people suddenly spring up out of seemingly nowhere, with very advanced knowledge of architecture, government, and a kind of advanced democracy whereby each member of the society was cared for, and develop the largest civilization in South America in just 300 years?

The answer, of course, is that they were the descendants of a very advanced culture, and this is where Graham Hancock comes back into the picture. His studies of Tiwanaku, and the amazing incites of Arthur Posnansky, a Bolivian archaeologist that studied Tiwanaku for 50 years and dared to defy the so called “conventionalEarchaeologists ideas of its age, are pivotal to what I am researching and discovering now.

Posnansky postulated that Tiwanaku was as old as 15,000 to 17,000 years, based on his study of the obliquity of the ecliptic. I won’t bother to get into what this means in detail now, but what it suggest is that key marking stones at Tiwanaku, when adjusted for celestial alignments that have a multi-thousand year cycle, point to its construction at several, as in as much more than 10,000 years before conventional archaeologists “believeEit was made.

My own recent studies, thanks to finding several stone anomalies at Sachsayhuaman, Qenqo, Ollantaytambo, and other sites in and around the Sacred Valley of Peru near Cuzco, and reinforced by the knowledge of my Native informants, show that many of the greatest achievements of the Inca were in fact made by earlier people. These people may be those that Graham refers to as descendants of those that survived the great cataclysms that occurred as the result of the massive and rapid melting of the ice sheets at the end of the last ice age, that Graham and others date at around 10,500 B.C.

So, reading ancient chronicles and hearing stories about floods from oral traditions is one thing, but having celestially aligned ancient structures of stone staring you in the face, with erosion patterns that clearly point to an age of more than 800 years to even a neophyte geologist like me is solid proof! How more solid can you get than stone after all (pun very much intended.)

Other Pacific wide anomalies are also teasers, and I am following up on these, thankfully not alone. I am blessed to have Native informants, whom I have met from Hawaii, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Rapanui ( Easter Island ) and Aotearoa ( New Zealand ) who are helping me to weave a fascinating pattern together. Collectively, they speak of a trading and societal network that stretches back several thousand years, from Peru to the above mentioned locations, all the way to Japan and Tibet.

To order the book or to get in touch please free to contact me at: shipibospirit@hotmail.com
I have also written over 50 articles about the Inca, Hawaiians, and other Pacific cultures at: www.suite101.com
Just use the search box and enter Brien Foerster to see them all.

As well, videos and slideshows that I constantly add to Facebook ( just search for Brien Foerster) and on Youtube (again look up Brien Foerster) are available for your observation and critique.

I am deeply indebted to Graham Hancock, and other brilliant researchers such as Robert Bauval, John Anthony West, Robert Shock, and David Hatcher Childress who have campaigned, for decades, at not only “thinking outside of the conventional box, but also presenting, boldly and with research, hard evidence of time frames and highly developed societies which “conventionalEscholars simply can’t refute, though they try, somewhat desperately.

Brien Foerster
Cuzco, August 7, 2010

The Quipu was a cord about two feet long, composed of different coloured threads that were tightly twisted together, from which a quantity of smaller threads were suspended, like a fringe. The threads were of different colours, and were tied into knots. In fact, the word Quipu is Quechua or Runa Simi for knot. The colours seemed to represent practical things; white being silver and yellow gold, but also abstract ideas as well; white signifying peace and red, war. But the main function of the Quipus was for arithmetical purposes.

The knots represented numbers, and could be combined in such a manner to represent any amount required. The abacus used by the Chinese may be thought of as a similar instrument.

Officers were established in each of the districts, called Quipucamayus, or “ keepers of the Quipus “ and their job was to furnish the government with information on various important matters. One of the Quipucamayus was in charge of the revenues, for example, the amount of raw materials such as wool distributed amongst the labourers, the quality and quantity of fabrics made from it, and the amounts stored in the royal warehouses. This would also have applied to agricultural products, military hardware, household utensils, etc.

Another Quipucamayu would be in charge of births and deaths, marriages, the number of the populace qualified to bear arms, and other such details of life in all areas of the Tahuantinsuyu. The number of quipucamayus scattered throughout the Empire, was proportional to the size of each place. Thus the smallest villages numbered four, and others twenty, or even thirty. The Incas preferred this arrangement. even in places where one accountant would have sufficed, the idea being that, if several of them kept the same accounts, there was less risk that they would make mistakes.

Once a year the Quipus were forwarded to Cusco, where experts trained in them would decipher the contents of each one. Thus, the government in Cusco was provided with a mass of statistical information, carried along the efficient Inca road system by the swift-footed Chasquis. Indeed, it may be said that everything that could be counted, was counted in this way, even to battles, diplomatic missions, and royal speeches. But since it was only possible to record numbers in this manner, and not words, the quipucamayus assigned to record ambassadorial missions and speeches, learned them by heart, at the same time that they noted down the numbers, places and dates on their quipus; and thus, from father to son, they transmitted this information to their successors. The speeches exchanged between the Incas and their vassals on important occasions, such as the surrender of a new province, were also transmitted to posterity by the amautas, or philosophers, who summarized them in simple, clear fables, in order that they might be implanted by word of mouth in the memories of all the people from those at court to the inhabitants of the most remote hamlets.

Quipucamayus were selected from a class of people, “males, fifty to sixty”, and were not the only members of Inca society to use the quipu. Inca historians used the quipu when telling the Spanish about Tahuantinsuyu history (whether they only recorded important numbers or actually contained the story itself is unknown). Members of the ruling class were usually taught to read the quipu in the Inca equivalent of a university, the yacha-huasi (literally, “house of teaching”), in the third year of schooling, for the higher classes who would eventually become the bureaucracy. These included not only the full-blood Inca, but also the prominent members of cultures which had been added to the Inca world, or Tahuantinsuyu as it was called (the four corners of the world.)

According to the words of Garcialaso de la Vega, who published his famous “Royal Commentaries of the Incas” in 1609:

All laws, ordinances, rites, and ceremonies throughout the Empire were recorded by these same means.

‘When my father’s Indians came to town on Midsummer’s Day to pay their tribute, they brought me the quipus; and the curacas asked my mother to take note of their stories, for they mistrusted the Spaniards, and feared that they would not understand them. I was able to reassure them by re-reading what I had noted down under their dictation, and they used to follow my reading, holding on to their quipus, to be certain of my exactness; this was how I succeeded in learning many things quite as perfectly as did the Indians.’

Hernando Pizarro, younger brother of Francisco, the Conquistador, was informed by the natives near Lima Peru that altars had existed on this site at the time of arrival of the first Peruvians, and so great was the veneration of this God and place by the locals that the Inca, instead of attempting to abolish His worship, found it more prudent to allow it to continue, conjointly with that of Inti, their supreme deity ( the sun.)

The natives throughout the Tahuantinsuyu ( Inca World ) still made pilgrimages to this site, to commune with the Oracle that dwelt there, and pay tribute. This made Pachacamac one of the most opulent temples in the Tahuantinsuyu, and Atahuallpa, last of the Inca rulers, anxious to collect his ransom as quickly as possible, urged Pizarro to send a detachment there, to collect the treasures that it contained before the priests could hide it from the advancing Spanish in 1532.

Pachacamac is a vast adobe complex, set amongst a massive sad dune, which lies 25 miles southeast of Lima, Peru, and adjacent to the Pan American highway, astride the Pacific coastline. “Pachacámac” in Quechua means “Pacha,” world, and “camac” to animate therefore “The One who Animates the World.” The site was considered one of the most important religious centers of the indigenous peoples of the central Andes, and contains a number of pyramids.

Built centuries before the time of the Incas, and in fact was founded at least as far back as 200 B.C.,Pachacamac is noted for its great pyramid-like temples, and the remains of frescoes adorning its adobe walls. Culturally and chronologically it is related to Chancay culture, and others, including the Huari. At the time of the Spanish conquest it had become a major Inca shrine.

Pachacámac is the “Lord Of The Earthquake,” a very powerful huaca (sacred spirit being and place) that controlled the balance of the World. The Idol, carved of wood, depicts a two faced human figure with felines and serpent features in the Huari style, tied to the agricultural cycle of maize (corn). The original was, very unfortunately, destroyed by the Spanish, who were angered by the temple’s lack of gold.

According to the oral traditions; “in the beginning there were no foods for the first man and the first woman, and the man died of starvation. The Sun then fertilized the woman and she produced an offspring. Pachacámac became jealous of his heir, and killed the offspring, scattering the remains. These became the essential ingredients of humanity; the “teeth of man” were maize, and his “bones”, yuca. Artistic images of Pachacamac do not exist, as he was considered invisible, except for a wooden staff, thought to be a representation of Pachacamac, which was found in 1938 during an excavation of the site. This is believed to be a copy of the original, which was destroyed, as stated previously.

According to Spanish chronicles, Inca Tupac Yupanqui, the monarch at the time of the Inca occupation, (he was high or Sapa Inca from 1471 to 1493) decided to commune with the Pachacamac. He was said to have waited for 40 days for a dictate; history does not record if the Inca became a disciple, however he did later erect a temple on the site, the massive Temple of the Sun. Besides the Inca, the priesthood alone were allowed to commune with the Oracle directly. The priests would present questions and then transmit the answers back to the throngs of visitors who arrived in great number.

The first occupation of Pachacamac began around 200 AD with stone walls that served as the base for upper adobe structures. With the arrival of the Huari culture in 650 AD, Pachacamac’s influence extended to other zones of the central, and the coastal Andes. Numerous Huari influences appear on the ceramics and textiles founb at the site. After the Huari’s collapse, Pachacamac grew in size, eventually covering 210 acres.

During the late period 800-1450 AD, the majority of the architectural compounds and pyramids were constructed. The primary architectural unit is the walled enclosure containing a stepped pyramid, storage structures and patios. The site is organized around two perpendicular avenues aligned with the cardinal directions, which cross one another at the center of the site.

The Incas arrived last, between 1450-1532 A.D. They adapted the pre-existing temples and adding the “Temple of the Sun,” the “Acllahuasi” (Virgins of the Sun temple), the “Palace of Taurichumbi” and the “Seat of the Peregrinos,” which is a vast plaza.

The spectacular Incan Temple of the Sun, located at the top of a rocky promontory, which overlooks the Pacific ocean, is made of four pyramid bodies truncated to superimpose one another. It takes the form of a staggered pyramid with a trapezoidal appearance. The main access is formed by a zigzag structure. Much of the original red and yellow paint, which is the pre-Inca structure, can still be viewed on the walls.

The Acllahuasi is classic Incan architecture, featuring the zigzag entrance surrounded by trapezoidal doorways, foundations of polished granite, and the living quarters of the Virgins (priestesses) of the Sun. Shortly after the Incan occupation of the site the conqueror Francisco Pizarro heard about Pachacamac while holding the Inca Atahualpa prisoner at Cajamarca (1532). He promptly sent an expedition to sack the center and seize a large amount of silver and gold.

We are the Apus; the Guardians. We watch over the plants, the animals, and the people. We have been here a very long time; longer than the people who have inhabited the valleys below us.

It is they, the people, who gave us our names; Salkantay, Ausengate, Husacaran, to name a few of us. The Spanish, late-commers to this place, called us the Andes; as if one name can describe all that we are and all that we do! They have been here for 500 years, but what is 500 years against we, who have always been here!

The people of the valleys, and those who live on us, still call us by our original names, our Runa Simi or Incan names. It is they who have always loved us, and asked for our protection and guidance.

We are the largest and oldest of all of the mountains of Peru, and the easiest to identify, because we are always covered with snow. Our friends and siblings, the clouds, great us with a warm caress; they envelop us and bless and blanket our peaks with layer upon layer of glistening white snow. This snow grows on us like the hair on the heads and faces of the old people; the ones who know and remember.

When Inti, Father Sun, warms the world in the springtime, nurturing the birth and growth of the living things, our long hair begins to recede. Snow and ice turn to water, trickling and then flowing down our faces and backs, into the streams, and into the rivers.

This is why the people love us; we are the caretakers of the water that they need, that all life needs.

But our world is changing now. Not as much snow is reaching us because our cloud relatives don’t have as much to offer as they used to, and too much is melting too fast. We are not responsible for this. We have heard that people in distant lands, people who do not worship or respect us, or even their own Apus, are the ones that are responsible.

We are told that they worship things called machines, things that we don’t understand, that are warming the air too much. Not just the air in these far off lands, but our air too. They have actually caused the fine barrier that protects our beloved Pacha mama, our Mother Earth, from the cold and sterile darkness beyond, to become thinner, and weak. As our blessed Inti shines his light and warmth onto his lover Pacha mama, his gift of heat is hurting her and this causes him much pain.

These new conditions make it difficult for us to take care of and watch over the life that was put into our care by Viracocha; the creator of all things. It saddens us, and makes us cry, but the more we cry, the more the snow melts.

If the snow stops coming to us, and we are left bare and barren, then we shall cease to be Apus. Our ancient role in the universal scheme as caretakers will be over, and the lives that depend upon us will be sad, wither, and then perish.

We call upon you for help.

Although you are very small in size compared to us, and think that you are insignificant, you are not!

A prayer is all that we ask of you. A prayer to bring back the snow to cover and clothe us. A prayer to the machine people to show us some respect, and in turn, to show themselves self-respect. For all things on this living Pacha Mama, this living earth, are connected to each other, like a giant spider’s web. What affects one part of the web affects all others; what the machine people do to us, they do to themselves.

We hope that they will learn this lesson, and soon if not now, so that we may continue doing what The Creator Of All Things placed us here to do.

Guard and protect all life.