1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Cieza de León once came upon three different highways running between the same two towns, each built by a different Inka.

In 1615, the Inka writer Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala presented his life’s work, a massive history of Inka society with four hundred drawings, to King Philip II of Spain, hoping that the king would use it to learn more about his new subjects. Whether Philip ever saw the manuscript is unknown, but Poma de Ayala’s work—one of the few non-European accounts of Inka life—is now a fundamental scholarly source.

The peoples of the wet equatorial forests did not belong to the Andean culture system and were not interested in joining. They fought ferociously. Caught by an ambush, Atawallpa was forced to retreat. Enraged by this failure, Cobo wrote, Wayna Qhapaq “prepared himself as quickly as possible to go in person and avenge this disgrace.” He left his pleasure palace and publicly berated Atawallpa at the front. In a renewed offensive, the army advanced under the Inka’s personal command. Bearing clubs, spears, bows, lances, slings, and copper axes, brilliant in cloaks of feathers and silver breastplates, their faces painted in terrifying designs, the Inka army plunged into the forests of the northern coast.

Wearing soft, loose clothing of vampire-bat wool, he swanned around his palaces with a bowl of palm wine or chicha, a sweet, muddy, beer-like drink usually made from crushed maize.

In 1525 Wayna Qhapaq suddenly got sick and expired in his Ecuadorian retreat. Once again the succession was contested and bloody. Details are murky, but on his deathbed the Inka seems to have passed over Atawallpa, who had not distinguished himself, and designated as his heir a son named Ninan K’uychi. Unluckily, Ninan K’uychi died of the same illness right before Wayna Qhapaq. Next in line was a nineteen-year-old son who had stayed behind in Qosqo. As was customary, high priests subjected this choice to a divination. They learned that this son would be dreadfully unlucky. The priest who reported this unhappy result to Wayna Qhapaq found him dead. In consequence, the court nobles were left to choose the emperor. They settled on the teenager who had been the Inka’s final choice.

Because Wayna Qhapaq had not actually married Washkar’s mother—the union was properly incestuous but not properly legitimate—the new Inka demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in a wedding ceremony with his father’s mummy. Even for the Andes this was an unusual step.

Civil war was probably unavoidable. Egged on by scheming courtiers and generals, relations between Atawallpa and Washkar spent several years swinging through the emotional valence from concealed suspicion to overt hostility. Washkar, in Qosqo, had the machinery of the state at his disposal; in addition, his claim to the fringe was generally accepted. Atawallpa, in Ecuador, had a wartested army and the best generals but a weaker claim to the throne (his mother was merely his father’s cousin, not his sister).

The war lasted for more than three years, seesawed across the Andes, and was spectacularly brutal. Washkar’s forces seized the initial advantage, invading Ecuador and actually capturing Atawallpa, almost tearing off one of his ears in the process. In a sequence reminiscent of Hollywood, one of Atawallpa’s wives supposedly smuggled a crowbar-like tool into his improvised battlefield prison (his intoxicated guards permitted a conjugal visit).

On a plateau near today’s Peru-Ecuador border the northern forces personally led by Atawallpa shattered Washkar’s army. A decade later Cieza de León saw the battleground and from the wreckage and unburied remains thought the dead could have numbered sixteen thousand. The victors captured and beheaded Washkar’s main general. Atawallpa mounted a bo...

With the momentum of war turning against him, Washkar left Qosqo to lead his own army. Atawallpa sent his forces ahead to meet it. After a horrific battle (Cieza de León estimated the dead at thirty-five thousand)...

Meanwhile, Atawallpa’s triumphant cavalcade, perhaps as many as eighty thousand strong, slowly promenaded to Qosqo. In October or November 1532, the victors stopped outside the small city of Cajamarca, where they learned that pale, hairy people who sat on enormous animals had landed on the coast.

Pizarro exulted less in victory than one might imagine. A self-made man, the illiterate, illegitimate, neglected son of an army captain, he ached with dreams of wealth and chivalric glory despite the fortune he had already acquired in the Spanish colonies. After landing in Peru he realized that his tiny force was walking into the maw of a powerful empire.

For his part, Atawallpa observed the power of Inka gold and silver to cloud European minds.* Precious metals were not valuable in the same way in Tawantinsuyu, because there was no currency. To the Inka ruler, the foreigners’ fascination with gold apparently represented his best chance to manipulate the situation to his advantage.

As gold and silver slowly filled the rooms, all of Tawantinsuyu seemed frozen. It was as if someone had slipped into the Kremlin in 1950 and held Stalin at gunpoint, leaving the nation, accustomed to obeying a tyrant, utterly rudderless. Meanwhile, the waiting Spanish, despite their unprecedented success, grew increasingly fearful and suspicious.

The conquistadors did not follow through on their part of the deal. Rather than releasing Atawallpa, they garroted him. Then they marched to Qosqo.

To be sure, their victory was nowhere near complete: huge, bloody battles still lay ahead. Even after the conquistadors seized Qosqo, the empire regrouped in the hinterlands, where it fought off Spanish forces for another forty years. Yet the scale of Pizarro’s triumph at Cajamarca cannot be gainsaid.

I have just pulled a fast one. The Inka history above is as contemporary scholars understand it. They disagree on which social factors to emphasize and on how much weight to assign individual Spanish chronicles, but the outline seems not in serious dispute. The same is not true of my rendering of Pizarro’s conquest.

in his reading he discovered a hole in this version of events—a factor so critical that it drastically changed Dobyns’s view of native America.

Why did the Inka lose? The usual answer is that Pizarro had two advantages: steel (swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses. The Indians had no steel weapons and no animals to ride (llamas are too small to carry grown men). They also lacked the wheel an...

Lechtman went and looked anyway. She discovered that Inka metallurgy was, in fact, as refined as European metallurgy, but that it had such different goals that academic experts had not even recognized it.

Europeans sought to optimize metals’ “hardness, strength, toughness, and sharpness.” The Inka, by contrast, valued “plasticity, malleability, and toughness.” Europeans used metal for tools. Andean societies primarily used it as a token of wealth, power, and community affiliation.

Andean societies vastly preferred to hammer metal into thin sheets, form the sheets around molds, and solder the results.

one delicate bust that Lechtman analyzed was less than an inch tall but made of twenty-two separate gold plates painstakingly joined.

Because pure gold and silver are too soft to hold their shape, Andean metalworkers mixed them with other metals, usually copper. This strengthened the metal but turned it an ugly pinkish-copper color. To create a lustrous gold surface, Inka smiths heated the copper-gold alloy, which increases the rate at which the copper atoms on the surface combine with oxygen atoms in the air—it makes the metal corrode faster. Then they pounded the hot metal with mallets, making the corrosion flake off the outside. By repeating this process many times, they removed the copper atoms from the surface of the metal, creating a veneer of almost pure gold.

Andean cultures did make tools, of course. But rather than making them out of steel, they preferred fiber.

Mechanical engineering depends on two main forces: compression and tension. Both are employed in European technology, but the former is more common—the arch is a classic example of compression. By contrast, tension was the Inka way. “Textiles are held together by tension,” William Conklin, a research associate at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., told me. “And they exploited that tension with amazing inventiveness and precision.”

Lechtman explained, “people solved basic engineering problems through the manipulation of fibers,” not by creating and joining hard wooden or metal objects. To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reeds rather than cutting up trees into planks and nailing them together. Although smaller than big European ships, these vessels were not puddle-muddlers; Europeans first encountered Tawantinsuyu in the form of an I...

Famously, the Inka used foot-thick cables to make suspension bridges across mountain gorges. Because Europe had no bridges without supports below, they initially terrified Pizarro’s men. Later one conquistador reassured his countrymen that they could ...

Andean textiles were woven with great precision—elite garments could have a thread count of five hundred per inch—and structured in elaborate layers. Soldiers wore armor made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was almost as effective at shielding the body as European armor and much lighter. After trying it, the conquistadors ditched their ...

(Experimenting with a five-foot-long, Andean-style sling and an egg-sized rock from my garden, I was able, according to my rough calculation, to throw the stone at more than one hundred miles per hour. My aim was terrible, though.)

In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in campfires until they were red hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in midair. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles.

More critical than steel to Pizarro’s success was the horse. The biggest animal in the Andes during Inka times was the llama, which typically weighs three hundred pounds. Horses, four times as massive, were profoundly, terribly novel. Add to this the shock of observing humans somehow astride their backs like half-bestial nightmare figures and it is possible to imagine the dismay provoked by Pizarro’s cavalry.

their leaders had to reinvent their military tactics while in the midst of an invasion. Mounted troops were able to move at rates never encountered in Tawantinsuyu.

In clash after clash, “the dreaded horses proved invincible.” But horses are not inherently unbeatable; the Inka simply did not discover quickly enough where they had an advantage: on their roads.

European-style roads, constructed with horses and cars in mind, view flatness as a virtue; to go up a steep hill, they use switchbacks to make the route as horizontal as possible. Inka roads, by contrast, were built for llamas. Llamas prefer the coolness of high altitudes and, unlike horses, readily go up and down steps.

Inka roads eschewed valley bottoms and used long stone stairways to climb up steep hills directly—brutal on horses’ hooves, as the conquistadors often complained.

Instead the conquistadors had to dismount and lead their reluctant animals through the steps. At that point they were vulnerable. Late in the day, Inka soldiers learned to wait above and roll boulders on their foes, killing some of the animals and frightening others into running away.

even on the plains the Inka could have won. Foot soldiers have often drubbed mounted troops. At the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the outnumbered, outarmored Athenian infantry destroyed the cavalry of the Persian emperor Darius I. More than six thousand Persians died; the Greeks lost fewer than two hundred men. So dire had the situation initially appeared that before the fight Athens sent a messenger to Sparta, its hated rival, to beg for aid. In the original marathon, the courier ran more than a hundred miles in two days to deliver his message. But by the time the Spartan reinforcements arrived, there was nothing to see but dead Persians.

The Inka losses were not foreordained.

by the time of the siege of Qosqo the Inka had developed an effective anti-cavalry tactic: bolas. The Inka bola consisted of three stones tied to lengths of llama tendon. Soldiers threw them, stones a-whirl, at charging horses. The weapons wrapped themselves around the animals’ legs and brought them down to be killed by volleys of sling missiles.

Had the bolas come in massed, coordinated onslaughts instead of being wielded by individual soldiers as they thought opportune, Pizarro might well have met his match.

some of the blame should be heaped on the overly centralized Inka command structure, a problem that has plagued armies throughout time.

Dobyns learned something from Cieza de León that was not mentioned in Prescott’s history, in the Smithsonian’s official Handbook of South American Indians, or in any of the then-standard descriptions of Tawantinsuyu. According to Cieza de León, Wayna Qhapaq, Atawallpa’s father, died when “a great plague of smallpox broke out [in 1524 or 1525], so severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts of the kingdom.”

Smallpox not only killed Wayna Qhapaq, it killed his son and designated heir—and his brother, uncle, and sister-wife. The main generals and much of the officer corps died, wrote the Inka chronicler Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, “all their faces covered with scabs.” So did the two regents left in Qosqo by Wayna Qhapaq to administer the empire.

Smallpox has an incubation period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads and great population movements, Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned for a major epidemic.

Millions of people simultaneously experienced its symptoms: high fever, vomiting, severe pain, oozing blisters everywhere on the body. Unable to number the losses, the Jesuit Martín de Murúa said only that the toll was “infinite thousands.”

In Europe, Asia, and Africa smallpox became a constant, terrible presence, infecting almost every child, killing many and leaving others with the disfiguring pockmarks that are its telltale sign. Survivors become immune to the disease. Because most Europeans contracted the disease in childhood, the great majority of European adults, the conquistadors among them, were immune.

But a study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccinated smallpox cases in southern India found that the disease killed 43 percent of its victims.

In about three years, that is, as many as one out of two people in Tawantinsuyu died. The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.”

A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states.