Lessons from Time Travel

Travel through Peru is a dizzying experience. It's time travel!

There are, in the highlands and mountains, the remains of human settlements that date from 8,000 BC—think about that! In the Toquepala Caves, there are seven-color paintings done by hunter-gatherers dating back to that time, sequences of the trapping and harvesting of guanacos by use of axe, lance and spear-throwers.

Peru’s Sacred Valley was settled around 800 BC. It’s a remarkable ecosystem: there are corners where crops can be grown year around, although the altitude ranges from just below 7,000 feet to almost 10,000 feet above sea level. Water is abundant from both natural watercourses and the channels and fountains devised by pre-Columbian peoples.  While most people think of the Inca as Peru’s original civilization, the Inca were actually late-comers, emerging around Cuzco during the 14th C.

Before the rise of the Inca, Cuzco seems to have been a center for the rise and fall of several cultural groups, including the Chanapata early on, and the Wari, an aggressive people that preceded the Inca. The Wari collapsed around 1100 AD, after initial success at conquest of neighboring peoples. Legend brings the Inca on to the scene. Myth attributes the founding of Cuzco to them.

The Inca were a talented society; they adopted and adapted useful elements of previous cultures, and wove together surrounding peoples into a single entity. They did this not so much through armed conquest as with diplomacy: persuasion, negotiation, alliances through marriage. Part of their strategy was the offer of stability and protection to replace costly tensions and conflict. The Inca were apparently masters of administration, for their territory ended up reaching from today’s Columbia southward deep into present-day Chile.

The pre-Inca and Inca ruins in the Sacred Valley are marvels of architecture and engineering. What’s particularly impressive to me is both the longevity, the permanence of the constructions, and the not-entirely-unrelated design that worked with terrain, geology and ecology rather than trying to dominate the indomitable.

The famed ruins of Machu Picchu are a case in point. Even when discovered in 1911, some 500 years after its abandonment, the “ruins” were largely intact. Oh, the roofs, originally thatch, were gone, timbers fallen, and vegetation had managed to weaken some parts. But by and large, the buildings stood entire, the fitting of the stones so securely done—without mortar!—that the stones remained unmoved. In a land of earthquakes! Channels for water still directed the water through the citadel; terraces for support continued to shed water and provide stability.

As they do today, though the impact of thousands upon thousands of tourist feet has begun to affect the passageways and walls. Some shifts appear in the previously unmoved stones, here and there, prompting the authorities to consider limitations on access.

There’s much we could learn from the model we are told that the Inca left us. Their reliance on non-forceful means to unify disparate peoples and thereby expand trade and cultural exchange offers food for thought. War is directly destructive of human life; it also disrupts trade and wastes resources, including labor. If accommodation can be reached with one’s adversaries, then cooperation can ensue, enhancing everyone’s security. The question posed today was probably an issue even then: what is a people ready to give up for increased security, and what must be retained? Religion is often a sticking point, particularly if there are significant numbers of fundamentalists (“my way is the only TRUTH”); certain cultural values may cause stresses if infringed. But it’s worth looking for points where peoples can find common ground and starting from there, rather than trying to force an adversary into a mold it’s unprepared to fit into.

Likewise, and perhaps even more importantly, it appears that the Inca, and their predecessors, didn’t try to dominate their landscape. Instead, they learned how to work with it. Looking at waterworks today that were built thousands of years ago and still function, one is struck with the fact that maintenance is minimized if you don’t try to force a system into a place where it doesn’t naturally fit. The terraces and drainage channels in the pre-Columbian ruins of Peru remain whole; erosion hasn’t carried it all away. Even in the high country around Lake Titicaca (elevations average above 12000 ft.) where frost is frequent, the indigenous peoples figured out how to use a kind of raised bed and channel growing system that acted to modify temperatures enough to allow abundant crop production. (There’s a great description of this in an article by researcher Clark L. Ericson at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cerickso/articles/Exped.pdf).

The indigenous peoples of the United States are actively exploring their cultural roots and the ancient knowledge that informs their cultures. Tension continues between forced domination, which is philosophically a foundation of Western European culture (See Genesis: 1-26, where god charges  mankind with to dominate all animal life and subdue plant life), and seeking commonality. To date, the urge to domination has resulted in the primacy of Western culture. There is now, however, a profound question about whether we, as a species, can survive if we continue using the old models.

Maybe it’s time to start listening to the voices of indigenous peoples who have adapted to their environments. Domination isn’t working out so well…

Wind/ice cause collapse of communication tower at Sugarloaf, Maine, 24 Feb. 2019
Photo by TDS Communications
taken from News Center ME site (NBC)