#chachapoya

The body-shaped sarcophagi of Karajía contained the remains of high-ranking Chachapoya ancestors. ( Chiara Barbieri)

Two conquering empires and more than 500 years of colonial rule failed to erase the cultural and genetic traces of indigenous Peruvians, a new study finds. This runs contrary to historical accounts that depict a complete devastation of northern Peru’s ancient Chachapoya people by the Inca Empire.

The Chachapoyas—sometimes referred to as “Warriors of the Clouds” because they made their home in the Amazonian cloud forests—are mainly known today for what they built: fortified hilltop fortresses and intricate sarcophagi overlooking their villages from sheer, inaccessible cliff sides. The little we know about their existence before the arrival of the Spanish comes to us via an oral history passed along by the Inca to their Spanish conquerors—in other words, the winners’ version of history.

Now, a study tracking the genetic and linguistic history of modern Peruvians is revealing that the Chachapoyas may have fared better than these mainstream historical accounts would have us believe. As Chiara Barbieri, a post-doctoral researcher from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, puts it: “Some of these historical documents were exaggerated and a little bit biased in favor of the Inca.”

Many of these early reports stem from two historians who essentially wrote the book on the Inca Empire during the time period from 1438 to 1533: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a conquistador and Incan princess who published chronicles on the Inca Empire in the early 17th century, and Pedro de Cieza de Leon, a Spanish conquistador from a family of Jewish converts who travelled through the area in the mid-16th century, and wrote one of the first lengthy histories of the Inca people and Spanish conquests.

The fortress of Kuelap, popularly known as 'the Machu Picchu of the north,' dominates the landscape at an elevation of 3,000 meters. Credit: Chiara Barbieri

The Chachapoyas region was conquered by the Inca Empire in the late 15th century. Knowledge of the fate of the local population has been based largely on Inca oral histories, written down only decades later after the Spanish conquest. The Inca accounts claim that the native population was forcibly resettled out of Chachapoyas and dispersed across the Inca Empire. However, a new study in Scientific Reports, by an international team including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, uses genetic evidence to reveal that despite Inca conquest, the population of Chachapoyas has remained genetically distinct, and not assimilated with that of the Inca heartland.

Despite their spectacular achievements, from the first cities of the Americas to the Inca Empire, the indigenous peoples of the Andes left no written histories. One legacy that can now be read, however, is the genetic diversity of their descendants today, especially when taken together with the rich archaeology of the Andes and the prehistory of its native languages. This is the approach taken in a new study in Scientific Reports to test the demographic legacy of the Incas.

The study emerges out of a collaboration between research institutes in Peru and in Germany, including the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. The focus is on a key region in the cloud-forest transition between the Andes and Amazonia in northern Peru. Here the Incas encountered fierce resistance from the "Warriors of the Clouds," the Chachapoyas culture, noted particularly for its distinctive body-shaped sarcophagi and the monumental fortress of Kuelap, the "Machu Picchu of the north." Particularly to punish and to secure control over such rebellious lands, the Incas are thought to have resettled millions of people across the "Four Quarters" of their empire, Tawantinsuyu. Chachapoyas was reportedly singled out for such treatment, making it an ideal case for using genetics to test the accuracy of Inca oral histories, which were not written down until almost a century later, by the Spanish conquistadors.

Answer by /u/400-rabbits,

The only people who seriously subscribe to the idea of Chachapoyas as blonde and blue-eyed are racists and conspiracy theorists (with no small overlap between the two). It is not a serious idea and is not to be taken seriously. The very quote you cite from Cienza de Leon does not even describe them this way, instead noting them to simple be paler than other native groups he had encountered. He also affirms them to be indigenous, as the original text from his La crónica del Perú calls them "indios naturales," a term early/colonial Spaniards explicitly used for Native Americans:

Son estos indios naturales de Chachapoyas los más blancos y agraciados de todos cuantos yo he visto en las Indias que he andado...

Note that calling them "más blancos" (more white) does not imply that they were "white" with the connotations it has today (i.e., ethnically European), but simply acts as a descriptor of skin tone. Note also that Cienza de Leon also not calling them European, but merely that they are of a lighter skin tone then the other indigenous groups he has encountered. There is nothing here to suggest they were of European ancestry and certainly nothing about blonde hair and blue-eyes. The use of blanco/negro for skin tone, without implications about ancestry, is not uncommon in early Spanish texts, and should not be used in the same way "white" or "black" are used today. The terms can just as easily by translated as "fair/pale" or "dark/swarthy," without the burden of terms currently used to ascribe race. (Weirdly, I just had to tackle this regarding Afrocentric theories in another question.)

I also see nothing about the Chachapoyas' height in La crónica del Perú. One radiological study (Friedrich 2010) of Chachapoya area mummies estimated stature in what they determined to be adults to range from 123cm to 160cm, which is... not tall. Admittedly, estimating stature from CT scans of long bones is not ideal, but clearly these people were no giants. There were, in fact, in line with stature estimates from the region. Ubelaker and Newsom (2002) in The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere measured skeletal remains from various periods in nearby Ecuador, finding a range between 148-170cm.

Well what about mummies in the region with "red" hair? Surely such a hair color could only occur if some fair-haired Northern European had spread their genes around, right? No.

Lightening/Reddening of hair in preserved remains is a well-known post-mortem change. As my Tibbet and Carter (2008) Soil Analysis in Forensic Taphonomy note:

All hair color contains a mixture of both black-brown eumelanin and red-yellow phaeomelanin pigments, which are suspectible to differential chemical change under certain conditions. Importantly, phaeomelanin is much more stable to enviromnetal conditions than eumelanin; hence, the reactions occurring in the burial environment favor the preservation of phaeomelanin, revealing and enhancing the red-yellow color of hairs containing this pigment. (p. 129)

What about other biological evidence? Surely some evidence of errant Vikings would show up in the bones and genes, right? No.

Nystrom (2006), examining craniofacial landmarks, found that while sites associated with the Chachapoyas culture showed differences from each other, this was was best explained by the geographical distance, admixture with surrounding groups, and a general erasure of internal ethnic division among the Chachapoyas by both the Inca and later Spanish. In other words, the people of Kuelap may have seen themselves as distinct from those people up the Utcubamba river at Hueyabamba or Condores, but to outside invaders they were all Chachapoyas. On the genetic side of things, Sandoval et al. (2016) looked at other extant groups in the region, and found them to be a complex and diverse group of peoples "suggesting a high interpopulation migration between the Andes and Amazonia." Likewise, Guevara et al. (2016) using samples from extant communities in the area found historical evidence for a Chachapoyas population that was connected to, but still distinct from their neighbors, which is explained by the general population diversity of the region, it being an area where both Andean and Amazonian groups mingled, and influence from the Inca system of resettling conquered peoples. They concluded:

The genetic profile of the Chachapoya indicates that populations that developed in “intermediate ecological regions” have a complex genetic composition which has been influenced by their position with regard to other civilizations in the northeast Andes.

None of these investigations came back and said, "well, turns out they're Vikings." So were does that idea come from?

Well, the idea of the Chachapoyas being non-indigenous got a boost recently with PBS's Secrets of the Dead devoting an episode to the hypothesis of a German academic (with no expertise in archaeology, let alone Andean specific training), Hans Griffhorn. He proposes that, following the 3rd Punic War, the Carthaginians were not all enslaved by the Romans, but that many of them joined Iberian Celts to flee to secret Brazilian colonies. From there they apparently decided to travel from the Brazilian coast through the Amazon to settle in the Andes, for some reason.

The documentary is terrible and uses the same toolkit that Pre-Columbian conspiracy theorists always rely upon: taking the most extreme interpretation of ambiguous ancient texts; drawing specious connections between convergent similarities in the art and architecture of American groups and the chosen Afro-Eurasian group; an insistence that the American group in question was somehow unique, distinct, or "advanced" as compared to their neighbors; a blithe disregard for the mountains of archaeological, anthropological, and historical evidence; and an underlying assumption that the peoples of the Americas somehow required an outside force to push them towards civilization. The only thing missing is some dubious linguistic analysis, but that is probably only because the Chachapoyas language is extinct. Jason Colavito has a review on his site worth reading.

Ancient Celts and Carthaginians are not Vikings though, and the idea of Andean Norsemen goes back all the way to... the mid-late 20th Century. That's when Jacques de Mahieu, a french Nazi collaborator and general proponent of Nazi racial theories, began publishing books arguing that Vikings had extensively colonized and conquered huge swathes of the Americas. Nigel Davies in his 1979 book on pre-Columbian hypotheses, Voyagers to the New World, summarizes de Mahieu's idea and their reception:

seven Viking boats, each with eighty people on board, reach Mexico in A.D. 967. Twenty-two years later these adventurers undertook a new migration and eventually reach Paraguay, after passing through Venezuela and Chile. In Paraguay, the Norsemen became the progenitors of a tribe whose sturdy womenfolk created the legend of the Amazons, and their last descendants still survive as the Guayaqui Indians. Mahieu admits that these Guayaquis are a sadly decadent breed of Vikings, since they measure only four feet, eleven inches in stature and some are cannibals. Such theories are treated as pure science fiction by leading Argentinean anthropologists, and though he has written no less than fifteen books on the subject, Mahieu has hardly proved his point.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, author of the 2003 Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, has further summary of the ideas contained in those 15 books published by Mahieu, which posit a pan-American Viking empire. Apparently the original flotilla of Vikings conquered the Toltecs, then moved on to Venezuela and Colombia. One specific Viking leader split off to colonize Peru and found an Incan Empire whose elites were Norse. Goodrick-Clark notes Mahieu's books were published by Wildred van Oven, Goebbel's deputy who fled to Argentina and remained a committed Nazi until his death, and that Mahieu's ideas influenced Miguel Serrano, a Chilean neo-Nazi who believed a race of Aryan-Hyperboreans originally colonized the Americas and that Columbus' voyage was a ploy by the Jews to cover this up.