"The Story of Peru’s Cloud Warriors" Topic

"Recent archaeological discoveries have shed new light on the history of Peru's Chachapoya people. Until the 1990s most of what we knew about this pre-Columbian culture – referred to as the ‘Warriors of the Clouds' by the Inca – was based on third-hand stories from unreliable Spanish chroniclers. Even today, the Chachapoya jigsaw has more gaps than pieces. Yet interest and knowledge in the erstwhile civilisation is growing. In 2017, the hilltop Chachapoya ruins of Kuélap were equipped with a cable car and marketed by the Peruvian government as a northern rival to Machu Picchu. Two years later Unesco placed the ‘Chachapoyas sites of the Utcubamba Valley' on its tentative list of World Heritage Sites being considered for nomination.

Predating the Inca by over six centuries, Chachapoya culture flourished from around AD 800 in Peru's remote northern highlands, an area of crinkled mountains, deep canyons and lofty waterfalls where the eastern slopes of the Andes dissolve into the humid Amazon basin. Here a loosely unified society of cacicazgos (small kingdoms) gradually took root, farming terraced fields and acting as trading intermediaries between the Andes and the Amazon. The population, which may have numbered 500,000 at its peak, produced powerful shaman and engendered a tough fighting ethos. It evolved with little outside trauma until the invasion of the Inca in the 1470s…"

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Amicalement
Armand

Just think what we might learn had these civilizations left a written record.

Good stuff, Armand. Thanks

Just what we need, another army!

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand