![]() ![]() With no written language, much of what is known about the Chachapoya is derived from archaeological remains found at funerary sites on hard to access limestone cliffs in Peru’s cloud forests. It evolved with little outside trauma until the invasion of the Inca in the 1470s. The population, which may have numbered 500,000 at its peak, produced powerful shaman and engendered a tough fighting ethos. 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. 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. Two years later Unesco placed the ‘Chachapoyas sites of the Utcubamba Valley’ on its tentative list of World Heritage Sites being considered for nomination. 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. Yet interest and knowledge in the erstwhile civilisation is growing. ![]() Even today, the Chachapoya jigsaw has more gaps than pieces. 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. ![]() Recent archaeological discoveries have shed new light on the history of Peru’s Chachapoya people. ![]()
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