Tag Archives: Culture

Oy, Oy, Ollantaytambo – a day in the Sacred Valley

13th April 2018

[Long Read Warning – this was a content-rich day. Get a coffee, or a drink, is my advice]

The valley that runs from Pisac to Ollantaytambo was called the Sacred Valley by the Incas, as it ran along side of the Urubamba river, also known as Willkamayu in the local Quecha language, meaning “sacred river”. It became an important part of the Inca empire, and having the advantages of lower altitude and water, was a good area for farming, principally maize and potatoes.

Our day in the Sacred Valley was spent travelling through the valley from Pisac to Ollantaytambo. The weather at first was very dull – raining quite hard at times – but it cheered up as the day progressed.

Pisac is well-known for its market, which takes over a latge part of the town. These days, it plays mainly to tourists, and, like many such, it’s a colourful place.

Many of the stallholders dress traditionally,

and there are one or two locals also dressed traditionally, in the hope of getting a tourist Sol or two as a photo opportunity.

Some of the fabric designs are wonderful.

Traditional dress figures strongly among the locals (particularly, it must be said, the older ones)

but modern life exists alongside tradition.

Above – this lady is carrying milk, direct from the cow, to sell it at a stall

Shortly after I took the picture above, one of the ladies handed her lamb to the other, and pottered off on some mission or other.

The town itself is pleasant, quite pretty in places, but the usual South American mix of colour, charm and scruffiness.

On the outskirts is a tiny church (not the only one, but the cutest)

and many of the buildings sport a pair of animal statues on their roofs, by way of a blessing.

The town is well-paved, with aqueducts running along many of the streets

beside which you see mosaic versions of many Inca animals, with the condor (the animal the Incas held in very high regard) featuring often, in different representations.

and other traditional Inca animals such as the snake (bottom of the snake-puma-condor hierarchy).

Occasionally, you can see, outside a shop, a small basket hangingn on a pole. This means that the establishment is a public bakery. People can bring things – including cuy, or guinea pig – to be baked.

If the pole sports a red thing at the end,

it means that the place serves chicha, a local alcoholic drink. There are plenty of these establishments.

The town’s Inca roots can be seen in some still-extant terracing, originally used for farming, but here used to support a cemetery. Note the protrusions in the middle of the terrace wall; these form an Inca-style staircase

which is still in use today!

Our journey from Pisac to Ollantaytambo involved some notable items of interest. For example, a town called Lamay seems to specialise in eateries which will serve you the local delicacy – guinea pig, or cuy. The marketing is not subtle

in the way that it tells you that you get guinea pig on a stick.

Jane tells me that it smelt delicious.

Cuy is very clearly a delicacy and one to market heavily.

We stopped for lunch (not guinea pig!) at a splendid place called “Sol y Luna“, which, being Relais et Chateau, was, obvs, dead posh. We had a lovely lunch and were, unexpectedly, entertained with a display of traditional Peruvian horsemanship

and dancing.

After lunch we went to Ollantaytambo, which was a delight, but only after bumping up a considerably cobbled road through narrow streets. The town itself is, yes, typically South American – charming in places, scruffy in others and quite colourful.

but what it’s best-known for is a very substantial Inca fortress.

which you can climb up if you have the stomach (or, rather, the lungs) for 300 steps up at altitude. If so, you get to see some fabulous Inca stonework

with beautifully interlocking (and very substantial) stones which provide a base stable enough to resist earthquake)

containing niches for idols, fashioned in the traditional Inca trapezoidal shape)

and differentiatng between the temple part (on the left, with top notch stonework) and the farming part (on the right, still good stonework, but not of the top quality reserved only for noble houses and temples).

At the top is the throne, reserved for the ruler to view his fiefdom,

and this is his view. Note that the alignment of this is such that at spring equinox, the sun rises exactly over the top of the mountain in the centre of the picture.

There was a huge amount to learn from the Ollantaytambo site – how the accoustics of the design allowed for eavesdropping on conversations at a lower level; how it was never completed; how much of it was buried so that when the Spaniards came and took over (after a battle which they lost, incidentally) they didn’t find (and hence destroy) what was there – it’s around 80% complete and only the perishable stuff (like roofing, traditionally made using bamboo to support thatching) has disappeared. Some restoration work has been done, but fundamentally the site has survived over the centuries due to the remarkable stoneworking abilities of the Incas.

This was the first significant exposure to Inca work that we had seen on our travels, and it was a very impressive site and sight. There is much to learn about the Incas, and Camila, our guide, gave us some wonderful historical and cultural insights. I’ve tried to get across some of them, but, fundamentally, what takes your breath away is the size and scale of the place – an excellent end to a long and varied day.

Easter Island 3: The rest of the moai, a volcanic crater and Birdman

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28th March 2018

There are various different estimates of the number of moai on Easter Island, but “upwards of 900” seems to cover it. Some are near platforms and therefore count as official moai, some are in the quarry, some are just any old where and therefore can be presumed to have fallen and broken on their journey from quarry to platform. Ah, well, back to the drawing board. It only takes a year to make another. (And size doesn’t, as far as anyone knows, make much of a difference. The moai appear to have grown over the course of the culture, with later moai being bigger than earlier ones. But bigger ones don’t necessarily take longer, as you can have more men working on a larger statue.)

So, let’s wrap up the moai part of the Easter Island segment of our odyssey with some photos of many of those that have been restored. Firstly, and strikingly, one has been restored with replica eyes being put in place.

This can be found at Ahu Tahai, and the eyes certainly add character to the appearance, although whether that’s an improvement is a moot point.

Another important platform can be found at Ahu Akivi.

The significance of this platform is that it was the first to be restored, through the energy, insight and enthusiasm of Thor Heyerdahl working with American archaeologist William Mulloy. Sort of Thor ~~Ragnarok~~ Restoration.

Jane’s joke, not mine. She has a thing for Chris Hemsworth. Can’t imagine why.

Heyerdahl is most famously associated with his 1947 Kon Tiki raft experiment in which he sailed 5,000 miles from South America to the Tuamoto Islands to demonstrate the viability of long sea journeys as a way of cultural migration. (Anyone of my approximate vintage will remember that The Shadows had a hit with a record called Kon-Tiki, which just goes to show that pop music can have an educational role.)

Heyerdahl first discovered and photographed the moai in 1955, and he recruited Mulloy to drive the restoration work at Ahu Akivi, which started in 1960, and so has significance as the first platform to be restored.

Mulloy ran several archaeological projects on Easter Island and had great influence in the way it appears today, for which he is justly respected by today’s islanders. He is buried at the Ahu Tahai site.

There are several unusual features of the Ahu Akivi platform:

It is inland and facing the coast, whereas other platforms are on the coast facing inland
It is aligned so that the moai exactly face the rising sun during the spring equinox; no other platform is so precisely aligned
All seven moai are of the same size

There is, of course, a legend about Ahu Akivi, concerning the original Rapa Nui King Hotu Matu’s priest having a dream about an island, the king sending out scouts who discovered the island, with seven remaining to await the king’s arrival as he moved his entire people to Rapa Nui. There are several reasons why the experts dismiss this legend, but, hey, it’s a great story.

And that about wraps it up for the moai part of the Easter Island story. But there’s more, and that is to be found at a site called Orongo, in the south west of the island.

The first thing you encounter as you approach the Orongo site is a spectacular view across the Rano Kau volcanic crater, which is a mile wide.

The lake is actually a wetland, bordered in some places by a rainforest. Fruit trees grow inside the crater, and the lake, although essentially stagnant, has had special fish put in it which do not need much oxygen to survive but which eat the mosquito eggs and so keep the island’s mosquito population down.

Turning your back on Rano Kau, you go through the Orongo reception (some interesting photos in it, by the way) and into the site of the Birdman ceremonial village.

The Birdman culture replaced the moai culture on the island, being in existence between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. It was based around a race to the furthest of three small islets off the south-western tip of the island.

;

The basic idea is that each of 18 tribes on the island submitted a champion, whose job was to climb down the cliff, swim across to the furthest islet (called Moto Nui), await the arrival of the migrating sooty tern seabirds, procure an egg from a nest and transport it back to the ceremonial village. Intact. The winner was the first to arrive with an intact egg (often transported, we understand, attached by cloth to the competitor’s forehead). His reward was to liaise with three virgins who had been specially kept aside for him; the reward for the chief of his tribe was to become the Birdman for the year, a position of some status.

The village itself consists of several stone houses which were, essentially, used only for the period of the Birdman competition.

Of these, around a couple of dozen – about half of the total number – have been restored. Embarrassingly, some of the originals were damaged by the British, who hacked them about in order to get at some murals inside them. To compound this, the Brits then stole a unique moai, made of basalt and carved with Birdman petroglyphs and this (“the stolen friend”) stands in the British Museum. Just down the corridor, one assumes, from the Elgin marbles.

So, why did the moai culture die out? And why was it replaced by the Birdman cult? (“no-one knows”, but perhaps the deforestation of the palms left the islanders unable to leave, and the migration of the sooty tern gave them the illusion of being able to come and go at will?) Whatever, it’s another of Easter Island’s unusual sites and sights, and part of a wonderful, compelling and mysterious story which it was a pleasure to spend two days discovering.

Easter Island 2 – The making of the moai

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28th March 2018

The lunatic idea behind Stonehenge (“Hey, let’s make a monument of 25-ton stones! And just to make it fun, let’s transport them from 150 miles away!”) seems to have found some resonance in Easter Island. All of the moai, wherever they ended up on the island, were made in a single place, Rano Raraku, and then, somehow or other, transported to their final platform. How? “No-one knows.” But there’s an engaging theory, for which read on.

Rano Raraku is effectively a quarry, fairly high up among the island’s hills.

As you walk through it, the first impression you get is that of heads sticking up out of the ground, and the first descriptions of the moai, such as the one which excited Jane’s curiosity when she was a child, were “the heads of Easter Island”.

It took a while for archaeologists to realise that these were actually just the tops of full statues that were buried. And then it became clear that the moai were actually fashioned in place. The shape was hacked out of the rocky ground (“the ground” is formed by compressed volcanic ash named tuff, sometimes erroneously called tufa). The moai shape was started lying on its back on the slope, and then, as parts of it were completed, the ground was hacked out from beneath it and it was gradually raised upright so that the completed moai was standing in its own depression. What has happened in the picture above is simply that the depressions have been filled in over the centuries.

Evidence for this can be seen higher up, where a moai is just being started.

Look carefully just to the left of centre of the picture, into the cavity hacked out of the stone, and you should be able to make out the chin and nose of a moai that’s lying on its back.

There’s a mystery moai at the quarry called “Tukuturi”, unique in that it’s in a kneeling position

and unusual in the shape of its face, which is less stylised than the ones typified in the Tongariki 15 that you can see in the background.

One legend is that it represents a master moai craftsman, and it’s erected to keep watch over the work being done in the quarry. As usual, “no-one knows”.

So, that’s the story of the statues. But what about the other key part of some moai, the “Pukao” – topknots?

These are made from a different, red-cloured stone, called scoria, which is much less dense than tuff. This rock was mined in a different place on the island, called Puna Pau.

You can tell that the material is easier to work than tuff from this stone.

This is not some mysterious symbolic shaping; it’s the work of a shepherd, who hacked out a cavity to shelter from wind and rain!

So, it’s known where the pukao were made – here’s a pit where some were in progress when work stopped:

What is less clear is (a) how did the islanders get the pukao out of depressions such as this?, (b) how were they transported to the platforms? and (c) how were they placed on top of the moai? As usual, “no-one knows”.

What is known is that completed pukao featured a depression which matched the top of the head upon which it was to sit. We know this from another location on the island, Vinapu.

This is an inverted topknot, revealing the depression. You can see that it will not have sat foursquare on a head – in fact the topknots sit slightly forward on the heads.

Vinapu, by the way, is the site which demonstrates most clearly the amazing stoneworking skills of the Easter Islanders. There are two platforms, both of which show astounding precision in the way that stone was carved in order to align exactly.

You literally can’t get a sheet of paper between the stones, so precisely are they carved. This is workmanship akin to that found on the Inca Wall at Cusco which we (apparently) will see later on in the trip – keep an eye out for the blog post on that – but experts cast strong doubt that there was any explicit cross-fertilisation from Inca culture. There is also a legend that the Islanders found a way to make stone soft, so that it could be manipulated just like cheese. But, as usual, “no-one knows”.

The final part of the puzzle is – how the hell do you move a stone statue that weighs several tons? We know that they were made in one place and then moved to their final destination, and, as usual, there are several theories about how it might be done, but “no-one knows”. Our guide Malena told us of the words of one old woman who asserted that the moai “walked – two steps a night”. This sounds preposterous, but there’s actually a video of this being done with teams of men on either side making a replica (10 ton) moai sway from side to side, while a team from behind stopped it falling forward. In this way, the moai “walks”:

And another thing: assuming that this works (and recent ground scanning techniques have uncovered trails radiating from Rano Raraku that look like they may be tracks along which the moai may have been moved), how did they get the damn’ things up on to their platforms, sited accurately on their stone plinths?

That’s right: “no-one knows”.

For the continuation of this story, and what happened to the moai culture, read the next post – click here.

Steve Walker

Photography/Videography Hobbyist; Travel Enthusiast

Tag Archives: Culture

Oy, Oy, Ollantaytambo – a day in the Sacred Valley

Easter Island 3: The rest of the moai, a volcanic crater and Birdman

Easter Island 2 – The making of the moai