Lost Kingdoms of South America (2013) Ep1 People of the Clouds

archeologists crave unexplored territory nothing thrills more than new discoveries of ancient civilizations for over a century now Peru has given us treasure after treasure it's a vast country of extremes from tropical rainforests to the dry deserts of the Atacama in one of the most remote northern regions lies the most mysterious kingdom in Peru I'm Jago Cooper and as an archaeologist who specializes in South America I've always been fascinated by the secrets and mysteries buried deep in these or inspiring and forbidding landscapes the history of this constant has been dominated by the stories of the Inca and the Spanish conquistadors but in this series I'll be exploring an over forgotten past traveling from the coast to the clouds in search of ancient civilizations as significant and impressive as anywhere else on earth in remote northern Peru one such civilization thrived for over 500 years they were called the Chachapoyas which translates as the people of the clouds and who they were is one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of the Americas in the year 980 on Andean Mountain Tom's lived the Chachapoya people and the remnants of Chachapoya culture are amongst the most stunning and least understood in South America the Chachapoya quite frankly are still a mystery to us all we have to go on a tantalising fragments treasures and artifacts from faraway tropical rainforests tombs placed high on unscalable cliffs mummies hidden in caves and one of the most impressive archaeological sites in South America how did such a complex and advanced culture bloom in this remote part of Peru over a thousand years ago before venturing into the mountains my investigation into these enigmatic people begins here in the Peruvian capital Lima none of the indigenous South American cultures left us written records so the earliest written accounts are the chronicles of the Spanish conquistadors in 1638 a century after the Spanish arrived father Pedro kalanchoe one of the first chroniclers ventured judge poyo territory and he wrote of the Chachapoya people that they were bellicose and indomitable herbalists and sorcerers and to the amazement of the Europeans he also wrote that they only obey the chief during wartime and not any special one but he who is known to be most valiant enterprising and daring sorcerers on mountain peaks bellicose Indians who were not controlled by their chiefs intriguing though these conquistador claims are there not much to go on the Spanish invaders weren't always reliable eyewitnesses the problem is only a handful of archaeologists have even bench it into the Chachapoya territory so before heading into the Andes I need a more trustworthy source one of the few who has studied the cryptic Chachapoya he's Adriana von Hagen so I met with her to establish the basics what is it that drew you to the touch Boise region what do you find so interesting about the touch boys culture just the fact that that no there's so little known and that that the iconography the imagery that's what I've been studying cat what it can reveal about about a culture you will notice that all chenchu boya sites almost all are located on mountaintops or ridges and they were known as sorcerers using Amazonian esoteric knowledge of herbs and hallucinogenic drugs it's so little of the qiat-ps region seems to be mapped how much of the archaeology do you think we've actually found 5% if that yeah yeah I mean I I can count on one hand the sites and sites that have been excavated scientifically incredible and it's a huge region huge why do you think more work hasn't been done by archaeologists there mainly because it's isolated at least it's isolated to us in our Western sort of concept of getting to places distant places I mean for the pre-columbian people walking for two weeks there's nothing but for us um even driving for a day is a long way Peru is roughly five times the size of the UK the Chachapoya were found to the north and on the eastern side of the Andean mountains in nine and a half thousand square miles of challenging terrain after a flight from Lima and a 14 hour drive I finally arrived in what is to this day called the Chachapoya region and seeing the epic landscape for the first time it strikes me that this isn't an obvious place to build a civilization the first humans made their way across Alaska and into North America over 14,000 years ago over the next 1,000 years they traveled southwards along the Pacific coastline and through the Continental interior to colonize and populate South America the Chachapoya culture emerged around 900 AD and some archeologists believe they emigrated to these desolate mountaintops from the lower lying Amazonian region but we know that when they arrived here they built homes on the hilltops and eventually grew to a population of half a million strong they ruled these mountains and valleys for six centuries but the first question surrounding the Chachapoya is why settle in this particular region to the west is the Andes for thousands of miles the highest mountain range in South America to the east the vast Amazon basin stretching out thick dense tropical rainforest to modernize the chesh poyo region appears to be surrounded by barriers appears to be archaeologists have to look beyond first appearances this is the real touka bomba one of many rivers that flows through the Chachapoya region although some of these rivers start just 150 miles from the Pacific coast they defiantly all turn eastwards flow into the Amazon basin and run 3,000 miles out into the Atlantic to modernize the river may seem like another obstacle to make ancient life difficult but of course it's easier to move over water rather than through the jungle or up into the mountains if as seems likely the first Chachapoya had rafts and canoes the river takes on a whole new significance it becomes an a road connecting the Andes with the Amazonian Basin journeys that would take days on foot could be completed in just hours on the river at lower levels there's a hint of the tropical jungle and the connections with the vast Amazonian Basin the most biologically diverse place on earth so despite living high in the mountains the tragic wire could trade with the peoples of the Amazon ensuring a supply of an amazing array of herbs medicines animals and exotic bird feathers the Chachapoya had chosen an ideal crossroads what appears isolated would actually have been a hub for trade their lofty communities on the mountaintops would have been closely connected with the people downriver this is beeswax a typical product of the upper Amazon and is exactly the type of exotic commodity that they would have traded up into the mountains and beyond so it seems one thing we can know for certain about the Chachapoya is that by using the rivers they could trade with the peoples downstream in the Amazonian Basin the vast majority of the materials traded from the tropical regions were perishable but some of that evidence still survives in Chachapoya sites spectacular headdresses have been found festooned with exotic feathers of parents from the Amazonian rainforest animals from the lowlands have also been found mummified and preserved with such a rich supply of resources closeby it appears the Chachapoya thrived transporting the tropical goods deep into the Andes these transactions undoubtedly enrich the Chachapoya knowledge of herbs medicines hunting and mythology but this wasn't their only frontier the Andes is the longest north-south mountain range in the world the mountains seem to represent an impassable barrier between inland South America and the Pacific coast like the rivers the mountains might appear to be a massive obstacle to the Chachapoya but again we shouldn't go on appearances alone deep canyons like these carved over centuries by the Rio marinum provided the lowest routes into the Andes for hundreds of miles in either direction these river valleys acted like funnels through which the trade will pass the valleys provided a gateway to the coast just as the rivers opened up trading routes to the Amazon downstream and at Chachapoya sites throughout the region we find traces of that ancient trade I'm going to the town of ketchup is the administrative capital of the region here the Jetta poisk Ministry of Culture has a treasure trove of artifacts hidden away the personal throws of a stacked in a cupboard there are fines from miles around watched over by mummified remains from a Chachapoya tomb they're allowing me to take a closer look this is a llama and these llamas are really important they play a crucial role in the life of the Chachapoya obviously you don't get any horses in the whole of the Americas before the Europeans turn up so the llama is not only used for its meat and its wool but it's also the main beast of burden we can see that there's rope going around the llamas back and forming up here to a pack on the back although this is actually a vessel as it is now it looks like this rope represents that rucksack that bulton which is on the llamas back carrying the produce from the Chachapoyas up into the highlands lovely so this shell was found in the tomb of a church boy a warrior in this region we've got these perforations up the sides and even right inside there you can see right down there the holes inside the shell so to me it looks like this is a flute a musical instrument this would have come from over 500 kilometres away on the ecuadorian coastline and so it gets us thinking about those trade networks that the Chachapoya region going up the river systems across the Andes and down the other side this is a little seed pod and it comes from the my shield plant which is a seed which only comes right down below lands at altitudes less than 500 metres so it must have been come from the Amazon but this shell is clearly a utilitarian shell used for a musical instrument well then placed in a string and uses a rattle around the wrists and the ankles just like the Morris Dancers in the you but goods are the only things that pass along busy trade routes with trade comes communication with communication comes knowledge walking through a local market really highlights the benefits and effective trade system yet have been mine your own mines to get metals you down to forage for days in the Amazon to get exotic plants what I think is most interesting is that having these trade networks exposes you to the new latest arts technologies medicinal plants and most importantly new ideas which can affect your culture so by controlling the trade routes between the cultures of the rainforest and the kingdoms on the coast they absorbed ideas from both encountered new artistic techniques and had exotic resources at their disposal believe it or not the Chachapoya were pretty cosmic on the Chachapoya region has always been famous for its woven textiles unfortunately very few of these chech poor textiles have survived but the ones that do give us this lovely insight into the beliefs and imagery of the Chachapoya me encanta suit Rojo que es que que significa SOC Martinez aha es una mano y esto es usted hey Gary chata poyo tunics and blankets were patterned with colorful animals serpents and strange frog like creatures we simply don't know enough to say for sure what these images mean but it does suggest a rich highly developed symbolic belief system with influences from both the lowlands and the highlands decades of work may be needed to even begin to understand the imagery and the tantalizing clues it provides - chatter pure culture but one artifact found it later period treasure poor sites embodies the complexities of Chachapoya culture the khipu the quipu is a piece of string encrypted with coded information that seemed to be carried by special persons known as khipu keepers and were often buried alongside the dead there are just over 600 of these fascinating artifacts in the world including this amazing collection at the Museum in leymebamba keepers are still one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern archaeology when people come to a museum in South America the first thing they're attracted to will be the gold objects those glittering shiny pieces but the reality is that tucked away in the dusty corner are these pieces of string khipu khipu are extraordinary in Quechua the Inka language keep humans not these mysterious objects were initially thought to be some sort of simple South American abacus but recent research suggests that they are far far more sophisticated than that if we think about our own language we have 26 letters that gives us 26 different variables you can then have any number or combination of those letters in sequence so if we take that idea of looking for variables and different ways that information can be recorded and turn our attention to the khipu there's a main chord with three different chords which come off it on each of those chords can be spaced at different distances along the main court each of these subsidiary chords can have a different length there can be different knots positioned at different places down each of those subsidiary chords even the knots themselves have a number of different forms with single knots - double knots - ten different strings being wrapped around within the same knot there's different colors there's different Twinings you realize there are so many different scales at which information is locked within it originally thought of as just being a series of numbers what we now know is that locked away within these khipu are legends myths narratives of the people that made them if as we suspect the khipu do contain narratives the significance is enormous it means the Chachapoya and the Inca who also used the khipu had a three dimensional system of recording stories hidden in the knots could be the key to unlocking countless secrets so much remains to be understood about the khipu but for now we can just stare at them in wonder we know that the chatter poyo were trading people and that they absorbed influences from across the region but if their livelihoods were dependent on the river why settle on the less accessible mountaintops above I met with Klaus Kosh Maeda a german archaeologist who has spent much of his life studying the origins of the Chachapoya what's distinctive about like a residential complex of a church boy the residential complexes they are on top of the hills while the ceremonial centers on the slopes of the hills and why do you think the Chachapoya put their settlements on top of the hills the main reason is that the settlements are on the level of the cultivation sides of the fields they were cultivating maize and potatoes and this is in higher altitudes in the Andes different altitudes provide different microclimates where different crops could be grown thus at the optimum height for cultivation the cloud people build their impressive villages settlements can tell us a great deal the architectural layout of the buildings can provide invaluable insights into the way the Chachapoya lived it's going to be inside one of these change pore structures what's distinctive about church boy architecture Chachapoya structures are around and we have a decoration in form of rhesus mostly in six art form it's an Universal motive of the Chachapoya just looking around this church boy structure I can see these beam slots in in the walls what does that tell us about this structure the beam swords possibly work to put a second floor to this house but having multiple stories in a house is very unusual for South America for me this is really quite a large building I mean it's large structure to be having yes this structure is not an invitation to it it's ceremonial cycle and so inside the houses they were practicing rituals and dances I'm amazed to see a 600 year old two-story building here in South America it's almost unheard of I want to see for myself the elaborate Chachapoya burials so I'm going far off the beaten track beyond the road network where the remains of the clown people like undisturbed to this day when I'll do it in C is actually our logo this is my horse and it's called the mad one a local wheelchair filling the Luther fear he'll stuff so the lovely saddlecloth underneath here this theory was made about tires and me a local the horse are ready to head up the valley you know a local and the other horses will take our expedition part of the way up the mountain until we get within sight of the towering cliffs of La pitaka it's tough an arduous terrain but archaeologists should never grumble because it's the very remoteness of these sites that have protected them from treasure hunters and looters that are a constant threat in this region oh hi Michael I love you go go in from ring way no I think I don't need though see this is the most insane spot just come down the top of the mountain and caught up here with Maximo who's want to peruse best Mountaineers but the reason I need máximos climbing wisdom is that I'm here to see for myself the cliff tombs of the cloud people these vast cliffs in the remote site of lap attacker are a true necropolis a Chachapoya city of the Dead I never thought I'd be sitting on the edge of a mountain about to drop off from faint bloody terrified it's a seriously long way down you can feel the sensation of the rope riding hang on that live stone as you get out there's a 300 meter vertical draw and the top to the bottom of the cliffs and even with expert climbers and the latest equipment it's a daunting prospect but astonishingly centuries ago the ancient cloud people not only climbed up and down these crumbling limestone cliffs with their dead they actually built on them you can see signs of Chachapoya walls on this rock face they have come up here and built these walls on this vertical rock face these crumbling limestone cliffs have pitted with caves and the Chachapoya transformed these we think into burial chambers and what's most remarkable of all is that some of those burials are still here how the Chachapoya got up here is completely mind-boggling coming down the ropes you can see behind me unbelievably there are still Chachapoya burials in fact the bones of these ancient people poke out all over the clip alongside the occasional vultures net but the true revelations come inside the tombs themselves Wow we're inside the cave ah whoa it's a little natural cave but just here on the edges you can see the Chachapoya built and walls up expanding the size of the cave we're still a good hundred meters up still ah hell I can't imagine there's been too many people here since the church poyo were last here five hundred years ago Wow I was really quite some write down these inaccessible little cave tombs are known as chullpas and it's a real privilege to be inside one the cave is full of little nooks and crannies I'm just gonna have a little climb up this wall and look up here I can see a little ledge inside this alcove is a human skeleton that is still articulated it's still intact all the bones are in the correct position and you can see that it's been wrapped in some sort of tunic or shroud as a truly spectacular this cave is just one of many within the honeycomb cliffs of Lap attacker and all the remains appear to be carefully ritualistically positioned Wow okay we're gonna be really careful here because there are bones on the floor if you look over here we can see some remains of some Josh Boyer I've never seen anything like it the way the bones are assembled makes me think they might have been defleshed before they were brought here the way that all skulls and long bones have been laid out they seem to been quite particular about how they've been placed against this rock they've listed laid here for at least five hundred years we can see a whole group of long bones skulls a knee joint it's just incredible to see it all Latia lying here some of the chill pers contain a single burial others multiple burials possibly families perhaps a major investigation we'll discover how the Chachapoya got up here in the first place I can see intriguing beams sticking out from the cliff and we've already seen that they were skilled at construction but no one has yet come up with a conclusive explanation as to how they scaled these dangerous heights and so regularly even with ropes and helmets I found out it can be pretty hazardous but interesting is that puzzle is the real question is what role the dead played in their culture why devote so much effort to entombing them and then visit so often Chachapoya sites are hard to find you often had to come right up into the hills try and find them but they're also becoming increasingly vulnerable in 1996 some cattle ranchers were pushing through a valley like this when they saw a tree had fallen down off the side behind the tree was a small opening curious they went right inside and found 200 chech Poyer mummies the site was called laguna de los condores unlike the cliffs at lap attacker the bodies at laguna de los condores had been carefully mummified these were mummies dating from a later period when the Chachapoya culture overlapped with the Inca culture they were mummified adults mummified babies mummified animals it was a hugely important discovery but the ranchers began to search through the bodies hunting for treasure word got out and within days tourists and tomb raiders were trampling all over one of the most astonishing archeological discoveries in the Americas after ten days of chaos the first archaeologist on the scene was sonia guillén sensing the importance of the discovery and seeking to preserve what remained sonya collected the artifacts and mummy bundles together and rescued them for the museum in layer bomba the astonishing preservation of these mummies can get us much closer to understanding why the Dead meant so much to the living and they can tell us much more about the final days of the Chachapoya oh wow look at that mmm this person had tuberculosis he was a young individual and he probably died because of a complication with tuberculosis there are more than 200 mummies here in the museum's controlled storage room and by examining them Sonia and her team have got as close as anyone can to understanding the belief systems of the Chachapoya you get to connect to an individual you get to connect to the last events before this individual was taken to their final repository and individual by individuals you can get to learn about a population most of the mummies have never been studied scientifically today we are unwrapping this mummy for the very first time from x-rays Sonya can tell the bundle contains a young man who appears to have died from tuberculosis he was mummified and left in the cave some five hundred years ago and no one has set eyes on him since until now there we are I'm amazed every time we look into any of these individuals there's always something new this is the first individual the very very very first individual where we find the ear spool in place okay and what material is that made out of wood so the earlobe would have gone around man a little bit of depth mm-hmm earring it's becoming fashionable nowadays isn't it forensic archaeology is methodical and incremental and every find every detail even a large earring illuminates the Chachapoya a little more so look at these hands like up round the face I mean they've been deliberately tied there twice like round the fingers and round the wrists why did you think they had them up around the round the face sorry if I sound over simplistic but I think this was the best place to put them they were trying to make a package that they could move from one place to the other easily you know buy food so here as in the cliffs the Chachapoya dead were not left to rest in peace archaeologists believe the living tended to them we wrapped them and may even have taken them from the tombs and displayed them what can this tell us about their attitude to the dead when you see that the effort they put into creating these mummies do you think that's cuz they're trying to keep people alive the memory of them alive and have that sort of connection between the living in the dead definitely because in those days what else did you have to keep your memory alive if was to keep the individuals close to you and remember also that your rights to a territory are rights that are defined through your ancestors so it's important to show others also that your ancestors are here with you helping you demand that these territory is yours the effort of mummification of scaling impossible cliffs with their dead it wasn't simply about remembering those they loved it was a ritual that helped rout the Chachapoya in their land so looking at these mummies for all these years what I like the key things that you think you've learnt when you're approached a mummy bundle a mummy and and with this whole context you can't avoid connecting to emotions then they connect to you as humans and that's also one of the things we want to present to the public that they just don't look at the freakshow where where they will get scared but actually will connect to adults young ones children and how their society treated them with respect with sorrow with tenderness with emotions that you can't reconstruct and they can connect to you the mummies from laguna de los condores give us an amazing glimpse of the Chachapoya attitude to life and death displaying deceased ancestors seems to have been about identity and belonging but the funerary culture of the Chachapoya reveals even more than that as well as mummification they built sarcophagi to display their dead and what these structures don't have is just as significant as what they do how our people bury their dead is one of the best ways of identifying hierarchies what's interesting about the Chachapoya is they appear to be a Galit Aryan there are hundreds of sick off a guy like this with men women and children buried inside but significantly there are no elite burial sites no royal tombs these strange sarcophagi appear like ghosts on the landscape not enough archaeological work has been done to be sure who they commemorate which is not surprising given how difficult they are to access in fact some of these intriguing little mud and straw statues seem to be protected by nature itself so just over here a nine Chachapoya sarcophagi I really want to go have a closer look but the one on the right inside has a nest of killer bees the bees have killed a few people in this valley over the last few years so there's no way I'm going to get any closer to see more evidence for this surprising lack of hierarchy you have to fight your way through archaeological sites are always covered with things that sting and spike just why it's always good to have a machete sad but it's quite fun like lost kingdoms should be Chachapoya architecture is often hidden and the centuries of vegetation and we can only get glimpses through sharp thorns but it's worth hacking my way through the hills to meet Peter Lerche II originally from Germany Peter is an anthropologist who has lived in this region for 32 years past and present nobody knows the Chachapoya people like Peter does in fact he considers himself Peruvian and was once mayor of the town of Chachapoyas and he managed to get me close to one of the many Lost Chachapoya settlements so what's the name of this site this side is yella yella pee yell up it's a yeah touch up on ya the population center and what are we looking at here was this this is a ceremonial center of yella pee this is like a 6 meter high wall right on the top of the bluff which you must be able to see for miles around as a real statement yeah that's an ideological aspect Here I am they show that they're not hiding and what are we looking at here what are these sort of particular phrases this is a zigzag frieze and it symbolizes a snake and the symbol at the top then what do you think the symbol the value is behind that rhomboid shape so rhomboid shaped it sir the Jaguar it's not an Amazonian culture it's not an Andean culture it's a mixture of both words at its peak over half a million people lived in the chat apoyo territory which is more than live here in modern times all the evidence suggests that the cloud people Society not only had its own symbolism and ideology but then it evolved in a distinctly different way than any European models we have no manifestation of power in an architectural way no no architecture of power normally we know about humans when I've power I want to show my power in palaces and here all the same circular structures and this challenge is major constructs of archaeological interpretation because when people think of a United culture of a half a million people we associate that with a hierarchy with an elite but we just don't have that with the Chachapoya archaeologically or architectonic lee there is no evidence some of the technological developments you see at places like this and the organization of labor it's great a thing that people must have been coming together as a collective rather than under an authoritative leader as therefore necessities they have had they knew they need retaining walls they need agricultural terraces so they had to stand together and work together I must admit I'm beginning to fall with the Chachapoya the evidence so far points to their architectural prowess their egalitarian culture and a real devotion to their dead lots of archaeology around the world emphasizes the more brutish side of human behavior battles weapons sacrifices but the Chachapoya challenged that assumption that all human societies evolved in the same way let's not delude ourselves this is no South American Garden of Eden it's a tough place to live and the Chachapoya often squabbled amongst themselves but there was no rigid hierarchy they shared ideas on these mountain slopes arose a society that was both complex and cultured with their own art and architecture their own beliefs and values for 600 years the society thrived on this land and enrich their knowledge by facilitating trade as the Chachapoya civilization developed it was constantly growing and innovating coming to dominate the landscape for thousands of miles around they built round houses that could be seen on the numerous mountain peaks they built tombs on cliff faces and at the heart of the Chachapoya territory they'd built their masterpiece any notion that the Chachapoya remain passive traders is dismissed when you come to the most famous ketchup or site in the Andes covering 15 acres 10,000 feet above sea level this is quail up it's an epic statement of the power and skill of the Chachapoya it's estimated that Quayle app took centuries to build and it's probable that the people who lived here were constantly reinforcing the structure in places the thick platform of stone is over 65 feet high and some of the finally cut limestone blocks weigh more than three tons this is a building of such or inspiring scale it's hard to believe it was built by hand you don't have to be an expert to see the sheer scale of work that's gone into building quail up these 60 foot high walls enclose a site that has transformed this mountaintop the question is why why would the Chachapoya carry hundreds of thousands of stones like these up the mountainside to build this incredible site in part it was a safe haven the three entrances into quail app are in themselves clever and defensive the entrances initially appear open welcoming but any gun her enemy charging through will quickly find the walls narrowing until his only space for a single warrior to pass and so if the Chachapoya wanted to fend off an invading army the architects who designed this entrance would have made it easy for them to pick them off one by one like so much Chachapoya archeology scandalously little research has been done on quail app and a document this astonishing ancient citadel would take years sheer scale of the site is incredible with over 400 stone buildings hidden beneath the undergrowth I met with alfredo na res the archaeologist who has been studying the site for years quando n jhol la gente que cuando es el parte principio del sitio y los muchachos mess ante goes que tenemos Sunday a raid or del Cielo sex toes a keen en toes despues de Cristo pero so speech ahmo's de que la occupation comienza antes Quezada sin el cuatro cientos despues de cristo yeah receipt o comienza crecer alfredo believes the site was occupied for more than a thousand years though whether the first people here which are Poya or an earlier culture is unclear quail app is 500 years older than the more celebrated Machu Picchu and is intriguing in both its construction and in its purpose at first sight the structure certainly looks defensive it's in Greenville City ikeda Caleb para usted tiene es que es una una Fortaleza yo muchas personas en zijn de que es una Fortaleza por la dimension esos mariah's por el control de los access OHS pero de acuerdo no estas s Kobashi owns messes messier Sione's es muy difícil defender el monumento desde esta gran guna iya porque en primer lugar casi toda la Ossa structure --is estan sobre la marea ya know crea un espacio SI que permeated s de arriba defender el sitio s impossible there are secrets locked away within the walls the suggest the site was much more significant than just a fortress yo creo que es un centro sagrado por excelencia cuando las comunidades que vienen de fuera construe Juergen al lugar no solamente vienen confrontation comida con mucha avenida y hace mucho fiesta para construir sino que también Tran parte de los huesos de sus ancestress y los de vino' bertrade om bolsas antigua dos y luego colo kados en diferentes lugar es este momento es en relia un momento cementerio la gran Mura externa esta completamente llena de entierro secondary o today kwela field a long way from anywhere high on a mountain surrounded by a beautiful but a very empty landscape but over a thousand years ago archaeologists estimate there as many as 3,000 people crammed into this amazing mountaintop Citadel far from being at the fringes quail app and the Chachapoya people who lived here were at the center of ancient life entonces tenemos este de de una cultura PN defne dou y bien Savio tell de l'air de parte grande de su o america es una de las culturas más importantes de esta Rehoboam a so Nia in Lausanne de no real entails que tiran como consecuencia uno de los mona mentos archaeological architect own egos meh suspect larry's atoll America but the Chachapoya world was under threat a new power was rising in the mountains far to the south today it's a magnet for tourists but from the 1430s machupicchu in the nearby capital of cusco was home to Inca royalty who set out to conquer northern Peru what the Romans were to Europe the inca were to South America at its greatest extent their Empire stretched from Ecuador to Argentina around 1470 the Inca reached the eastern slopes of the Andes the land of the cloud people they built conquest roads like this one they built forts throughout their lands the mighty Inca Empire dispatched an emissary to the Chachapoyas to ask them to submit peacefully or face war they replied they would rather die in defense of their freedom above all else the Inca coveted the valuable Chachapoya trading routes access to the Amazon was everything but the Inca foot soldiers struggled suppressed the Chachapoya people they rebelled and had to be Recon curd twice the Chachapoya paid a heavy price for their resistance the Inca Empire had a policy they called mitt may a conquered people would be dispersed far and wide forcibly removed from their home territory to far-flung parts of the Inca Empire the judge apoyo people were scattered and broken sent to what's now Ecuador and the shores of Lake Titicaca where to this day there is a town called Chachapoyas some estimates suggest as much as half the population were exiled with many others killed only a few Chachapoya remained in their homeland one thing we know about the Chachapoya is that they're rich realistically looked after they're dead but just a few years ago here in Quail app 200 skeletons were unearthed found were they had fallen there was no evidence of the kind of ceremonial burial we've seen elsewhere which points to a violent ending the skeletons were of all ages and both sexes and were found alongside everyday utensils and tools suggesting it may have been more of a massacre than a battle it seems likely that the 200 skeletons were the last Chachapoya in Quail app the Inka ruled over the remaining Chachapoya until the new world changed forever with the arrival of the plundering Europeans by the time the Spanish arrived in this part of Peru 1535 ad they were able to exploit the resentment of the Chachapoya against their income oppressors and persuade them to join them in the fight against them meeting with the Europeans was to prove fatal to jet apoyo culture the invading Spaniards brought missionaries in tow who set out with evangelical zeal to convert the indigenous population worse was the smallpox measles and diphtheria that swept through the Chachapoya in the years that followed within just two centuries of the Spanish arrival ninety percent of the remaining Chachapoya had perished the kingdom of the cloud people contained only clouds the Chachapoya were gone the cloud forest from which they came grew around their structures swallowing them up where they lay unseen for centuries even today it is certain that somewhere out there there are many more Chachapoya tombs towns and monuments that lie hidden in this vast and beautiful region coming down from the Andes and returning to Lima I realize the size of the challenge in truly understanding the Chachapoya the fragments we've seen are just a start and it could be decades before we really unravel their true story but even this partial picture that we have today resonates in this great continent rediscovering the lost kingdoms of South America isn't just academic history is the storage that we tell ourselves and as the amazing mummies choppers and Porter to collapse begin to reveal their secrets they're a great source of pride and group and they're also a reminder of the cultures of South America derived long long before Europeans appeared on the horizon the you

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Keywords: Archaeology (Field Of Study), South America (Continent), History (Literary School Or Movement), Peru (Country), Bolivia (Country), Colombia (Country), Documentary (TV Genre)

Id: GvGf0JIat0s

Length: 54min 3sec (3243 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2013