Heritage Aid Foundation

VII International Conference of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA)

September 27^th – 29^th, 2006

University of Technology Sydney, Australia

© Lindsay R. Hasluck 2006

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Urban Planning Continuity In The Andes - A Tradition Revealed

This research has taken four years living in the Andes mainly around Peru and Bolivia. The studies have been made all the more interesting by the opportunity to experience the chaos of successive revolutions as urban areas self-mutilate under the cultural pressures formed by post-colonialism and Globalization as it shocks against the desires of traditional Andean life, beliefs and economies. It has been a thorough lesson in the social force that tradition still plays in Andean ideology. Tradition, as we shall see, has been a fundamental force in the creation, function, ideology and aesthetics in the design of Andean cities and settlements.

The central theme of this research is an exploration of the evolution of urban design in the Andes to ascertain if there existed in pre-historic times a shared Andean tradition of urban planning.

THERE DOES!

Since previous research on Andean urban planning has been treated as the product of individual sites or cultures, this research investigates the repeated use of design elements within Andean-wide urban planning, in order to isolate specific components for individual functional analysis within the cultural context.

The primary focus is to demonstrate for the first time, clearly, the urban design connection that forms a coherent Andean urban planning tradition shared between urban civilizations of the Andes from the inception of urbanism around the beginning of the third millennium BC until the cultural disruption of the Spanish conquest in the mid-sixteenth century AD. That is, a 4000 year period that places Andean urban planning into the same time frame as early Old World planning use, and well before that of its northern neighbour Mesoamerica, currently accepted as the birthplace of urbanism in the Americas.

The Andes is a justified and excellent area to investigate the evolution of urbanism as it appears to have first created the urban principle and worked through the social and design problems in isolation from the rest of the world. India, China and Egypt, by comparison, were part of a network through which ideas and urban principles were diffused, even though they developed their own regional styles. South America, like Mesopotamia, adopted the elevated behavioural creed of urbanism, as its own response to particular pressures and solutions, and is perhaps one of the few last areas to be thoroughly investigated.

The Andean cultural area which includes the extreme fringes of the Amazon, the Cordillera mountain ranges and valleys, as well as the western coastal deserts can be thought of as roughly equivalent to the area covered by the Tawantinsuyu (Inca) Empire at its height, just prior to the arrival of the Spanish. That is stretching from northern Argentina and Chile to southern Ecuador, approximately 5400km.

Within this extensive area the indigenous use of horizontal resource zones – trading between valleys, and vertical zones – intra valley trading between different ecological areas, including ocean, Yunga, Puna highlands and Amazon, from very early times has been crucial in the facilitation of the spread of ideas, such as new types of plant use, irrigation, social structure and of course urbanism.

The Andes region can be divided in 7 approximate geographical sub-divisions, which are the areas that had the greatest influence upon the rise and spread of urbanism, and between which from early pre-urban times there has been inter-cultural influences.

Bennett, an Andean pre-historic specialist, states that

The various regions of the Central Andes have such inter-connected cultural histories that the processes of culture development in one region needs to be seen in the light of what happened in the others.

The shared resource economy was a vital factor in the creation of Andean urbanism, and the formation of specific cultural traits generally agreed upon as needed for the birth of urbanism, such as social stratification, work specialization, state formation, (in this case theocratic), and permanent residency.

The Andes has often been omitted from the world urban map due to its lack of literature. However the ‘literati class’ that writing as Sjoberg theorises, denotes as forming a society with the leisure and educational capacity to be called urban, can be seen in operation from the earliest times in Supe-Caral (Central Coast) around 2600 BC. Their use of architecture,  mathematics, astronomy and ideography, (all of which grew in complexity through time and successive civilizations), displays the existence  of a ‘literati class’, formed, no doubt, through religious and esoteric education. Thus the Andes should also be included in international comparisons of urbanization.

The subject which covers a vast time frame and various cultures and civilizations is too complex to be fully detailed in these few moments available to us. Let it suffice for this lecture to touch upon a few of the main points and to place them within a cultural context, so that not only do some of the design elements that are the key to the planning tradition become evident but also the cultural context within which they operated.

The evolution of Andean urbanism and the growth of Andean civilizations from the perspective of urbanization and design creates a narrative within which specific repeated urban elements can be recognised in action.

The first urbanisation in the Americas begins in the Supe valley on the central coast at the beginning of the 3^rd millennium BC. Urban planning can be seen in action at the capital Caral, placed in the centre of a collection of urban settlements and as the peak of the valley wide settlement hierarchy. As such it reflects the developed state of Supe civilization’s social stratification.

Caral was planned taking into account its specific mid-valley location beside a permanent river, central to surrounding settlements, to be able to access flood plains for farming, control intra-valley vertical trade and water supplies, and situated on a low barren plateau above the arable land. Sacred geography also generally had an influence on the choice of location, through a cities relationship to lakes, mountains, rivers and islands.

Previously, pre-urban agglutinated settlements, had been arranged around, but separate from Ceremonial Centres to which their surplus was attracted. This pre-urban settlement pattern, with waxing and waning of urban civilizations, continued in some places in the Andes until being absorbed into the final stages of the Tawantinsuyu. Other areas, particularly in the Regional States Period between the two greatest empires Wari-Tiwanaku and Tawantinsuyu, relapsed into pre-urban conditions. However the idea of urbanism survived shifting locations from coastal to highland areas, as regions politically collapsed and others expanded their potential.

The position of Caral, and its trading between coastal and highland areas allowed for an increase in population density and thus labour force, which when devoted to the new capital created a monumental religious complex in its centre, a plaza surrounded by 6 pyramids, administrative buildings, and elite and workers dwellings in the form of barrios (suburbs).

The material success of the society and growing complexity of social structure and hierarchy is demonstrated in the greater variation in the elite diet and so access to resources, and the internal division of the city into elite religious and administrative upper city built on the more favourable land closer to the central religious complex and administrative buildings, the physical representations of state power and access to and control of state resources. The workers barrio, by comparison, was located on the lower, rougher terrain on the periphery of the city, but with ease of access to agricultural holdings. This internal division continued as a fundamental part of the urban planning tradition and physical setting of the Andean city. With class division, such as at Chan Chan and Cuzco, sometimes being taken to extremes.

Monumental religious construction was built under a mitae service tax, the common form of labour force for public construction throughout Andean pre-urban and urban pre-history. With construction of the communities temples in the centre of the city, the elite ensured that urban areas became the focus of ideology and community support, thus forcing the societies future to be urban rather than rural or agricultural in focus.

So too, it brought religion, the manufacturer of ideology and maintainer of social cohesion firmly and physically under its control. Thus the surplus formerly controlled by unattached ceremonial centres now became the jurisdiction of an extended urban elite class.

Nearby, on the north coast, in the Casma valley the city of Moxeque was flourishing under the same social construction and planning ideas. A major difference between Supe and Casma was that Casma began with the use of ceramics, small scale irrigation and warfare. Technological advances that entered Supe Caral only in its later existence.

Built upon non-arable land, it had pyramids at either end of a large walled central plaza to which access was restricted, although its size suggests that at times the plaza played a public ceremonial or gathering role.

Pyramids were used throughout the Andes cities and ceremonial complexes and were ideological structures of great strength in that their form simulated the powerful deities of the mountains, and were richly decorated with religious friezes and paintings of socially cohesive ideological power. The control over which maintained the elite’s social position.

Like Caral, Moxeque had been designed and built to an original plan, while urban maintenance continued the original idea, showing planning procedures practiced from the earlier construction of ceremonial centres, such as the ability to solve planning problems, restriction of access to areas and the central control of a public workforce.

Moxeke, like Caral, was also the capital of a system of satellite towns, a method which increased under the later influence of the Wari-Tiwanaku pan-Andean Empire throughout its highland and coastal regions, an became the mode of operation, for all Empires and large polities in the Andes.

After the demise of Supe (1900 BC) and later Moxeque (1000 BC) urbanisation recedes from the coast and can be seen starting to flourish again in the highland Alti Plano plateau  near lake Titicaca, with the Tiwanaku culture. At the same time the Andes comes under the first pan-Andean influence from the central highland civilization the Chavín cult religion that is pre-urban in nature. Yet its influence plays an important part for urbanization as along with its ideological influence there spreads generally throughout the Andes the introduction of the use of maize, irrigation and the acceptance of social stratification which allows for a wide spread densification in population, that precedes the adoption of urbanism.

Tiwanaku, built beside the lake and large pasture lands for the llama herds that played such an important role in their, and later Tawantinsuyu empire’s transportation shows the use of planning ideas from Caral and Moxeke. That ideas travelled over large distances can be seen in the Tiwanaku use of coastal Chavín iconography, such as the ‘God-with-stick’, puma, condor, anthropomorphic figures and gold sheet designs.

The city of Tiwanaku began as a nucleated settlement around 1700 BC, but did not reach what is commonly accepted as its urban age until around 0 AD, with the construction of its present central religious complex and elite palaces and housing. Recent studies have shown that the centre of the city at this stage underwent reconstruction (post-planning) and the present pyramids and plaza closures may represent ideological changes in the power structure associated with its new supremacy over the other lake side cultures. One of whom, Yayamama, may have been the staging post for ideas from the central and northern coast and highlands.

Tiwanaku was a city not just socially divided by class in a typical Andean dualist system, a system which the empire spread with lasting consequence through out its area of influence. Physically the division was written in to the design of the city by a system of moats with the elite living on the central island and religious complex, and foreigners and workers on the periphery. This was a design that was also intended to inscribe in the plan of the Tiwanaku city ideologically important esoteric knowledge, as it is thought to relate to water fertility and mountain deity beliefs, while also simulating the nearby sacred Island of the Sun.

Tiwanaku was a trading city that used vertical resource zones from the Amazon to the coasts. Importing raw materials and exporting such products as textiles, fine ceramics, hallucinogenic powder and religious paraphernalia. Through iconographic decorations they exported their ideology through a system of wealth finance. Under its influence the idea of centralized state authority and planning became generally known, and served the needs of a multi-regional empire.

In its expansive stage, using a system of mitaes or colony settlements, a second capital was located around 600 AD at Huari to serve the northern needs of the empire. Huari, which despite the topographical difficulties of being built on a high rocky plateau in the central highlands, uses the same planning ideas based around the repetition of enclosures for housing and religious areas as used at Tiwanaku, but is a more forceful expression of the division of social space than seen at either Caral or Moxeque.

The use of high walled enclosures, and repetition in design comes into general Andean use with extension of the Wari-Tiwanaku empire into the central and north coastal and highland  regions, its influence reaching as far north as the Moche valley where a small urban civilization was struggling to exist. Pikillacta is the clearest example of pre-planned repetition in its use of five repeated elements and that its plan appears to be a blueprint also used at contemporary Viracochapampa.

Planning in the Andes was based upon two forms. The lesser used form was an original plan, or pre-planning, in which a city was built according to a pre-construction design, starting with importance of the location. There are fewer of this type of city and none of them ever became great centres, although Caral was the first, there came later Moxeque, Huari, Galindo, Huaca Pampa, Incahausi, Huammuco Viejo (Spelling), Pikillacta, Viracochapampa, to name a few.

The other form was post-planning in which a plan was later formulated and introduced to an existing city or settlement to bring order to what was previously an organically created layout. This was a remodelling of a city, particularly the centre, with a new layout to represent a change in ideology or governance. Post-planning was bar far more widely used in the Andes and includes not only some of the major cities in the pre-Historical period, such as Tiwanaku, Pachacamac, Cajamarquilla, possibly Chan Chan and Cuzco, but also most of the Tawantinsuyu provincial capitals.

The general introduction of urbanism by Wari-Tiwanaku to the Andes was to continue to have effect after its collapse, which was possibly due to the severe climatic changes caused by an El Niño. Some cities that had been built or re-built under the empire, such as the reintroduction of urbanism to the Casma valley with Manchán and Taukachi-Konkán, and elsewhere Pachacamac, Cajamarquilla, etc. continued to flourish with increasing population densities, and regional changes in style. In the following Regional States Period, few new centres were created, but with increasing population intensification existing urban centres expanded with a far greater complexity of religious iconographic style and architecture, greater dedication to urban monumental constructions in their central religious complexes and semi-industrial mass production of goods for domestic and trade use. The production of fine products of ideological importance in took place in city centres under elite supervision, while mass production of utensil products happened on the periphery for trade and resource access.

The lack of a large centralized state control for planning led to the return of some areas to pre-urban chieftaincies, which constructed agglutinated settlements on defensive hilltop positions. The south coast never reached an urban level, nor was involved in substantial monumental construction; the smaller valleys and unreliable water supply were probably the barrier to the needed densification of the population.

In this period there arose in the Moche valley on the north coast the Chimú Empire that had grown out of a fusion of north coastal Mochica and Wari-Tiwanaku planning traditions, and was to go on to be an influence upon the Tawantinsuyu.

The north coastal region is recognized as having been the home to a regional cultural tradition. Urbanism which had begun on the north coast with the Moxeque in the Casma valley, after the Chavín demise re-appears in the capital city of Moche, in the Moche valley. Moche, whose planning is based on a grid system, unusual for the coast prior to Wari-Tiwanaku influence, was part of successive stages of development from pre-urban cultures and their slowly secularizing and urbanizing design.

The Mochica capital around 600 AD collapses under the sudden and severe climatic changes caused by an El Niño, leading to temporary city design, Galindo, which included far more rigid social controls and lack of large monumental structures, showing the lack of force in the elites ideological control.

The descendant of this extreme in design, Chan Chan is renowned for its complex and systematic layout which took to extreme the idea of social division through city design and in its elite citadels expressed the ideology of the elite in design and iconographic expression. It was in fact the ultimate expression of the social and political changes that took place on the north coast after the collapse of Moche, and the restructuring as seen in the new designs in Galindo.

Extreme design aspects of rigid control and lack of centralized public plaza and monumental construction which began after the Moche collapse became repeated later at Chan Chan, founded under Wari-Tiwanaku influence. Here can be seen the extreme use of the repetition of enclosures in the citadel designs. The citadels show not only complex planning based on the repetition of internal elements, such as was highland Wari-Tiwanaku the case at Pikillacta and Viracochapampa before, but also of elements between the citadels, they having been built at roughly the same time. Outside the citadels lay semi planned workers and artisans housing while the citadels were restricted to the elite ruling classes and their entourage.

The Chimú Empire, with Chan Chan as capital, was the largest and most influential in the pre-history of the Andean coastal regions. It spread from Tumbez in the North to the Rimác valley in the south where it was halted by the existence of the Pachacamac regional polity.

 The Chimú had a strong urban focus using a system of provincial capitals and supporting satellite cities and towns, throughout these coastal valleys, but not into the highlands. Their use of iconography in city decoration and in sacred items, particularly gold and silver, remains one of the most remarkable aspects of their culture, although this was used throughout the cities of the Andes. When defeated by the Tawantinusyu in the 1470’s AD, their highly sophisticated culture had much influence on the conquering empire. The Inca was so impressed that he turned Chan Chan into a provincial capital, and took the children of the ruling class to Cuzco for re-education, a system of control developed by the Chimú themselves, and which was a similar fate to the important oracle city of Pachacamac, forming its southern boundary.

By the time the Tawantinsuyu have spread their empire throughout the Andes, there is gathered under their administration over 4000 years of urban planning techniques and tradition to which they have access. Because of the vast range and geographical variation of their empire rigid planning is used less strictly than under their antecedents the Wari-Tiwanaku from whom they had inherited tried solutions.

The Tawantinsuyu were not great urban builders, most of their energies were devoted to infrastructure such as roads, agriculture, storage against famine and war efforts. Where possible they re-modelled existing cities to become their provincial capitals, or strategically built administrative centres nearby existing cities. A quick look at the state of urban planning under the Tawantinsuyu serves also as a summary of the Andean urban planning tradition in its final days.

Cuzco although the capital of the empire was not the finest example of Yawantinsuyu urban planning and its design was not repeated elsewhere in the empire. However the elements of its design, such as elite housing, administrative and storage buildings located in a central position around the plaza, dualist division into upper and lower, Hanan and Hurin, artisan workshops for the creation of elite wealth finance goods in a central position for the control of ideological production were all part of the system of planning, both through re-modelling (the greater use) and the pre-planning of administrative centre and cities.

Although strict planning such as grid layout, used with success by the Wari-Tiwanaku and Moche, and to a lesser extent at Chan Chan, with the use of repeated design elements such as enclosure and patio housing, was not strictly adhered to by the Tawantinsuyu architects, this was because of the difficult topography used for the conservation of the good arable land and the use of strategic trading and defensive positions such as at Písac and Machu Picchu. However, planning can be seen to be of great importance with the architect’s use of stone and clay models, a practice that probably began at least under the Tiwanaku. The most recognized example of this being the remodeling of the centre of Cuzco under Inca Pachacuti at the beginning of their expansive stage. In this instance the Inca dreamed of,  modeled and then laid out the new city design with string on the ground. Although colonial accounts of Tawantinsuyu architect’s use of models show that they were incredibly adept.

Tawantinsuyu annexation of cities recognised the importance of a cities reputation to its economy, ideological and political stability, and therefore when possible used existing centres of control and prestige, such as Pachacamac, located for its sacred connections to off-shore islands. The use of directional and astronomical layout, seen starting in Caral, but clearly a large part of the esoterical layout of Tiwanaku, and again in Chan Chan with its citadels aligned to the summer equinox, was seen in the use of sun temples, as astronomical observatories and calendars, and in Cuzco the esoteric design of the Puma to which the whole city was aligned, with the fortress of Sacsawaman as the head and fanged jaws. Cities of great reputation and ideological strength also tended to have extended life-spans.

 The Tawantinsuyu spread urbaization and the urban planning tradition not just through their wide use of mitmaequnas or colonies, exchanging people from different parts of the empire to spread urbanization, but also through their use of a road system that joined the cities into an urban network that put all territorial control under urban administration, despite the fact that the empire was agriculturally based in terms of both production and population base.

Roads and plazas had always been used internally in cities for social division and restriction of access, as had walls, but the large inter-city roads of the Tawantinsuyu, often improved upon from earlier regional systems such as the Wari-Tiwanaku and Chimú, were to be the factor that finally joined the Andes into a massive urban conglomeration, comparable with the height of the Roman empire.

Many aspects of the Andean urban planning tradition are comparable with other pre-industrial designs from the Old World. The Spanish colonization of the Americas was based on town planning influenced by the Roman grid design and Mediterranean patio house. It is fair to say that the Spanish colonial towns may not have seemed overly alien to the Andean indigenous populations accustomed to pre-Hispanic city life, and many quickly adapted. They would have still found the major streets leading to a central plaza around which were still located the principle religious and administrative buildings which were also the main canvas for ideographical designs as were their temples of old. The houses patio design, previously found throughout the Andes, would have seemed familiar, as would their material of adobe and stone. However the streets would have been wider for the introduction of the horse and wheel. Also the grid layout would have been more rigid as the Spanish brought the towns and cities down from the difficult topography and built upon the good, flat arable land. Also familiar would have been the act of remodelling existing cities, such as Cuzco as part of a process of cultural fusion, under gone recently by many under the colonization of the Tawantinsuyu Empire. Further in depth comparisons are warranted and now that the elements of the urban planning tradition have been recognised, these comparisons become possible and place the Andean experience contemporaneous with the early use of urban planning in other ancient civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Indus Valley.