[CHAPTER VI]
THE ANDEAN NORTH
I. THE CULTURED PEOPLES OF THE ANDES[111]
From the Isthmus of Panama the western coast of South America is marked by one of the loftiest and most abrupt mountain ranges of the world, culminating in the great volcanoes of Ecuador and the high peaks of western Argentina. A narrow coastal strip, dry and torrid in tropical latitudes; deep and narrow valleys; occasional plateaux or intramontane plains, especially the great plateau of central Bolivia—these are the primary diversifications from the high ranges which, rising precipitously on the Pacific side, decline more gradually toward the east into the vast forested regions of the central part of the continent and into the plains and pampas of the south.
Throughout this mountain region, from the plateau of Bogotá in the north to the neighbourhood of latitude 30º south, was continued in pre-Columbian times the succession of groups of civilized or semi-civilized peoples of which the most northerly were the Nahua of Mexico, or perhaps the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. The ethnic boundary of the southern continent is to be drawn in Central America. The Guetare of Costa Rica, and perhaps the Sumo of Nicaragua, constitute northerly outposts of the territorially great Chibchan culture, the centre of which is to be found in the plateau of Bogotá, while its southerly extension leads to the Barbacoa of northern Ecuador. South of the Chibcha, in the Andean region lying between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, is the aboriginal home of the Quechua-Aymara peoples, nearly the whole of which, at the time of the Conquest was embraced in the Empire of the Incas. This empire had even reached into the confines of the third culture area of the southern continent; for the Calchaqui of the mountains of northern Argentina, who were the most representative and probably the most advanced nation of the Diaguité group, had even then passed under Inca subjection. Other tribes of this most southerly of the civilized peoples of America had never been conquered; but bounded, as they were, by the aggressive empire of the north, by the warlike Araucanians to the south, and by the savages of the Gran Chaco to the east, their opportunities for independent development were slight; indeed, it is not improbable that the peoples of this group represent the last stand of a race that had once extended far to the north and had played an important part in the pre-Inca cultures of the central Andes. Beyond the Diaguité lay the domains of savagery, although the Araucanians of the Chilean-Argentine region were not uninfluenced by the northward civilizations and in most respects were superior to the wild tribes that inhabited the great body of the South American continent; but the indomitable love of liberty, which has kept them unconquered through many wars, gave to their territory a boundary-line marked no less by a sharp descent in culture than by its untouched independence.
In Columbian times these three Andean groups—the Chibchan tribes, the Quechua-Aymara, and the Diaguité-Calchaqui—possessed a civilization marked by considerable advancement in the arts of metallurgy (gold, silver, copper), pottery, and weaving, by agriculture (fundamentally, cultivation of maize), and by domestication of the llama and alpaca. In the art of building, in stone-work, and, generally, in that plastic and pictorial expression which is a sign of intellectual advancement, the central group far excelled its neighbours. Nor was this due to the fact that it alone, under Inca domination, had reached the stage of stable and diversified social organization; for the archaeology of Peru and Bolivia shows that the Empire of the Incas was only the last in a series of central Andean civilizations which it excelled, if at all, in political power rather than in the arts, industrial or aesthetic.
Our knowledge of the religious and mythic ideas of these various groups reflects their relative importance at the time of the Spanish conquests more than their natural diversity. Of the Chibchan groups, only the ideas of a few tribes have been described, and these fragmentarily; of the mythology of the Calchaqui, who had yielded to Inca rule, even less has come down to us; while what is known of the religious conceptions of the pre-Inca peoples of the central region is mainly in the form of gleanings from the works of art left by these peoples, or from such of their cults as survived under the Inca state or in Inca tradition. Inevitably the central body of Andean myth, as transmitted to us, is that of the Incas, who, having reached the position of a great imperial clan, naturally glorified both their own gods and their own legendary history.