2019-08-08 - Ocean Going Incas
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Kensanata writes (following from a conversation on fedi) about the
Inca, regarding the question about whether the Inca were Ocean
Traders [1].
The answer, of course is yes! Being a large civilisation with
excellent access to the sea, the Inca utilised that resource in the
same way they used everything else in their realm.
To be a little more specific, the Inca outsourced their Ocean
Trading to the Chincha People, who had been established as Ocean
traders since round about the start of the Late Intermediate Period
(so c. 900 CE). They were absorbed into the Inca Empire in around
1450 CE, but, unlike so many of the other neighbouring civs, their
Kingdom enjoyed some independence in the Inca System, probably due
to their status as traders and boatbuilders. They held their
traditional locations - the valley of Chincha and a coastal region
- under their own system of Lordship. That's located about 200 km
south of Lima, there's a nice Archaelogical Paper on some recent
discoveries in Chincha at
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7218
When the Spanish first arrived at Cuzco, the Chincha Lord was
mistaken for the Great King Atahualpa, owing to the wealth he
displayed. He was also noted as the only subject leader who was
carried on a litter like the Great King.
As to how far they travelled, that's a matter of debate. What is
certain is that they were extremely highly regarded by the Inca,
who relied on them to carry out all of their Ocean Trading. There's
evidence of them travelling as far south as modern-day Quillota in
Chile, at the Southern extreme of the Inca Empire.
We know they were trading at least as far North as the modern-day
boundary between Ecuador and Colombia, because the Spanish sailor
Bartolomé Ruiz captured one there in 1526. Wikipedia has a
translation of the original work which describes the vesell:
> The ship he took had a capacity of up to 30 toneles [25 metric
> tons]. The keel was made of canes [balsa logs] as thick as posts
> bound together with ropes of what they call henequen, which is
> like hemp. it had an upper deck made of lighter canes, tied with
> the same kind of ropes. The people and their cargo remained dry
> on the upper deck, as the lower logs were awash in the sea water.
> The ship had masts of good wood and lateen-rigged sails of
> cotton, the same as our ships, and good rigging with henequen
> ropes. It carried stone weights like barber's grinding stones as
> anchors.
The social anthropologist Dorothy Hosler postulates that the
Chincha were trading at least as far north as modern-day
Zihuatenejo in Mexico, because the local metal workers in that
state underwent two major transformations in methods, but without
any indicaiton of intermediate developments. The metal workers of
the Andes, however, did experience the intermediate stages, and the
transformed Mexican metalworks all display Andean techniques.
That's a journey, from Chincha to Zihuatenejo, of about 4,500 km as
the crow flies, probably 5,500 km if you take in a stop at Huyaca.
The voyage south to Quillota was a mere skip at just 3,000 km,
giving a total extent of the Inca-Chincha Trading Empire at around
8,500 km.
Hosler's work, like so many of the really interesting stuff in the
world, is of course behind paywalls a mile high, but I'm sure you
could dig something up if you were interested enough. The most
recent paper of hers I've read on the issue is West Mexican
Metallurgy: Revisited and Revised. Journal of World
Prehistory, 22(3), 185–212. doi:10.1007/s10963-009-9021-7, that
one is replete with more academic references to the Chincha and
their Ocean Empire than you can shake a stick at.
The Chincha people, like so many of the South American Civs, are
lost to us today, eradicated by western diseases as much as the
depredations of the Spanish. It fills me with rage that access to
the knowledge we have gained of them is denied to all but the
wealthiest in our societies.
[1]
gopher://alexschroeder.ch/12019-08-08_The_Inca
[2]
https://is.gd/AXzOMF
