ANDEAN PEOPLES

Distribution of aboriginal South American and circum-Caribbean cultural groups. aboriginal inhabitants of the area of the Central Andes in South America. Although the Andes Mountains extend from Venezuela to the southern tip of the continent, it is conventional to call Andean only the people who were once part of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire in the Central Andes, or those influenced by it. Even so, the Andean region is very wide. It encompasses the peoples of Ecuador, including those of the humid coastmany of whose contacts were as frequently with maritime peoples, to both north and south, as with the highland peoples. Most of the populations and civilizations of Bolivia and Peru are Andean in a central, nuclear way, and here again are included the kingdoms of the irrigated desert coast. The peoples who for the past four and a half centuries have occupied the northern highlands of Chile and Argentina also must be included. (For a description of northern Andean peoples, see Central American and northern Andean Indian. For additional cultural and historical information, see pre-Columbian civilizations: Andean civilization.) There is a stereotyped image of the Andes showing poverty against a background of bleak, unproductive mountains, where millions insist, against all apparent logic, on living at 10,000 feet (3,000 metres) or more above sea level. Nowhere else have people lived for so many thousands of years in such visibly vulnerable circumstances. Yet, somehow this perception of the Andean peoples coexists with another, based on the breathtaking stage setting of such archaeological sites as Machu Picchu, the majesty of Inca stone palaces at Cuzco or Hunuco Pampa and such Chim mud-walled cities as Chan Chan, the beauty of Andean textiles or ceramics in museums the world over, the reported concern of the Inca kings for the welfare of their subjects, and the mostly abandoned large-scale irrigation works or terraces constructed by these peoples. These two visions of Andean peoples and their accomplishments can be reconciled only if it is recognized that what the resources and ecologic potential of an area and a people may be depends on what part of these resources the people use or are allowed to use by their masters. The Andean region was once rich and produced high civilizations because, over millennia, its people developed an agriculture, technologies, and social systems uniquely adapted to the very specialized if not unique ecologic conditions in which they lived. Additional reading Studies of the pre-Columbian history and culture of this area may be found in the bibliography of the article pre-Columbian civilizations. The best account of Andean cultures as they appeared to an eyewitness of the early years (16th century) of European rule is Pedro de Cieza de Len, The Incas (1959, reissued 1969; originally published in Spanish, 1554). An introduction to Andean archaeology may be found in John Howland Rowe and Dorothy Menzel (eds.), Peruvian Archaeology (1967), with selections mainly by American scholars. The role of irrigation in the cultural and political elaboration of coastal kingdoms is well illustrated in Paul Kosok, Life, Land, and Water in Ancient Peru (1965). Special regional problems are introduced in Louis C. Faron, Mapuche Social Structure (1961), a study of the reintegration of these people of Chile since the time of conquest; L.C. Faron, Hawks of the Sun (1964), on the Southern Andes; Betty J. Meggers, Ecuador (1966); Donald W. Lathrap, The Upper Amazon (1970); Paul T. Baker and Michael A. Little (eds.), Man in the Andes: A Multidisciplinary Study of High-Altitude Quechua (1976); Kevin Kling, Ecuador: Island of the Andes (1988; originally published in French, 1987), focusing on Indian culture and life and illustrated with photographs; and Steve J. Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640, 2nd ed. (1993). John V. Murra The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica