The Offering at the Puma Punku
Teresa Fewlass
I never thought that I would get to go to Bolivia; Tiwanaku was a world away. But at the University of Pennsylvania Museum's An nual Maya Weekend in April of 2000, Dr. Jeanette Sherbondy introduced me to Dr. Alexei Vranich. Dr. Vranich held the archaeological permit for the Puma Punku in Tiwanaku and he was looking for people to work on site for the next season. Suddenly there was a real chance that I would get to work on a famous archaeological site in the Andes. In June, I boarded a plane for La Paz without even knowing exactly where I was supposed to go once the plane landed. Luckily Dr. Vranich met me at the airport. In the cold gray dawn of the Andean winter, our cab meandered across the altiplano. The adobe and brick city quickly dissipated into sparsely populated farm lands, the sacred white peaks of Illimani rose in the distance, and I was nearing Tiwanaku.
At the Puma Punku
The balks were decades old. On my third day at Tiwanaku, we were taking them down to get them out of the way. The Bolivian crew excavated the third balk, Balk C, in two levels. In the shadow of a massive stone slab which had been left pedestalled on a column of dirt, the little pot on top of Level 3 did not look like much. It was undecorated and the rim had been broken in. While the huge stone loomed over our shoulders, Maestro Ramón used a trowel blade to etch the dimensions of the offering pit into the hard packed ground. I cleaned around the pot, carefully brushing away flakes of dirt. I started finding more little pots. The Bolivian workers started getting very excited. People gathered to help me uncover the first small intact pots to be found at the Puma Punku. Slowly brushing off the dirt, we revealed three little pots and four little plates.
The first pot that I had seen was also the smallest. It had a round body with a flat base and a handle set sideways like a coffee mug's handle that has been put on exactly wrong. The next largest pot had the same type of sideways handle as the first, but on a more angled body with a pedestal foot. A flat, round lid accompanied the second pot but was placed on top of the plates rather than on top of the pot. The largest pot had a long thin neck, a round body that angled down into a pointed base, and two tiny handles on the sides. Two of the little plates had small flat parts on the rims and the other two plates had the same small flat parts and sculpted bird heads on the ends opposite the flat, tail-feathery looking parts. The ceramics all were a pale reddish color and undecorated. Astonishingly, they were all intact. There was more. Beside the small pile of ceramics lay a small copper tube with a seam down the middle, and another small copper piece that was broken into two pieces (see Figure 1). The second copper piece was a thin stick with a flat arc on one end. The stick part was broken in the middle and both parts had bits of textile clinging to them. Scattered among the copper pieces in the dusty pit rested several small bones and a tiny tooth.
On site, the crew immediately began to debate whether the offering was from the colonial era, Inca, or Tiwanaku, argue over whether the bones belonged to an infant or child, and question the use of the copper pieces. Several days later, another crew member found a second offering in the unit wall about five meters north of the first offering. The second offering appeared to be at about the same depth and contained the same set of ceramics. However, it contained llama bones instead of the small ones in the first offering and did not contain any metal pieces.
The Andes
Andean culture has changed much over the millennia since humans first came to the Andes. Rising cultures seized the remnants of the older ones and used the structures to support their own beliefs and institutions. Beginning to expand in the mid-1400's, the Inca empire adopted the long fallen Tiwanaku and conquered the Chimu to seize their great city of Chan Chan.1 Less than 100 years later, the Inca empire fell as it in turn was conquered by the Spanish who built a church atop the great Inca Temple of the Sun in Cusco. With each episode of conquering, the new cultures seized power from the old, but the supporting remnants of the old still reach forth.
The remnants of ancient Andean ritual play an important part in modern Andean religion. People in the Andes are Christian, but they practice their religion in ways that can seem very foreign and often very un-Christian. On Corpus Christi, saints' days, and other Christian holy days, the Andean people celebrate by singing, dancing, and parading in the town plazas. These words alone do not describe anything significantly different from Christian celebrations in other parts of the world, but the sights and sounds show distinct Andean ritual. At Christian celebrations, one might expect to hear stately organ music and see singers in choir robes but at Andean Christian celebrations in Sorata, Cusco, and Tiwanaku, I heard lively music from drums and native flutes and saw dancers and singers dressed in bright multicolored costumes with faux feline skins on their shoulders.
These celebrations are only one way in which the Andean people practice their religion. Many go to church for services just as Christians do all over the world, and also they visit Christian monuments. Recalling Inca reverence for high places, Andean people have placed huge statues of Jesus high on hills and mountain peaks overlooking towns and villages. One such statue overlooks Cusco and another resides in the mountains east of Tiwanaku. During a trip to the Inca site of Iskanwaya, our archaeological crew stopped at a Jesus statue high in the mountains. It was a very special event for one of the Bolivian men and his son as they took a carefully wrapped offering up to the statue. Other offerings and rocks gathered around the base of the statue to mark the visits of previous pilgrims (see Figure 2). Our Bolivian drivers offered libations of alcohol and prayers for safe travel before we got back in the Land Cruisers and again drove off along the narrow, winding, steeply-sided, and rocky road.
Native Andean people still make offerings to Mother Earth, or Pacha Mama, and the Sacred Places. Made to nourish the Sacred Places, these modern offerings may contain many different objects including coca, llama fetuses, dried frogs, various seeds, colored wool, sugar, flowers, and candy, and are usually burned to complete the ritual.2 The people make the offerings for fertile herds, prosperous fields, new homes, to counter illness or bad luck, and anytime they feel that they need a sort of extra little spiritual support. They also make offerings when starting new work, as I discovered when there was a question on site at the Puma Punku as to whether or not an offering should be made when new archaeological crews started working on new units. An offering had already been made to open the site for the season, so it was quickly decided by both Bolivian and American crew members that no new offerings had to be made for the site.
Modern Andean people comfortably combine both Christian and native religion in their rituals, but this was not always the case. Near the beginning of the 1600's, Catholic priests pressured Andean people to renounce their native religion. Some of the Catholic priests realized that they had to know about the indigenous Andean religion in order to fight it and convert the natives, so they collected stories about the Andean natives and studied them. One of these priests, Father Avila, had collected and edited the myths and beliefs of local native people as written down by a man named Thomas. Although Avila meant to use the Huarochiri Manuscript against the native people, Thomas stated that he was writing down the myths and beliefs so they would be remembered. The Andean people had no written language and the Spanish were trying to destroy the living religion, so unless it was written down, the belief system could have been lost. However, Thomas also stated within the manuscript that the Andean people were adapting to the imposed Christian religion and secretly aligning their own religious ceremonies and celebrations with Christian holy days so that the priests would not bother them.3 For example, the manuscript states that, "We know people schedule Chaupi Namca's rites during the month of June, in such a way that they almost coincide with Corpus Christi" and during this festival for Chaupi Namca, men wear puma skins.4 Four hundred years after that was written down, I saw men dance in similar costumes at a Corpus Christi celebration in Sorata. The modern meshing of Christianity and indigenous Andean religion probably began as a facade meant only to ensure the survival of the Andean religion but that facade has evolved into a true interweaving of the two religions which has preserved aspects of both.
In the early 1600s, another Catholic priest, Father Bernabé Cobo, also studied the native people. Although by then many people no longer practiced or remembered much of the Inca politics and religion, Cobo visited important sites including Cusco and Tiwanaku, interviewed native people and wrote down descriptions of rituals, sacred places, and sacrifices. To demonstrate the harmful nature of the false Inca religion, Cobo carefully listed numerous shrines and sacred places and identified what offerings and sacrifices were made to each one. Some guacas were offered only shells, but he listed many to which children were sacrificed.5 Cobo wrote that the Inca collected children as tribute and that it was these children, and some children who were voluntarily given up by their parents, who were most frequently sacrificed. Made only for significant reasons such as famine or the illness of a leader, human sacrifices were the most important offerings and the Incas wanted the sacrificed children to be perfect and happy. Maidens had to have perfect bodies without any blemishes or moles. Infants were breast fed and children were given food and drink to ensure that they were content and happy before they were strangled. Second only to the human sacrifices, animal sacrifices were also very important for ritual offerings. Ideally, the Incas sacrificed domesticated animals such as llamas and guinea pigs because animals raised by humans were integral parts of the sustenance of the people.6
As stated above, both animals and people were sacrificed, but there is also variation among the human sacrifices. Sometimes the children were given by their parents and sometimes they were chosen from among the maidens. Both males and females, children and adult servants or warriors, were chosen to be sacrificed. Sometimes the sacrificial offerings were buried in temples and sometimes they were taken to sacred places like high mountain peaks. High in the snow-capped Andes, Johan Reinhard has found several Inca mummies preserved by the cold. On top of Pichu Pichu in Peru, Reinhard found two human sacrifices inside a raised earth platform. A 15 year-old girl whose head had been molded into the popular cone shape was the first Inca sacrifice to be found with such a deformation. She was killed by a blow to the head. Also inside the platform was the frozen body of a young male who may have been sacrificed with the girl as marriage partners. Two clothed male and female figurines were buried with the girl and boy as part of the offering. North of Pichu Pichu on Ampato, Reinhard found another sacrifice. The skeleton had been hit by lightning and the presence of volcanic ash indicated that the Inca made human sacrifices in response to volcanic eruptions.7 Reinhard found another lightning-scorched mummy on Cerro Llullaillaco in Argentina. Of the three sacrificed children found on Cerro Llullaillaco, the youngest girl had been struck by lightning, but the boy and older girl had not been struck. The 8 year-old girl was wrapped in a shawl secured with silver pins, called tupus, which were shaped like delicate crescents on the ends of sticks. Ceramics and textiles accompanied these three sacrifices as offerings and all three had peaceful expressions on their faces despite being sacrificed. The Inca wanted the pure and honored children to go to the gods comfortably and as the faces of these three sacrificed children showed, it is likely that they were already mercifully unconscious from the altitude and alcohol when they were killed.8
The Inca sacrificed children and built great temples before the Spanish came, but there were also Andean people before the Inca. Many cultures, including the Chimu and the Moche, thrived in the Andes before the Inca. They had rituals, burials, and sacrifices as the Inca later had, but none expanded into such a far-reaching empire. The Chimu had their own great city called Chan Chan. Chan Chan's tombs contained rich offerings and skeletons of young girls who may have been sacrificed to accompany the king in death, but the Incas looted Chan Chan when they conquered the Chimu.9 Preceding the Chimu, the Moche had rich burials with many gold offerings and human sacrifice was a very important part of their culture. Moche priests acted as the deity called the Decapitator and used crescent-shaped blades called tumis to ritually sacrifice humans at the Huaca de la Luna. As the Incas later sacrificed children because of volcanic eruptions, the Moche sacrificed people because of El Niño. Unlike the Inca sacrifices, the Moche sacrifices may not have gone to death so quietly. Some Moche sacrifice skeletons had leg bones pulled from the pelvis joints and some are splayed as if they had been staked.10
Beginning around roughly the same time as the Moche culture, about 2,000 years ago, Tiwanaku started its slow rise, expansion and eventual fall. The two main structures at Tiwanaku are the Akapana and the Puma Punku. The Akapana is a stepped pyramid, composed of seven terraces, that symbolizes a sacred mountain. Channels drain water from the top of the Akapana down through the structure, just as channels of water flow through the more recent Inca structure at Machu Picchu. A moat surrounding the Akapana recalls the Island of the Sun and suggests that the pyramid also symbolizes the center of the world. The Akapana was both a ritual center and a residence, and both burials and offerings have been found there. A whole row of adult mummies was buried in seated positions facing a single male who held a puma shaped incense burner. An offering associated with the sealing of a room included llama figures, pins, a bone lip plug, obsidian and pieces of ceramics. Near the foundation and first terrace, offerings included headless skeletons of adult males, a 2 year-old child, and ceramics including keros. As shown by the headless skeletons, the taking of heads may have been an important part of Tiwanaku ritual sacrifice.11
The second of the two most important structures at Tiwanaku is the Puma Punku, or Gateway of the Lion. Like the Akapana, the Puma Punku was built to channel water down from the top of the structure. Unlike the Akapana, the Puma Punku is aligned directly between Lake Titicaca and the sacred Mount Illimani. The Puma Punku had steps leading onto the temple from the lake in the west and its eastern ritual platform faced the snowcapped mountains.12 Hills rise on the sides to the north and south of the Puma Punku and seem to channel people from the lake to the temple to the mountains. At the temple, walking up the steps is suddenly like ascending a small mountain above the flat altiplano.
Although archaeologists started working on the Puma Punku more than one hundred years ago, the structure is only barely beginning to be uncovered. Tiwanaku died around 1,000 BC after prolonged droughts and the temples were abandoned for hundreds of years.13 It is likely that some people still went to the Akapana, Puma Punku, and other structures at Tiwanaku and made offerings there, because it is very difficult to ignore large stone buildings which rise off a very flat land, but Tiwanaku was largely neglected until the Inca empire expanded east and became interested in ancient Tiwanaku. The Inca empire never had to conquer Tiwanaku as it did the Chimu who followed the Moche, because the Tiwanaku culture died about 400 years before the Incas reached Tiwanaku. The Inca empire found the temples in ruins after hundreds of years of neglect and adopted Tiwanaku into its own cultural identity.14 Tiwanaku helped the Inca to make connections through both time and space by expanding the Inca influence east to Tiwanaku and by linking the Incas to Tiwanaku's origin myths. It helped the Inca empire legitimize its expansion and power. Stone walls and ceramic sherds indicate that while at Tiwanaku, the Inca may have built rooms on the edges of the Puma Punku and made offerings. But the Inca empire was short-lived and the Spanish soon took Tiwanaku. Colonists looted Tiwanaku. Having visited Tiwanaku in 1610, Cobo noted that colonists had already torn the buildings apart looking for treasure and built churches out of Tiwanaku's strong stones.15 Now the Puma Punku is a mound of tumbled rock. Massive blocks are fallen and dislocated like a giant puzzle and archaeologists are trying to put it back together.
The Offering
The sacrificial offering lay buried in the compact Andean soil for a long time before I began to excavate it. One of the first questions about the offering was just how long it had been buried. If, as originally identified, it was a colonial era offering, it would have been in the ground a scanty 400 years. If it was an Inca offering, it would have been in the ground for around 500 years. And if it was a Tiwanaku offering, it could have been in the ground for 1,500 years. It might have been nice if the offering had been Tiwanaku because it would have contributed to the presentation of the Tiwanaku site and culture that the Bolivians were trying to establish to promote tourism at the site. However, the ceramics indicate that it is an Inca offering. Although they do not have any decorations to indicate their origins, the three pots closely match examples of Inca pots. The smallest one is a collared jar, the second pot with the lid is a pedestal bowl, and the third pot with the pointy bottom and slender neck is an arribalo for holding liquids such as chicha.16 Although the heads on the plates look more like birds with pointed beaks, Bolivian crew members insisted that the heads represented ducks. In Cusco, I saw newly made sets of offering ceramics that contained almost exactly the same forms of pottery, but with painted decorations, so this combination of Inca offering vessels must be somewhat common.
The Inca offering contained not only Inca ceramics, but also bones. The bones were very small and judging by size, they could easily have been guinea pig bones. However, the consensus of the crew on site was that the tooth was a human tooth, so the bones must be human bones. Because the Inca sacrificed children of all ages and some adults, there seems to be no ritual preference for either age and thus no solely religious reason why the bones should not belong to a child of either age. The bones are so tiny that they can not even be seen in a photograph, so despite one Bolivian crew member's adamant insistence that the bones are from a seven year-old child, I think it is far more likely that if they are human, the tiny bones were from an infant.
The bones show that the offering was a sacrifice of an infant and the ceramics show that the offering was made during the Inca empire, but the Inca infant offering also contained two small pieces of copper, one of which was broken. A piece of metal with a flat crescent on the end of a stick may be either a tumi or a tupu, but there are distinct differences between the two types of objects. As I saw in the museum at Iskanwaya and in Cusco, a tumi, or sacrificial knife, tends to be decorated with figures and have a handle opposite the crescent blade. A tupu, or pin, tends to be undecorated although it may have a circular or crescent shaped head. Pins were used to hold cloth together for securing mummy bundles and cloaks.17 Although it was initially identified as a sacrificial knife, the broken copper piece in the offering is a pin. Not only does it look exactly like a pin, but it seems too small and delicate to be a functional sacrificial knife, and the textile clinging to both pieces of the object indicates that it was used to pierce cloth, just as a pin should do. Reinhard found tupus securing the cloaks on female sacrifices and securing the cloaks on the silver figures which accompanied the sacrifices,18 so the presence of the tupu in the Feature 700 offering may indicate that the bones were human and that they were from a female.
The metal tube is another mystery. Andean people used bone tubes to sniff snuff and hold pigments,19 but metal does not seem to be the best material for performing these tasks. Metals can discolor pigments, and I suspect many people would prefer not to stick a metal implement up their nostrils. Some metal llama and human figurines were formed by soldering tubes and pieces of metal together20, but I did not see any other pieces of metal in the offering that would indicate that it had been part of a figurine, so the use of the copper tube remains a mystery.
Having resolved the previous questions and identified most of the components of the offering, I now question the meaning of the offering rather than its physical form. The infant offering is related to the llama offering. They are in north-south alignment with each other and they both contain the same set of ceramic vessels, so it is likely that they were offered together as part of the same ritual. The ritual must have been a very important one because the Incas sacrificed both a human child and a domesticated llama. The physical alignment and contents demonstrate the symmetry between the two offerings, but alone they do not speak to the purpose of the offerings. No burials have been found nearby, but perhaps the offerings were associated with environmental changes or the coming of the Inca empire to Tiwanaku. The offerings may have been a sort of rededication or awakening of the temple after long abandonment. Maybe the offerings were associated with the Inca adoption of Tiwanaku into its own cultural identity. There are infinite possibilities as to what event the offering was associated with, but the Inca infant sacrifice and the llama sacrifice were offered for powerful reasons.
When I left Bolivia, the offering was not completely excavated. Because the bones appeared to be human, Dr. Vranich called for a Bolivian specialist to complete the excavation. Although the bones remained in the ground, I bagged the metal pieces and ceramics to be taken to the museum in Tiwanaku. It is unlikely that many people will ever see the ceramics I helped excavate, but I will remember them. Their dull red color was the same hue as the barren winter altiplano. With no trees, the winter vegetation limited to pale spiky grass, the red soil dominates the landscape. Even the adobe houses are made from the red soil. And in the adobe bricks, the people often include the old broken pieces of ceramics like the little pots in the offering.
End Notes
- Adriana von Hagen and Craig Morris, The Cities of the Ancient Andes (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 168.
- Catherine J. Allen, The Hold Life Has; Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community (Washington DC: The Smithsonian Insti- tution Press, 1988), 153-161.
- Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste, The Huarochiri Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion, trans. by Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste; annotations and introductory essay by Frank Salomon; transcription by George L. Urioste. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 24, 42-42, 65, 78, 130-131, 475.
- Salomon & Urioste, 78.
- Bernabe Cobo, Inca Religion and Customs, trans. and ed. by Roland Howard; Foreword by John Howland Rowe. (Austin: Univer sity of Texas Press, 1990), viii, xv-xvi, 51-84.
- Cobo, 111-114.
- Johan Reinhard, "New Inca Mummies," National Geographic 194, no. 1 (July 1998): 130-134.
- Johan Reinhard, "Frozen in Time," National Geographic 196, no. 5 (November 1999): 44-55.
- von Hagen and Morris, 149, 168.
- Ibid., 93-94.
- Alan L. Kolata, The Tiwanaku: Portrait of an Andean Civilization (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 104-129.
- Ibid., 99, 129.
- Ibid., 284-285, 289.
- Ibid., 299-300.
- Cobo, 105-107.
- Craig Morris, "Progress and Prospect in the Archaeology of the Inca," In Peruvian Prehistory, ed. by Richard W. Keatinge (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 244-248.
- Kolata, 157-159.
- Reinhard (1998), 128, 130-131, 133; Reinhard (1999), 38, 46, 52-54.
- Kolata, 158.
- Craig Morris and Adriana von Hagen The Inka Empire and Its Andean Origins (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993),180-181.
Works Cited
Allen, Catherine J. The Hold Life Has; Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community. Washington DC: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988.
Cobo, Bernabe. Inca Religion and Customs. Translated and edited by Roland Howard; Foreword by John Howland Rowe. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
Kolata, Alan L. The Tiwanaku: Portrait of an Andean Civilization. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993.
Morris, Craig. "Progress and Prospect in the Archaeology of the Inca." In Peruvian Prehistory, edited by Richard W. Keatinge, 233-256. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Morris, Craig and Adriana von Hagen. The Inka Empire and Its Andean Origins. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993.
Reinhard, Johan. "New Inca Mummies." National Geographic 194, no. 1 (July 1998): 128-135.
"Frozen in Time." National Geographic. 196, no. 5 (November 1999): 36-55.
Salomon, Frank, and George L. Urioste. The Huarochiri Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. Translated by Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste; annotations and introductory essay by Frank Salomon; Transcription by George L. Urioste. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.
von Hagen, Adriana and Craig Morris. The Cities of the Ancient Andes. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998.