Monday! I have been fascinated by the Chachapoya for quite some time :)
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Monday:
BadKitties
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ejoanna
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Caedy
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art ah zen
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FloridaSNMOM
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Most Awesome Nana
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loggersbrat
The Chachapoya ("Warriors of the Clouds") were an ancient civilization in the high mountains of Peru. Their settlement was discovered in 1843. The building below was a fortress, with more than 400 outbuildings. They flourished from possibly the seventh century until 1470, when they were overpowered by the Incas.
Kuelap
The name Chachapoyas is in fact the name that was given to this culture by the Inca; the name that these people may have actually used to refer to themselves is not known. The meaning of the word Chachapoyas may have been derived from sacha-p-collas, the equivalent of "colla people who live in the woods" (sacha = wild p = of the colla = nation in which Aymara is spoken). Some believe the word is a variant of the Quechua construction sacha puya or "people of the clouds."
Five hundred years before the Inca, a remarkable band of warriors called the Chachapoyas built some of the greatest stone monuments in the Americas, yet their civilization vanished almost without a trace.
The Chachapoyas' territory was located in the northern regions of the Andes in present-day Peru. It encompassed the triangular region formed by the confluence of the rivers Marañón and Utcumbamba in the zone of Bagua, up to the basin of the Abiseo river, where the ruins of Pajaten are located. This territory also included land to the south up to the Chontayacu river, exceeding the limits of the current Department of Amazonas towards the south. But the center of the Chachapoyas culture was the basin of the Utcubamba river. Due to the great size of the Marañón river and the surrounding mountainous terrain, the region was relatively isolated from the coast and other areas of Peru, although there is archaeological evidence of some interaction between the Chachapoyas and other cultures. The Chachapoyas were talented engineers whose various burial practices lead them to build mountain side mausoleums in honor the afterlife of their dead. Mummy bundles wrapped in the finest of textiles were set high in Andean caves, often marked with red arches to identify them.
Source
There are some very curious things about the tribe that leave anthropologists, archeologists and everyone else interested in discovering more about their origins and history. First, Spanish accounts called them the tallest and lightest-skinned people of the region. Secondly, their culture – art, architecture, musical instruments, ceramics and clothes – seem to be very distinct when compared to other groups of the area. Third, this tribe mummified their dead, leaving hundreds of mummies and sarcophagi in the caves, nooks and crannies of the peaks of their former region of the Andes which are still being found and studied. These details have led some to speculate that the tribe could have perhaps come from a whole different wave of migration than the rest of the Amerindian people populating the Americas at that time. Could they have been descended from the people of the Indian legends such as Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl or Kulkulcan, the light-skinned gods, who arrived from across the ocean?
Source
Cliff tombs of the Chachapoya
Chachapoya sarcophagi
Victor Engelbert had this to say about the sarcophagi:
On a cliff ledge overlooking the vast Utcubamba Valley I spot five-foot-tall anthropomorphic sarcophagi of six ancient Chachapoya, gazing at the rising sun, as if the dead were watching over the living. The capsulelike coffins, made of clay and grass, and built into the cliff face between A.D. 1100 and 1300, are shielded from the rain by overhanging rock. Within them are mummy bundles holding the remains of Chachapoya elite. To reach the cliff heights, the Chachapoya may have used natural ledges, which were destroyed when they withdrew. Scholars believe a stone wall was erected around each mummy bundle. Cane poles were inserted into the walls, sort of teepee-style, and the capsules were built up and then painted. The effigies were finally "dressed" in feathered tunics and adorned with necklaces and trophy heads. The skulls may have been part of the decoration. The site is called Karijia, after a canyon below; the sarcophagi are known to locals as "ancient wise men."
A blue-eyed Chachapoya mummy
The other mummy pictures were somewhat gruesome, but you can see them
here.
A white-skinned people who were famed as ferocious fighters, the Chachapoyas held out against the Incans, who ruled an empire stretching from southern Chile to northern Ecuador until their conquest by the Spanish.
Archaeologists found an underground burial vault inside a cave with five mummies, two intact with skin and hair. ‘The women and their husbands always dressed in woollen clothes and in their heads they wear their llautos [a woollen turban], which are a sign they wear to be known everywhere.’
Chachapoyas chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote of the tribe: ‘They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.
There is quite a lot of information out there, including reports of
another settlement discovered in Utcubamba Province.
May your Monday be cloudless :)