Chachapoya Iconography and Society at Laguna de los Cóndores, Peru

Abstract

Explorers and researchers have documented distinctive Chachapoya-style architecture and pottery across a wide swath of the northeastern Peruvian Andes. The Chachapoya area lies sandwiched between the Marafion River to the west and north, the Huallaga River to the east, and is bordered to the south by Pías. It covers some 155,000 square kilometers (Figure 5.1). The land of the Chachapoya encompassed a range of ecosystems: the tropical forest along the Marañon, the windswept jalca or high grasslands, the temperate highland valleys ideally suited for potato cultivation and the ceja de selva, or tropical montane wet forest flanking the easternmost cordillera of the Andes. In the words of an early writer, the land of the Chachapoya was a ``very rugged and wet land, all year it does nothing but rain, and for this reason the Indians build their houses on the summits and heights'' (Primeros Agustinos 1916: 56). The name Chachapoya, in fact, may be a corruption of the Inca (Quechua) name for the province called Chachapoyas: sacha (tree) and puyu (cloud) which can be roughly translated as ``cloud forest.'' This is an apt description for much of the Chachapoya territory [Note 1].