First Peoples and the Making of Andean and Amazonian Space

The seventeenth-century chronicler Father Bernabé Cobo summed up the myths of origin among Andean peoples from Quito in the north to Qollasuyu in the south: "Each nation claims for itself the honor of having been the first people and says that everyone else came from them." He noted, "Using their imagination, each nation told their story in a different way." He added that each saw humanity originating in its own territory: "Each nation wished to place creation somewhere within its own lands." Such myths thus encapsulated not only native peoples' notion of their beginnings, but their vision of the space they had inhabited since the dawn of remembered time.

In many origin stories, both in the Andes and the Amazon, the lineage founders and culture heroes were the first to demonstrate their peoples' collective knowledge and technology. Thus, the mythical Guaraní twins from the southeastern lowlands displayed the hunting and warfare skills so valued by their descendants. These primordial ancestors were also seen to have shaped the features of highland and lowland landscapes. Hence, as the transgendered figure of Tunupa journeyed down the aquatic axis of the southern Andes, he drifted across Lake Titicaca, opened up the Desaguadero River, and later her breast milk filled the white expanse of the Uyuni salt lake.

For scholars, the origins of human settlement in the Andean region date back at least 11,000 years. As the glacial period came to an end, people moved into the high-mountain regions and began to domesticate crops and camelids and to convert the challenging environmental conditions of the Andes into the staging ground for flourishing societies. The environmental variations within a relatively limited geographical transect could be dramatic: from the altiplano (or high plateau, at an average elevation over 12,000 feet above sea level), the eastern cordillera (with peaks reaching to 21,000 feet) dropped steeply down into the subtropical Yungas valleys to the east and then into the lush foothills that spilled into the Amazon basin, while the equally imposing western cordillera slid into the coastal desert along the Pacific. Key among the Andean adaptations to the extreme topographical andclimatic conditions was the "vertical integration" of dispersed settlements that obtained access to diverse resources at different elevations. As the ethnohistorian John V. Murra and the Bolivian scholar Ramiro Condarco Morales independently showed, native polities accumulated impressive surpluses of wealth and redistributed them efficiently among large populations using Andean strategies for discontinuous territorial control, complementary production zones, and nonmarket forms of exchange up and down the vertical architecture of the cordillera.

The first great civilization in the southern Andean territory that is today Bolivia was Tiwanaku, which grew from a small polity just south of Lake Titicaca more than 1,500 years ago into a metropolis and ceremonial center sustaining a population of perhaps 125,000 residents and a greater hinterland of a quarter million people. Farmers used raised-field (sukakollo) agriculture, ingeniously suited to the altiplano's extreme temperature fluctuations, for crop yields far superior to those obtained by peasant agriculturalists today. Tiwanaku's vast political, religious, and trading system reached from the lake district down into the valleys of Cochabamba and the tropical lowlands to the east, and to the desert valleys and oases along the Pacific coast to the west, in what is today Chile and Peru.

After Tiwanaku declined sometime around 1100 of the current era, there proliferated a multiplicity of ethnic federations or chieftainships that sparred over territory and called on the support of the lightning gods of war, metals, and prosperity. From among them, the Inka people based in Cuzco arose to establish a vast new polity spanning from what is today southern Colombia in the north down to northern Argentina and central Chile in the south, making it the largest territorial state in the world at the time. Like other regional ethnic federations in the southern Andes, the Inka claimed descent from the earlier civilizational matrix at Tiwanaku and Lake Titicaca. In the imperial version of their origin myth, the Inka asserted that their ancestors had first emerged in the lake district before subsequently migrating north to Cuzco.

The Inka state — known as the Land of the Four Quarters, or Tawantinsuyu — expanded during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries into the domain it named Qollasuyu, the southern quadrant of Tawantinsuyu, which included contemporary Bolivian territory. The Inka drew on older Andean strategies for relocating populations and modifying landscapes for production, and southern Andean space and economy were profoundly transformed by their massive colonization efforts. The colonists (known as mitimaes to the Spanish) came from different regions in Tawantinsuyu and fulfilled different functions: military, administrative, agricultural, and artisanal. Under the Inka Wayna Qhapaq, for example, state management turned the fertile valleys of Cochabamba into the granary of Qollasuyu.

Scholars estimate that early human settlement in Bolivia's eastern lowlands likewise goes back more than 11,000 years. There followed successive waves of migration by mobile peoples that occupied the territory from the humid tropical savanna feeding into the Mamoré River basin, a tributary of the Amazon, down to the dry plains and scrub forests of the Chaco region, in the Pilcomayo River basin, a tributary of the Paraguay River in the south. For example, the Guaraní, a warrior culture from one of the three principal language families in South America, followed river routes as they sought out new territory, sometimes expressed in their mythic search for the "land of no evil." When they reached the Chaco, they fused with the already established Chané people, the southernmost extension of the diaspora of Arawak-speakers who had migrated across the Amazon basin from the Caribbean. They subsequently received the name of Chiriguanos, though today they prefer to be known simply as Guaraní.

As the origin myths express in their own imaginative terms, the ancestors did in fact fashion the human geography of the tropics. In the late twentieth century, geographers and archaeologists have significantly recast our understanding of lowland indigenous societies prior to the conquest. Though these societies were long viewed as simple nomadic groups,...