The independent republics that succeeded the Viceroyalty of Peru — Peru (1821), Bolivia (1825), Ecuador (1830), Argentina (1816, including the Inca-period Argentine north-west), Chile (1810, including the Inca-period Chilean north), Colombia (1810, including the Inca-period southern Colombian highlands) — inherited the territory of the former Inca Empire distributed across their boundaries. The successor states were, in their early decades, dominated by the creole and mestizo political elite; the indigenous Andean populations were largely excluded from political life through the long nineteenth century and into the twentieth. This chapter traces the survival, the revival, and the contemporary state of the Andean cultural inheritance that the Inca state had organised.
Indigenismo
The intellectual and political movement known as indigenismo — the assertion of indigenous Andean culture and politics as central to the identity of the modern Andean republics — emerged in the early twentieth century, principally in Peru and Bolivia. Its principal figures included the Peruvian Marxist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui (whose Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality of 1928 is the founding text of the modern Andean political left); the novelist José María Arguedas (whose Quechua-Spanish bilingual novels of the 1930s-1960s are the canonical works of Andean indigenous literature); the painter José Sabogal and the indigenista art movement of 1920s-1930s Peru; and the Bolivian indigenous political movements that would eventually produce the 2006 election of Evo Morales as the country's first indigenous president.
The indigenismo movement was, particularly in its mid-twentieth-century forms, both an academic-political project and a cultural revival. The Peruvian agrarian reforms of the late 1960s under General Velasco Alvarado abolished the hacienda system that had kept much of the rural indigenous population in semi-feudal labour conditions, redistributed land to indigenous communities, and gave Quechua official status as a national language (1975) — measures that have largely persisted through subsequent Peruvian governments of differing political orientations. The Bolivian indigenismo movement reached its political peak in the Morales government (2006-2019), which substantially restructured the Bolivian state along plurinational lines — recognising thirty-six indigenous nations as constituent of the country, formally protecting indigenous languages, and granting territorial autonomy to indigenous communities.
The rediscovery of Machu Picchu
The Inca site that has come to symbolise the empire in international consciousness — Machu Picchu — was, before its modern reintroduction to international scholarship, well known to the local Quechua-speaking population around its location in the cloud forest above the Urubamba river. It had been visited by various nineteenth-century travellers (including the German engineer Augusto Berns, who had attempted to commercialise it in the 1880s; the British explorer Thomas Payne; and the Peruvian agriculturalist Agustín Lizárraga, who left his name inscribed on one of the walls in 1902). The site was not, in any meaningful sense, "lost." But it was not extensively studied by international academic archaeology until the Yale historian Hiram Bingham, on his Peruvian expedition of 1911, was led to the site by the local farmer Melchor Arteaga and the Quechua-speaking children of the area, and recognised its scale and significance.
Bingham's National Geographic publications of 1912 and 1913 made Machu Picchu internationally famous. His 1911-1915 expeditions removed a substantial collection of artefacts to the Yale Peabody Museum, which was the subject of a long Peruvian government request for return; most of the collection was repatriated by Yale to Peru between 2010 and 2012 after substantial international negotiation. The site itself, after major Peruvian government conservation works from the 1930s onward, has become one of the most-visited tourist destinations in South America (about 1.5 million visitors a year in the pre-pandemic period; controlled access since 2017 with hourly entry limits to prevent damage to the structures). It is, by any measure, the most-recognised single image of the Inca civilisation.
The Quechua-speaking world
The Quechua language, in its various dialects, is currently spoken by approximately eight to ten million people. The principal speech communities are in Peru (about five million, particularly in the southern highlands around Cuzco), Bolivia (about two million, particularly in the Cochabamba and Sucre regions), Ecuador (about one and a half million, in the highland Cañar, Imbabura, and Chimborazo regions), with smaller communities in Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. It is the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas, by a substantial margin over Aymara (about two million speakers, largely in Bolivia and Peru) and Guaraní (about six million, in Paraguay and adjacent regions). All three Andean republics formally recognise Quechua as an official language. Education in Quechua at the primary level is mandatory in some regions of Peru and Bolivia; Quechua-language media (newspapers, radio stations, television programmes, and increasingly internet content) is substantial.
The Quechua-speaking world is not, however, the linguistic monolith that this summary may suggest. The major dialect division (between the so-called Quechua I of central Peru, with substantial pre-Inca origins, and the Quechua II of the southern Andes, descended from the imperial Inca Cuzco standard) is comparable to the difference between Spanish and Italian; speakers from one major dialect group cannot, in many cases, easily understand speakers from another. The standardisation of "Quechua" as a single language has been an ongoing political project in modern Peru and Bolivia.
Where Tahuantinsuyu can still be found
The physical remains of the Inca state are unusually well-preserved by the standards of pre-Columbian American civilisations. The dry climate of the Peruvian highlands and the south Peruvian coast has helped; the inaccessibility of the cloud-forest sites has helped; the survival of the indigenous population, which has continued to use and maintain Inca-era agricultural terracing, water systems, and roads, has helped. The travel section of this volume describes twenty stops in detail; some of them — Cuzco, Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley, Ollantaytambo, Tipón, Pisac, Choquequirao, Sacsayhuamán, the southern Peruvian Qhapaq Ñan — are among the best-preserved monumental archaeology of any pre-Columbian state.
Less obvious is the institutional inheritance. The Quechua language is, in itself, the principal continuous Inca-era inheritance. The Andean cuisine of the modern Peruvian and Bolivian republics (the use of maize, potatoes, quinoa, coca leaves, ají chillies, and the high-altitude livestock of llama and alpaca) is largely a continuation of the Inca-era agricultural system. The annual cycle of Andean Catholic festivals — Inti Raymi at Cuzco in June, the great pilgrimage to Qoyllur Rit'i near Cuzco in May-June, the pilgrimage to the Lord of the Earthquakes in October — preserves the form and substantially the content of the pre-conquest religious calendar. The Andean textile tradition — the most extensive surviving non-Western textile tradition in the world — has direct continuities with Inca-era technique and design.
The Inca state was, by every reasonable measure, the largest indigenous-American political project. Its collapse in 1532-1572 was the single most consequential event of South American history. Its inheritance — linguistic, cultural, religious, demographic, political — remains one of the substantial forces of the modern continent. The descendants of its subjects, two hundred million of them in seven modern countries, continue to use the institutions, the techniques, the language, and the calendar that the Inca state had organised. The country itself, in the sense of a unified political state under Sapa Inca rule, is over. The civilisation it organised is, on any reasonable measure, very much alive.
"We have not died. We never died. We are still here, on top of the mountains. The mountains are still ours." — Quechua-language statement by Andean indigenous leaders, Cuzco, 1995
End of Chapter X · End of Volume VII