Excerpt from Chapter 1:

Curing Incas: Andean Lifeways and the Pre-Hispanic Imperial Dead

In older times—before Christians came to the empire that the Incas called Tawantinsuyu, before they called that empire Peru—men and women healed the living with knives, and they cured the dead with air. They hadn’t always done so. The Yauyo people remembered a time when the dead “came back to life on the fifth day exactly” and were welcomed by their people with prepared food and drinks. “Now I’ll never die again forever!” they would say. This was not a good thing. The people so “swiftly increased in number” that they hungrily crowded the land. One day a man returned to life a day late and his wife, enraged, threw a corncob at him. “Why are you so damn lazy?” she shouted. “Other people never let us down by failing to come. But you, yesterday, you made us wait for you, and all for nothing.” The man’s spirit flew back to their ancestral source, never to return.[i] Ever after, the dead made way for the living, yielding their present fertility, and the living, in grateful grief, devised new ways to keep their loved ones close.

Here is a story about them.

High in the Andes, in a region that the Spanish would call Huarochirí, a Yauyo man visited a healer. He was in pain, likely grimacing at the tender, fractured spot left of his crown where the mountain had hit him with a rock, or where he had been injured while warring for the Inca.[ii] Despite that pain, he had walked to this healer on his own two legs, strong from climbing to maintain the canals of his ayllu—the clan group that included the living, the dead, and other beings and plants they cared for. Or, if the pain was too much to bear, his ayllu members would have born him there on their shoulders.

The healer laid him in a soft place, possibly in the open air, where the light was clear. She likely took a seat above his shoulders and took his head in her lap.[iii] Centuries later, a Yauyo-descended anthropologist who held that same head would call healers like her “surgeons”—an estimation that captures her expertise in this preoperative examination, though not the more cosmic knowledges she brought to bear when observing his breathing and the pallor [bl1] in his cheeks.[iv] She was experienced in these injuries. Sometimes there was obvious fracture and blood. Other times, a soft swelling indicating a traumatic lesion below. The harm could also be invisible, and she had to palpate where it hurt, take a patient’s pain on faith, and act to keep him from becoming huañuc, a dying one. In this case, she weighed his injury against her skill and decided to operate. A prayer and offering to the snowy mountain being Pariacaca, the sacred paqarisqa or ancestral font to which this man’s spirit would someday return, would have been in order.[v]

A tourniquet around her patient’s crown would cut off the blood flow from his scalp. Securing his head with one hand, she used her other to reach for the tools of her trade, perhaps arrayed on a piece of hide. Surgeons like her sometimes used bronze chisels or rods, but they relied more often on obsidian knives. She chose one, parted his hair with a thumb, and laid the blade against her patient’s scalp. Breathing in and out, she pressed down through skin and flesh until she felt the blade hit bone, a few inches to the side of the trauma. She deftly moved the blade in a semicircle, expanding the incision to prepare a circular flap in the scalp. She may have daubed it with a natural antiseptic before preceding; to steady himself, the patient may have chewed a quid of coca, the sacred green leaf that suppressed hunger and pain. She edged her blade beneath the flap and gently peeled it back, exposing the skull to the air. The hill of bone was pink with blood, its smooth curve possibly cratered by a trauma endangering the delicate dura mater and brain beneath. The surgeon set her blade upon the skull at a safe distance from the wound or malady. Then with slow strokes she abraded the bone, beginning the surgical operation that the Yauyo anthropologist would call trepanation.[vi]

Woman and man, surgeon and patient, were bound in a covenant of care. From his distant peak Pariacaca—who had expelled the sacrifice-hungry fire-monster Huallallo Caruincho and brought about this age of knowledge and plenty—may have watched, approving of her work. As always, that work would be temporary. The next time her patient experienced a cranial injury, the damage would be too great; in the midst of surgery he would die. This was the way of death, which uncrowded the land to support loved ones’ survival.

But the care mattered and would continue when he was breathless. His loved ones would seat him as he had sat in life. They would bind his knees and arms to his empty chest, cradling his head in his hands, making his new seedlike, rooting self. They would keep vigil into the night and would mourn until the moment that his essence flew away—“Sio!”—in the shape of a fly. “Now he’s going away to see Pariacaca, our maker and our sustainer,” they would say.[vii]

Something of his spirit would then come back. A female family member would tend his body at home, giving that returned spirit something to eat. In the coming year, his ayllu would take him to Pariacaca, or a more local shrine site where he would be mourned. In one of these caves or high houses of the dead, the cold and dry air would preserve him. His face would remain recognizable, his bundled body becoming like a mallki, a seedling or young tree from which the ayllu’s future prosperity would grow. If he had been a leader, a curaca who represented his people to the Inca, his ayllu might keep him particularly active. Along with other mummified ancestors he might periodically be brought down to the community’s kayan, a flat space or sometimes plaza where ayllus sorted out labor obligations and argued over justice. Via a mallkipvillac, a speaker for the ancestors, they would hear his desires. Periodically redressing, feting, and parading him, his descendants would care for their ancestral lands and canals in his name, asking him to help bring rains and food to sustain them.[viii]

Or he might travel. If he became truly huaca—a sacred thing who spoke to Pariacaca and could therefore command offerings—he might attract the attention of the Incas’ priests. They might seize him, taking him to Cuzco, the imperial capital, to join the collections of the Inca emperors’ own mummified dead. His good treatment would command Yauyo loyalty. The Inca emperor could draw on his power, sending him into war, and his people could celebrate his successes or grieve his distance. If they reserved a piece of him before he left, one of them could wear him as a huayo, a re-embodying mask, to dance his presence. Someday, if the Inca returned him, his interment would become permanent—or so his descendants imagined.[ix]

But not now. Not yet. The Yauyo surgeon succeeded, as she likely had many times before. Her steady scraping at the cranium yielded a platform of bone that she elevated and removed to reduce pressure on his swollen brain. She smoothed the rough edges of the resulting hole. She closed the scalp, allowing the bone to heal. He had survived. Someday he would stop breathing, as would she, and his cured body would preserve her skill for centuries to come. Today, they lived.

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Sources

[i] Salomon and Urioste, eds., The Huarochirí Manuscript, 1, 43, 99n44, 128.

[ii] For Huarochirí’s negotiated entry to the Inca Empire, and service in its army, see Spalding, Huarochiri, Chp. 3; Hernández Garavito, “Legibility and Empire,” 86–89; Mikecz, “Beyond Cajamarca,” 205-206.

[iii] Or he. Gender was no barrier to being a healer or wielding its tools. Andean healers were male and female: Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches; Brosseder, The Power of Huacas; Bastien, Healers of the Andes, 24.

[iv] Tello, “Prehistoric Trephining among the Yauyos of Peru.” Armus and Gómez, The Gray Zones of Medicine, 9, usefully note colonialism’s mystique of “seemingly stable medical systems.”

[v] For the huañuc continuum between the living and the dead, see Salomon, “‘The Beautiful Grandparents,’” 328–329.

[vi] This description of trepanation’s diagnoses, techniques, and tools, and Huarochirí’s healers’ success rate (55.6 percent of Huarochirí’s trepanned patients completely healed), draws from the work of Julio César Tello, who took this particular man’s skull while writing his “Prehistoric Trephining among the Yauyos of Peru,” and bioanthropologist John Verano, whose Holes in the Head, 60–62, discusses this man’s two operations. On breath and Andean healing, see Bastien, Healers of the Andes, 16, citing Jorge Flores Ochoa.

[vii] Salomon and Urioste, eds., The Huarochirí Manuscript, 129.

[viii] Ibid., Chps. 9, 11, 27, 28; Salomon, “‘The Beautiful Grandparents’”; Avendaño, Sermones, 44v; Rostworowski, History of the Inca Realm, 157–158; Isbell, Mummies and Mortuary Monuments, 92–97. It is important to note that the term mallki does not appear in the Yauyo-focused Huarochirí manuscript, it being a term that Spanish priests learned in their extirpations elsewhere, but scholars use its logic to explain the crafting of mummified ancestors in general.

[ix] Hernández Garavito, “Producing Legibility through Ritual”; Salomon, “Turbulent Tombs,” 329–334; Verano, Holes in the Head, 60, 62.