Andean peoples, aboriginal inhabitants of the area of the Central Andes in South America.

Although the Andes Mountains extend from Venezuela to the southern tip of the continent, it is conventional to call “Andean” only the people who were once part of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire in the Central Andes, or those influenced by it. Even so, the Andean region is very wide. It encompasses the peoples of Ecuador, including those of the humid coast—many of whose contacts were as frequently with maritime peoples, to both north and south, as with the highland peoples. Most of the populations and civilizations of Bolivia and Peru are Andean in a central, nuclear way, and here again are included the kingdoms of the irrigated desert coast. The peoples who for the past four and a half centuries have occupied the northern highlands of Chile and Argentina also must be included. (For a description of northern Andean peoples, see Central American and northern Andean Indian. For additional cultural and historical information, see pre-Columbian civilizations: Andean civilization.)

There is a stereotyped image of the Andes showing poverty against a background of bleak, unproductive mountains, where millions insist, against all apparent logic, on living at 10,000 feet (3,000 metres) or more above sea level. Nowhere else have people lived for so many thousands of years in such visibly vulnerable circumstances.

Yet, somehow this perception of the Andean peoples coexists with another, based on the breathtaking stage setting of such archaeological sites as Machu Picchu, the majesty of Inca stone palaces at Cuzco or Huánuco Pampa and such Chimú mud-walled cities as Chan Chan, the beauty of Andean textiles or ceramics in museums the world over, the reported concern of the Inca kings for the welfare of their subjects, and the mostly abandoned large-scale irrigation works or terraces constructed by these peoples.

These two visions of Andean peoples and their accomplishments can be reconciled only if it is recognized that what the resources and ecologic potential of an area and a people may be depends on what part of these resources the people use or are allowed to use by their masters. The Andean region was once rich and produced high civilizations because, over millennia, its people developed an agriculture, technologies, and social systems uniquely adapted to the very specialized if not unique ecologic conditions in which they lived.

Economic systems

Since 1532, under European rule, extractive activities, such as silver, tin, and copper mining, for foreign markets have been favoured to the point to which Andean agriculture and the ecologic wisdom in handling productively the extremely high altitudes have been gradually devalued and mostly forgotten. The population of the Central Andes is both less dense and less urban today than it was in 1500. The coastal cities of South America, from Guayaquil to Buenos Aires, are filling with highlanders who have been convinced by four and a half centuries of colonial rule that cultivating at 12,000 feet is too strenuous.

Although human occupation began over 20,000 years ago, the beginnings of agriculture and population growth are much more recent. Within the last 8,000 years a specialized desert-and-highland agriculture was developed. There are two significant achievements in the Andean agricultural endeavour. First, given the wide range of geographic circumstances—very high mountains in equatorial and tropical latitudes, a 3,000-mile coastal desert, the Amazon rain forest to the east—there were thousands of quite different ecologic pockets, each with its own micro-environment to be understood and exploited. Dozens of crops, with literally thousands of varieties, were domesticated; most of them remain unknown outside the Andean area. Only the potato has acquired a following elsewhere; and only maize (corn) and possibly cotton were known in the Andean region as well as in the rest of the Americas. It is this multiplicity of minutely adapted crops and the domestication of the alpaca and the llama that made the mountains habitable to millions (the bulk of the population in the Central Andes has always lived between 8,000 and 13,000 feet).

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Second, no matter how specialized Andean plants or herds may become, the leap from bare survival to dense populations and civilizations requires something more. The high altitude, with its 200, 250, even 300 frost-threatened nights a year, represents a challenge to any agricultural system. On the high, cold plains, known in the Andes as puna, there are only two seasons: summer every day and winter every night. By alternately using the freezing temperatures of the nocturnal winter and the hot sunshine of the daily tropical summer, Andean peoples developed preserves of freeze-dried meat, fish, and mealy tubers (charki, chuñu) that kept indefinitely and weighed much less than the original food. The giant warehouses that lined the Inca highways could be filled with these preserves and used to feed the engineers planning cities and irrigation canals, the bureaucracy, and the army, not to mention the royal court, with its thousands of male and female retainers.

Political systems

Even these two technological developments, however, are not enough to characterize and explain the emergence of Andean civilizations. From the intimate knowledge of their environmental conditions, the people developed a set of values that may have started from a desire to minimize risks but that soon was elaborated into an economic and political ideal. Every Andean society—be it a tiny, local ethnic group of 20 to 30 villages in a single valley or a large kingdom of 150,000 souls, such as the Lupaca—tried to control simultaneously a wide variety of ecologic stories up and down the mountainsides; some of them were many days’ march from the political core of the nation. If the society was small, the outliers (herders or salt winners above the core; maize, cotton, or coca-leaf cultivators in the warm country below) would be only three or four days away. When the political unit grew large and could mobilize and maintain several hundred young men as colonists, the outliers could be 10 or even 15 days’ walk away from the core.

The colonies were permanent, not seasonal establishments. Since more than one highland kingdom or principality would have maize or coca-leaf oases in a given coastal or upland Amazonian valley, there would be not only competition for their control but also coexistence for long periods of time in a single environment of outlying colonies sent out by quite different core societies.

The Inca state, or Tawantinsuyu as it was known to its own citizens, was perhaps the largest political or military enterprise of all. It reached from Carchi in northern Ecuador to at least Mendoza in Argentina and Santiago in Chile. Its scouts roamed even wider, as recent Chilean archaeology has shown. The Incas expanded and projected on earlier, pre-Incan solutions and adaptations; in the process, many tactics that had worked well on a smaller scale became inoperative; others were reformulated in such ways that their original outline was barely recognizable. For example, they kept an old Andean method of creating revenues for their princes, which involved setting aside acreage for regional authorities and demanding from the conquered peasantry not tribute in kind but rather labour on the field thus set aside. In this way the granary of the peasant household was left untouched; the authority took the risk of hail, frost, or drought decreasing its own revenues.

The Inca state at its zenith did not breach this tradition overtly; the local ethnic groups continued to work the state’s acreage and owed nothing from their own larders. But since the needs of kings kept growing, revenues produced on state lands were soon inadequate; acreage could be and was expanded through such public works as irrigation and terracing. A more tangible way was to increase the amount of energy available for state purposes. For some reasons, still insufficiently understood, the kings did not increase productivity by introducing tribute; they preferred to magnify on an imperial scale the patterns of reciprocal obligations and land use familiar to everyone from earlier times.

Beyond the strategic colonies set up on an expanded model, the Incas did not interfere too much with life of the many local groups that they had incorporated into Tawantinsuyu. Most of the cultures that existed in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile before the Inca expansion can be identified. In fact, because the European invasion beginning in 1532 was mostly concerned with breaking the resistance of the Inca overlords, frequently more is known about the pre-Inca occupants than about Cuzco rule. Inca power was broken and decapitated within 40 years of 1532. The ethnic groups, many of which (like the Wanka or the Cañari) sided with Europeans against the Inca, were still easy to locate and identify in the 18th century. In isolated parts of Ecuador (Saraguro, Otavalo) and Bolivia (Chipaya, Macha) this can still be done today.