Chachapoyas culture

The Chachapoyas, the Warriors of the Clouds, held the cloud forests of Peru's northern Andes, in the southern Amazonas department, from about 1000 until the Inca conquest of 1476. On knife-edge ridges they built round stone houses and the great walled city of Kuelap, whose twenty-metre walls ring hundreds of dwellings, and set sarcophagi like watchmen, the Purunmachus of Karajia, staring over the abyss. Chachapoya potters, weavers and mummy-makers served quarrelsome local lords who resisted every neighbour, and after annexation resisted the Inca too, so fiercely that Cusco deported whole villages. Chroniclers wrote them down at second hand, so archaeology speaks loudest: cliff tombs, geometric friezes and mountaintop fortresses. Pedro Cieza de Leon recorded that the annexed Chachapoyas adopted Cusco customs under Inca rule. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega preserved their memory in fragmentary second-hand chronicles. Smallpox and colonial labour then devastated them, and by the 18th century the cloud warriors survived mainly as ancestors inside the indigenous peoples of Amazonas.