The legendary white-skinned Cloud People of Peru

[skywizard]

A lost city discovered deep in the Amazon rainforest could unlock the secrets of a legendary tribe.

Little is known about the Cloud People of Peru, an ancient, white-skinned civilisation wiped out by disease and war in the 16th century.

But now archaeologists have uncovered a fortified citadel in a remote mountainous area of Peru known for its isolated natural beauty.


An ancient Chachapoyas village located close to the area where
the lost city was found


It is thought this settlement may finally help historians unlock the secrets of the 'white warriors of the clouds'.

The tribe had white skin and blonde hair - features which intrigue historians, as there is no known European ancestry in the region, where most inhabitants are darker skinned.

The citadel is tucked away in one of the most far-flung areas of the Amazon. It sits at the edge of a chasm which the tribe may have used as a lookout to spy on enemies.


The Chachapoyas, also called the Warriors of the Clouds, were
an Andean people living in the cloud forests of the Amazonian
region of present-day Peru


The main encampment is made up of circular stone houses overgrown by jungle over 12 acres, according to archaeologist Benedict Goicochea Perez.

Rock paintings cover some of the fortifications and next to the dwellings are platforms believed to have been used to grind seeds and plants for food and medicine.

The Cloud People once commanded a vast kingdom stretching across the Andes to the fringes of Peru's northern Amazon jungle, before it was conquered by the Incas.


A mummy of a baby from the
Chachapoyas culture


Named because they lived in rainforests filled with cloud-like mist, the tribe later sided with the Spanish-colonialists to defeat the Incas.

But they were killed by epidemics of European diseases, such as measles and smallpox.

Much of their way of life, dating back to the ninth century, was also destroyed by pillaging, leaving little for archaeologists to examine.

Remains have been found before but scientists have high hopes of the latest find, made by an expedition to the Jamalca district in Peru's Utcubamba province, about 500 miles north-east of the capital, Lima.

Until recently, much of what was known about the lost civilisation was from Inca legends.

Even the name they called themselves is unknown. The term Chachapoyas, or 'Cloud People', was given to them by the Incas.

Their culture is best known for the Kuellap fortress on the top of a mountain in Utcubamba, which can only be compared in scale to the Incas' Machu Picchu retreat, built hundreds of years later.

Two years ago, archaeologists found an underground burial vault inside a cave with five mummies, two intact with skin and hair.

Chachapoyas chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote of the tribe: 'They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas' wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.

'The women and their husbands always dressed in woollen clothes and in their heads they wear their llautos [a woollen turban], which are a sign they wear to be known everywhere.'


Secret civilisation: a map of the region where the settlement
was found


The Chachapoyas' territory was located in the northern regions of the Andes in present-day Peru.

It encompassed the triangular region formed by the confluence of the Maranon and Utcubamba rivers, in the zone of Bagua, up to the basin of the Abiseo river.

The Maranon's size and the mountainous terrain meant the region was relatively isolated.




Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ople-Peru.html




peace...

[Emil El Zapato]

When Genetics and Linguistics Challenge the Winners’ Version of History
New research shows that indigenous Peruvians were more resilient than the conquering Inca gave them credit for

Two conquering empires and more than 500 years of colonial rule failed to erase the cultural and genetic traces of indigenous Peruvians, a new study finds. This runs contrary to historical accounts that depict a complete devastation of northern Peru’s ancient Chachapoya people by the Inca Empire.

The Chachapoyas—sometimes referred to as “Warriors of the Clouds” because they made their home in the Amazonian cloud forests—are mainly known today for what they built: fortified hilltop fortresses and intricate sarcophagi overlooking their villages from sheer, inaccessible cliff sides. The little we know about their existence before the arrival of the Spanish comes to us via an oral history passed along by the Inca to their Spanish conquerors—in other words, the winners' version of history.

Now, a study tracking the genetic and linguistic history of modern Peruvians is revealing that the Chachapoyas may have fared better than these mainstream historical accounts would have us believe. As Chiara Barbieri, a post-doctoral researcher from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, puts it: “Some of these historical documents were exaggerated and a little bit biased in favor of the Inca.”

Many of these early reports stem from two historians who essentially wrote the book on the Inca Empire during the time period from 1438 to 1533: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a conquistador and Incan princess who published chronicles on the Inca Empire in the early 17th century, and Pedro de Cieza de Leon, a Spanish conquistador from a family of Jewish converts who travelled through the area in the mid-16th century, and wrote one of the first lengthy histories of the Inca people and Spanish conquests.

According to Cieza de Leon’s account, it was in the 1470s, about midway through the Inca Empire, that paramount leader Túpac Inca Yupanqui first attacked the Chachapoyas in what is today northern Peru. He quickly found that the Warriors of the Clouds were not the type to give up without a fight. Cieza de Leon described the first battle between Yupanqui and the Chachapoyas in the first part of his Chronicle of Peru:

The Chachapoyas Indians were conquered by them, although they first, in order to defend their liberty, and to live in ease and tranquillity, fought with such fury that the Yncas fled before them. But the power of the Yncas was so great that the Chachapoyas Indians were finally forced to become servants to those Kings, who desired to extend their sway over all people.

Beaten but not defeated, the Chachapoyas rebelled again during the reign of Yupanqui’s son after the latter died. Huayna Capac had to re-conquer the region, but encountered many of the difficulties his father had, according to Cieza de Leon:

Among the Chachapoyas the Inca met with great resistance; insomuch that he was twice defeated by the defenders of their country and put to flight. Receiving some succour, the Inca again attacked the Chachapoyas, and routed them so completely that they sued for peace, desisting, on their parts, from all acts of war. The Inca granted peace on conditions very favourable to himself, and many of the natives were ordered to go and live in Cuzco, where their descendants still reside.

De la Vega’s account, written nearly 50 years after Cieza de Leon’s in the early 17th century, tells a similar story of a decisive conquest and subsequent forced dispersal of the Chachapoyas around the Inca Empire. The Inca often used this strategy of forced dispersal, which they referred to by the Quechua word mitma, to dissuade future rebellion in the vast region they came to control. (Quechua, according to the new study, is the most widely-spoken language family of the indigenous Americas.)

“We have some records in the Spanish history that the Inca had replaced the population completely, moving the Chachapoyas for hundreds of kilometers and replacing them with people from other parts of the empire,” Barbieri says.

These and other accounts are some of the only historical notes we have of the Inca, who lacked any system of writing other than the quipu, or knot records. The quipu system of cords used different types of knots to indicate numbers, and was used for accounting and other records.

“We know a lot about what the Inca did because Inca kings, or high officials, were talking to Spanish historians,” Barbieri says. “So the piece of history of this region that we know is very much biased towards what the Inca elite were telling the Spaniards. What we don’t know was what happened before that—everything that happened before the 16th century.”

That is now changing, thanks to a genetic study on which Barbieri was lead author, published recently in Scientific Reports.

Many researchers had thought the local variant of the Quechua language family spoken by the Chachapoyas had died out, says Barbieri’s coauthor Paul Heggarty, a linguist also at the Max Planck institute. Then, a colleague heard a local dialect spoken in the area. Researchers with their team found fewer than 10 people who actually spoke the Chachapoyas variant, and confirmed it to be distinct from other Quechua languages spoken in the Andes to the south of the Chachapoyas region and north in modern day Ecuador.

“We collected and transcribed actual recordings so that anyone can ‘confirm’ the differences by listening on our website,” Heggarty says.

There was also a genetic component to the research. The researchers traveled between small villages, taking saliva samples from volunteers in the region in February 2015, particularly from those who spoke Quechua, or whose parents or grandparents spoke Quechua. They analyzed DNA from the samples, honing in on genetic markers unique to the Americas.

They found that in contrast with people who live south of the Andes, who tend to have more mixed genes, some genetic profiles in Chachapoyas were not found anywhere else, even in other Andean regions. “The Chachapoya stayed a bit isolated genetically,” Barbieri says, adding that the presence of these genes proves thay some of the historical documents were exaggerated and biased in favor of the Inca conquerors' version of events. “We are denying this effect of moving and replacing an entire population.”

The idea that the Chachapoya weren’t completely displaced was not entirely new, according to Barbieri and Heggarty. Some histories hold that the Chachapoya, still rankled over their defeat and at least partial displacement, lent a hand to the Spanish in their conquest of the Inca. “It was the same sort of thing you often get: my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” Barbieri says.

While the "Warriors of the Clouds"—a term Heggarty says likely came from romanticized notions from scholars—may have satisfied a lust for revenge against their Inca conquerors by siding with the Spanish, the alliance did not exactly make them best friends. According to Cieza de León, one of Francisco Pizarro’s captains conquered the Chachapoyas area and “reduced the natives to the service of his Majesty.” Some Spanish were granted the right to demand tribute and forced labor from the local people in the area.

There have been few bio-archaeological studies in the area, says Kenneth Nystrom, a biological anthropologist at the State University of New York New Paltz who has published studies looking at the skeletal remains of Chachapoyas. “It was interesting to read those results, but also how they linked in the linguistic analysis of the Quechua,” says Nystrom, who was not involved in the new research.

Nystrom adds another wrench to the mix: The modern concept we have of the area being a unified culture before the Inca arrived, he says, may not have been exactly true. While there was some continuity between the communities in the area in terms of iconography and architectural style, Nystrom concludes that the Chachapoya may not have self-identified as a unified culture.

“There may have been some kind of loose association between the groups, but what I ultimately suggest is that when the Inca came in, they said ‘You guys are all Chachapoyas and we’re going to treat you as an administrative unit,’” Nystrom says. This was a political move: By bringing together the disparate communities in an area, including in some case the possible forcible displacement of families, they found the conquered populations easier to govern.

Today, only a few dozen people in the region still speak the Chachapoya form of Quechua. “We can’t do anything to keep it alive when there are only a few people speaking the language,” she says. “This Quechua is going to die.”

That may be true. But there is another linguistic layer that has yet to be revealed: the Chachapoya language. The form of Quechua that some Chachapoyas speak today is a the superimposed language that arrived around the time, or shortly before, the Inca conquest of Chachapoyas. The original language of these people has been dead for centuries, with trace remains found only in a few place names and the surnames of some regional residents, says Barbieri.

“There is another layer which is even more mysterious, which is the ancient language of the Chachapoya,” she says.

[Aianawa]

Love the data n feelings around this research, back when being introduced to the many calenders of Maya n regions, the first one's upon my research were the cloud peoples and the mushroom peoples.

[Emil El Zapato]

I'll go for two of the cloud peoples and pass on the mushrooms

[Dreamtimer]

No 'trips' for you, eh?

[Emil El Zapato]

not even good ones ... I always get the heebee jeebees when I see 'white-skinned' ... it's like a flashing neon sign ... it's the social justice warrior in me.

I wonder if there are any 'brown-skinned' gods in Europe? serious.

[Aianawa]

I believe Jesus was brown and potentially black if that helps ?.

[Emil El Zapato]

that's not what I heard?

[Wind]

He certainly wasn't white skinned. He was a Middle-Eastern jew with darker skin tone than portrayed in the west.

[Emil El Zapato]

I know Wind ... but I've never seen an artistic depiction portraying him as such. It is a long historical tale to tell to impact Aianawa's mindset and then he would purposefully disregard it. His 'if that helps' tells the whole story. For obvious reasons the phrase 'white-skinned' is like a red flag to a bull to me. Even if innocent, it has been so distorted by the white supremacists that I can't see it any other way, in particular when associated with anthropological history.

In any case, Jesus was middle-eastern not European in the classical sense. Despite the subcontinents having all been sprinkled by the Godly Northern Europeans. (No offense, to present company Northern Europeans ...

[Dreamtimer]

You haven't been going to the right shops, NAP.

There are brown-skinned Jesus figures and even paintings. But you're right, over here Jesus has become white with blue eyes and very light brown hair. And a very European nose.

There are many brown-skinned gods around the world.

Here's a painting of Jesus that looks Middle Eastern.



This one looks old, but I don't know.

[Emil El Zapato]

sacrilege ...

interesting, but a thought occurred to me. In today's spiritual climate, because Jesus was falsely portrayed throughout much of modern history he qualifies as a 'false idol'. No, not really, his essence is unchanged, what humans did to him is completely irrelevant to the spiritual nature of his being.

I think Kahlil Gibran, even as a critic of Jesus, knew the real score.

[Dreamtimer]

And

Following up on these claims, anthropologist Inge Schjellerup examined the remains of Chachapoyans and found them consistent with other ancient Peruvians. She found, for example, a universal occurrence of shovel-shaped upper incisors and a near-complete absence of the cusp of Carabelli on upper molars — characteristics consistent with other indigneous peoples and inconsistent with Europeans.

According to the analysis of the Chachapoyas objects made by the Antisuyo expeditions of the Instituto de Arqueología Amazónica, the Chachapoyas do not exhibit Amazon cultural tradition but one more closely resembling an Andean one.

From Wikipedia

[Emil El Zapato]

yeah, that was my real point DT ... we do want to try to straighten out historical myths, hence the Tartarian thread ...

The incisors is one of the tell-tale signs of the Americas indigenous ... I think I have them ...

[Wind]

I think Kahlil Gibran, even as a critic of Jesus, knew the real score.

I love that book, and I love Gibran's poetic words. It has a better depiction of Jesus than the Bible does. I cherish it.

Mary Magdalene

His Mouth was like the Heart of a Pomegranate

His mouth was like the heart of a pomegranate, and the shadows in His eyes were deep.

And He was gentle, like a man mindful of his own strength.

In my dreams I beheld the kings of the earth standing in awe in His presence.

I would speak of His face, but how shall I?

It was like night without darkness, and like day without the noise of day.

It was a sad face, and it was a joyous face.

And well I remember how once He raised His hand towards the sky, and His parted fingers were like the branches of an elm.

And I remember Him pacing the evening. He was not walking. He Himself was a road above the road; even as a cloud above the earth that would descend to refresh the earth.

But when I stood before Him and spoke to him, He was a man, and His face was powerful to behold. And He said to me, “What would you, Miriam?”

I would not answer Him, but my wings enfolded my secret, and I was made warm.

And because I could bear His light no more, I turned and walked away, but not in shame. I was only shy, and I would be alone, with His fingers upon the strings of my heart.