Why are the better and more beautiful people always 'white' or 'whiter'. Coincidentally, I spoke with a graduate student studying anthropology and asked her about the 'shovel-shaped' incisors of certain indigenous people in the Americas and she responded that it wasn't a true characteristic but rather an ethnocentric bias precipitated by the 'white' people conducting the research. I was having a broken picture frame repaired incidentally. She was obviously white I might add (freckles, red hair and whitish skin) and remarked that modern anthropology is trying to root out such cultural and racial bias. White people came last in the origins of color and have been around for only about 5,000 years. In the below explanation note the definition of 'white' is not related to any racial designation, for the most part the pre-Columbian indigenous had no concept of a 'white race'.Originally posted by Aianawa
Appearance and origins
Cieza de León remarked that, among the indigenous Peruvians, the Chachapoyas were unusually fair-skinned and famously beautiful:
They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen in Indies, 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 (...) (Chuckie's note: (probably, if any truth exists in that European perspective it was because they were living under a cloud cover of mountainous rainforest) The women and their husbands always dressed in woolen clothes and in their heads they wear their llautos, which are a sign they wear to be known everywhere.
— "The Incas", Pedro de Cieza de Leon, Chapter 27
However, there is no other account at the time from other travelers to the region that mentions the particular "whiteness'' of the Natives in Chachapoya. These comments have led to claims, not supported by Cieza de León's chronicle, that the Chachapoyas were blond-haired and European in appearance. The chronicle's use of the term "white" here predates its emergence as a racial classification. Another Spanish author, Pedro Pizarro, described all indigenous Peruvians as "white." Although some authors have quoted Pizarro saying that Chachapoyas were blond, these authors do not quote him directly; instead they quote remarks attributed to him and others by race scientist Jacques de Mahieu in support of his thesis that Vikings had brought civilization to the Americas.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.
Sarcophagi of Carajía. Chachapoyas culture.
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. Given that the terrain facilitates peripatric speciation, as evidenced by the high biodiversity of the Andean region, the physical attributes of the Chachapoyas are most likely reflecting founder effects, assortative mating, and/or related phenomena in an initially small population sharing a relatively recent common ancestor with other indigenous groups.
The anthropomorphous sarcophagi resemble imitations of funeral bundles provided with wooden masks typical of the "Middle Horizon", a dominant culture on the coast and highlands, also known as the Tiwanaku–Wari culture. The "mausoleums" may be modified forms of the chullpa or pucullo, elements of funeral architecture observed throughout the Andes, especially in the Tiwanaku and Wari cultures.
Population expansion into the Amazonian Andes seems to have been driven by the desire to expand agrarian land, as evidenced by extensive terracing throughout the region. The agricultural environments of both the Andes and the coastal region, characterized by its extensive desert areas and limited soil suitable for farming, became insufficient for sustaining a population like the ancestral Peruvians, which had grown for 3000 years.
This theory has been described as "mountainization of the rain forest" for both geographical and cultural reasons: first, after the fall of the tropical forests, the scenery of the Amazonian Andes changed to resemble the barren mountains of the Andes; second, the people who settled there brought their Andean culture with them. This phenomenon, which still occurs today, was repeated in the southern Amazonian Andes during the Inca Empire, which projected into the mountainous zone of Vilcabamba, raising examples of Inca architecture such as Machu Picchu.
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