Peruvian gold reminders of barbaric deeds and fantastic treasures

Press, 13 June 1986, Page 17

Peruvian gold reminders of barbaric deeds and fantastic treasures

By

GARRY ARTHUR

The Incan treasure display now open at the McDougall Art Gallery is a reminder of man’s inhumanity to man — both the savagery of the autocratic, human-sacrificing Incan regime, and the barbarism of the freebooting Spanish conquistadors who destroyed it in short order. The conquest of Peru in 1532 by the veteran conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, and just 180 Spaniards, and their thorough destruction of Incan civilisation in the name of Christianity and out of lust for gold, ranks as one of the worst crimes against humanity in the history of the world — though equalled in its day by the parallel destruction of the New World civilisations of the Aztecs of Mexico and the Mayas of Guatemala. They succeeded in Peru for various reasons, including the belief that the Spaniards were the creator god Viracocha and his demigods returning as prophesied, and especially because their early capture of the Inca himself, Atahuallpa, virtually paralysed the populace. To secure his freedom, Atahu-

allpa offered to have his cell (said to have been 25ft by 15ft or 35ft by 17ft) filled with gold objects to a level higher than a man could reach, and then with twice that amount of silver. Pizarro accepted the ransom offer, and the Inca despatched messengers to all parts of the empire, commanding that gold be brought to Cajamarca where he was imprisoned.

Hundreds of llama loads soon began to arrive, much of it from the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco, and the room was filled to the stipulated height. But in spite of being officially declared free, Atahuallpa was kept under guard and soon brought to trial on as many charges as could be trumped up. The Spaniards were finding his presence an obstruction to their further looting of the empire.

He was convicted and sentenced to be burned alive in the public square — a sentence

which would be changed to strangulation if he would accept Christianity. He did, was baptised, and then garroted. The marvellous artistry of the Indian goldsmiths did not interest the conquistadors. They ordered the huge pile of gold ornaments melted down into bars — a job that kept nine forges going full blast for a month.

“Of the many other Peruvian gold ornaments that were sent intact to Spain, not a piece is known to survive,” says the American anthropologist, J. Alden Mason. “All were melted down to bullion.” But their is considerable evidence, he adds, that some of the ransom was hidden and not reported. Also, many llama loads of gold that were on their way to Cajamarca were buried to keep them safe when word came through that the Inca had been executed. At the same time,

golden objects remaining in temples and palaces all over Peru were hidden, too. “Much of the latter was soon found by the Spanish by judicious use of torture and other coercion, but traditions of buried and hidden treasure still abound in Peru, and labour to the amount of more than its value has been expended in the usually fruitless search for it.”

Even today the legend lives on of the existence somewhere of the Inca’s gold throne, weighing 83 kilos and encrusted with emeralds, which was given to Francisco Pizarro, and the dazzling Sun of Coricancha, which was later lost by Mancio Sierra in a night of gambling.

Atahuallpa’s ransom was the most spectacular treasure accumulated by the Spaniards in Peru, but they obtained much more, including the enormous loot taken from the capital, Cuzco, when the conquistadors sacked that city.

There they found “buildings covered with great sheets of gold ... facing the sun.”

The Incas were sun-worship-pers and believed that their monarch descended directly from the sun itself. All that lay beneath the sun was his, and gold was seen as an agent of the sun. It was not used as money in Peru — just as a material for fashioning things of beauty.

Central, feature of the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco was a thick disc of gold whose round face was surrounded by flames. The garden enclosure at the temple was a goldsmith’s fantasia of flowers and shrubs, small plants and great trees, animals large and small, birds of the air and creatures that creep upon the ground, in the words of the Spanish chroniclers.

There were towering statues of men, women and children, golden pots, pitchers, and jars, and a storeroom piled with “fruit and vegetables.” everything in it was made of gold, even the spades and hoes to be used in the garden. All the royal houses where the Inca relaxed had such golden gardens.

“There were also animals, small and large, simulated and moulded in gold and silver, such as hares, mice, lizards, serpents, butterflies, foxes and wildcats, since they had none that were tame,” wrote Garcilaso de la Vega. “There were birds of all kinds, some set in trees as though singing, others as though flying and sucking honey from the flowers. There were baths with great rainwater receptacles of gold and silver where they bathe and faucets of gold and silver through which flowed water from rain water containers.”

In 1536, when Manco Inca, a puppet ruler under the Spaniards, wished to buy his freedom, he gave Hernando Pizarro (Francisco’s brother) “two golden figures of a man and a woman, which weighed 37,000 pesos, as well as 300 bricks of gold, each of which weighed 2000 pesos, and a hundred loads of gold which weighed 3000 pesos each

The sheer quantity of the gold seized by the Spaniards suggested that gold had been mined from ancient times — mostly by gathering the alluvial gold of the riverbeds but also in deep shafts. Although admired for its untarnishing beauty, it was apparently plentiful enough to be hidden by painting on some ornaments, because traces of colour pigments have been found.

From the early Chavin culture to the time of the Incas, precious

and semi-precious stones were used to ornament goldware. Emeralds and pearls were imported from Equador and Colombia, as was the highly valued red spondylis shell. Rock crystals were brought in from Chile, turquoise from the north, and topaz and amethysts from the south. Turquoise was cut as beads, or inlaid on the handles of ceremonial knives and beakers. Shell was cut as ornaments or used as inlay. Rock crystal, lapis lazuli, and emeralds were ground and drilled to be used as beads or for eye ornaments on decorative masks.

The oldest gold objects found in Peru come from the Chavin culture in the north, from the caves of Paracas and from Nazca in the south. “It seems that the whole land is sown with these metals,” wrote the Jesuit priest, Padre Acosta, in the sixteenth century. The Andean region was the great centre of matallurgy in America. The Incan Empire was a bronze age culture, and as well as alloying tin and copper to form bronze, the Indians worked gold, silver, copper, and even

platinum. Repousse was probably the earliest technique — beating gold into thin sheets and forming the designs by tooling or hammering them over carved forms.

Charcoal furnaces were used, and instead of bellows, the Indian metallurgists produced a draught by blowing through tubes. Forges were built on hillsides with their openings facing the wind.

Gold ornaments were cast by thecire perdue, “lost wax,” method in which the object was modelled in wax, encased in

clay, then heated to melt out the wax and leave a once-only mould into which the molten gold could be poured. Another process, which was also known to goldsmiths in the Old World, wasmise en couleur, in which an alloy of gold and copper was used to cast an ornament. Part of the surface was then treated with the juice of an acid-bearing plant to dissolve the copper and leave the gold, which would be burnished. Some ornaments were made of two different alloys of gold of different colours.

Golden objects in the “Oro del Peru” exhibition are representative of 10 different styles and periods, although most were made during the Incan supremacy. It includes more than 250 objects dating from 100 AD To 1532, the year of the Spanish conquest.

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