Reviving Inca Waterways

By Claudia Wallis

In Peru, archaeologists restore an ancient means of irrigation

Fifty miles to the southeast stood Cuzco, the administrative capital of the 15th century Inca Empire and, to the Incas, "the navel of the world." Just over the granite slopes to the northwest lay Machu Picchu, a templed citadel so shrouded by mountains and mystery that no white man found it until 1911. Patallacta was between the two on a stone-paved Inca highway, part of the Royal Road that climbed and twisted more than 5,000 miles through the Andes. The town, with its 115 dwellings guarded by a hilltop fortress, probably served as "a pit stop for Incas traveling between Cuzco and Machu Picchu," says Ann Kendall, a British archaeologist who has spent 13 years studying the site. One thing is certain. Agriculture sufficient to support perhaps 5,000 people flourished at 8,000 ft. above sea level, on the high slopes of the valley of the churning Cusichaca River, a place that Kendall deems "the most beautiful in the world."

Today the land around Patallacta is powder-dry and barren. Fifteen families barely scratch a living from the soil, and almost nothing can be grown for the entire five-month dry season. How, then, did this unforgiving land once provide for so many people? The answer is etched into the granite hills around the valley: dozens of stone canals snake their way down from glacier-fed streams in the upper altitudes.

Overgrown, eroded, but still discernible, the canals were built with extraordinary ingenuity and industriousness. (Habitual sloth was a capital crime among the Incas.) The winding route from the heights down into the lower slopes was designed to divert enough water to wet the terraced plots without overflowing or bursting through the stonework. Maintenance teams had to patrol the waterways year-round to keep them clear of silt and rubble. In the 16th century the Spanish came, dreaming of El Dorado, and forced farmers to harvest gold instead of maize. Irrigation systems like the one in Patallacta were let go. Soldiers and farmers moved away. The canals were all but forgotten.

Five centuries later, Ann Kendall is trying to revive them. Her objective, beyond the usual archaeological digging and dusting, is to convert information about the past "to practical use in order to improve the economy." With a modest investment of labor, Kendall insists, Inca irrigation could pay rich dividends to this overwhelmingly poor country, where food and potable water are in chronic short supply. "I don't say that this scheme is going to empty out the slums of Lima, get people back on the land, recreate an Inca civilization," she says, "but it's possible to make this land fertile--and other land in similar circumstances--using the same methods that the Incas used."

For four summers, Kendall and an international team of volunteers, meagerly financed by a grab bag of charitable sources, have been laboring like Inca road gangs, repairing broken stonework, rebuilding terrace walls and clearing canal channels choked with debris. Aside from applying a little cement and plastic sheeting to canal beds, they have stuck to traditional Inca stoneworking techniques. So far they have managed to reirrigate only 30 acres. But even this small step forward--or backward--has begun to change some of the lives of the handful of farmers on the slopes around Patallacta. One peasant has requested and secured a $400 loan from Kendall to pay workers to fix a canal near his mountainside plot. "The fact that he would ask indicates the idea can be sold," says Kendall. "If you got 100 men to work three months together in rebuilding a system, you could turn large tracts of barren land into production."

Among her colleagues, Kendall's brand of applied archaeology is controversial. In restoring the aqueducts to working order, she may be inadvertently disturbing other fragile remnants of the ancient culture. The Peruvian government, however, applauds her efforts: earlier this year she became the first foreign woman to receive the country's Order of Merit. Luis Valcarcel, one of the pioneers of Inca archaeology, also approves. "Her project is praiseworthy," he says, "because she is not trying simply to draw up a catalogue of ruins; she is trying to restore them to their original condition." Modern Peru has much to learn from the early natives, says Valcarcel. "The Incas had a deep sense of their dependence on their Mama-Pacha, Mother Earth. They managed it so well all over the empire that Conqueror Hernando de Soto was moved to say: 'There was never hunger known in their realm.' " --By Claudia Wallis. Reported by Gavin Scott/Patallacta

With reporting by Gavin Scott

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