Inka Bird Idiom

Why were the feathers of birds such an essential artistic medium in the ancient Americas, more so than anywhere else in the world? Several publications of recent years have explored this question, especially in regard to Mesoamerica, where items such as the so-called Moctezuma’s Headdress, made with four hundred quetzal tail feathers, stand as testament to the aesthetic and ideological power of feathers. Fewer publications address the important role of feathers and birds in the ancient Andes. This is despite the fact that in Cuzco, Manko Inka gifted multiple feathered garments to Francisco Pizarro upon meeting him, as had done his Aztec counterparts in Mexico upon meeting Hernán Cortés. Ethnohistorian Claudia Brosseder addresses this lacuna and offers a thorough treatment of the reasons why the Inkas valued and used birds in their religion and statecraft.Brosseder’s main sources of information are twofold. Written sources include early colonial dictionaries and a small group of “chronicles,” accounts of Inka history and religion written by native Andean authors and/or people very close to Native informants. Brosseder combs through these sources and translates and synthesizes them to construct a narrative about birds in the Inka empire. Second, she consults the archaeological record, looking anew at surviving feathered garments and related objects, and especially considering the well-documented trove of Inka artifacts recovered from an Inka sacrificial event at the top of Mount Llullaillaco in Argentina.Brosseder’s focus on written sources leads to her governing metaphor, which is to describe Inka ways of conceiving of birds as cultural symbols as an idiom—that is, a rich vocabulary “with only one grammar” (5). Brosseder lays out the facets of this idiom through the book’s chapters, ultimately isolating a relatively small set of birds that were given capacious meanings in support of Inka power. The importance of one bird, the macaw, stands as testament to broader Andean ideas both geographically and historically, and especially claims a central role for the Amazon region within what is otherwise understood as the primarily highland Inka state.As is also the case with other aspects of their cultural production, Brosseder shows the Inkas to be both startlingly unique and highly indebted to the other Andean peoples they postdated and/or conquered. Chapter 1 explains the Inkas’ use of a highland eagle, the mountain caracara, to express the nature of male noble power. Chapter 2 synthesizes the “dense networks of references” (71) from the Mount Llullaillaco assemblage. This is the book’s most challenging section due to the number of objects involved, not all of which are illustrated. Brosseder interprets the items found on the mountaintop, which include human figurines wearing feathered headdresses, to explain how Inka ideologues used feathers and associated items to communicate with various instantiations of the Inka cosmic deities: Sun, Moon, and Thunder. Chapter 3 explores the legacy of macaws, especially a ritually important item known as the “macaw wing display.” Brosseder links this item to a set of tunics scattered across three museums that present abstract patterns in red, yellow, and blue macaw feathers, arguing that such tunics were worn by Inka priests in order to communicate with bodies of water. Chapter 4 explains the use of two other bird species, the pillco and ttokto, to express Inka ideas about war and peace. The pillco serves as an example of the Inkas’ tendency to take a lowland species that came into their consciousness through contact with cloud forest peoples and resignify it, in that case with metallurgical symbolism. Finally, chapter 5 enters the setting of the last Inka stand at Vilcabamba to again consider the centrality of a feather idea and meditate on the end of the Inkas’ bird idiom.Ultimately Brosseder shows that by way of birds and their feathers, Inka ideology was strongly rooted in the Amazonian lowlands, though the roots are not always clearly traceable. Furthermore, we see that the Inkas used feathers to spell out an expansive vision of the world in which the supernatural and natural were linked, and various ecological realms were connected in order to increase the prosperity of their domain

Amazon rainforest · Amazonian · Archaeology · Biology · Feather · Geography · Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior · Ecology · Geology · Paleontology