Diaguita

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In the dry transversal valleys that run east toward the cordillera, where the rivers come down from the snowline in fixed channels and the land between them holds nothing without irrigation, two peoples who never formed one nation answered to a single name. The Spanish wrote it diaguita, a label fastened from the outside onto a band of valley societies stretching across what are now the provinces of Catamarca, Tucumán, Salta, La Rioja, and the eastern edge of Santiago del Estero, and again, over the cordillera, onto the river oases of the Chilean Norte Chico. They spoke a common tongue, Kakán, and they shared a way of farming the desert with stone canals and a way of making and painting clay that is among the most accomplished in the southern Andes. They did not share a king. That fact — many lords, one language, no center — shaped everything that happened to them, from the urns they buried their children in to the wars they fought for more than a century against two successive empires.

Two peoples, one name

The name conceals a real distinction that any honest account must keep open. East of the Andes lay the Calchaquí-Diaguita: the valley peoples of the Argentine Northwest, named for the great longitudinal trench of the Calchaquí valleys that the Río Santa María drains southward through Catamarca and Tucumán. West of the watershed, in the short rivers that cut down to the Pacific through the desert of Atacama and Coquimbo — Copiapó, Huasco, Elqui, Limarí, Choapa — lived the Chilean Diaguita. The two were linked by the high passes and by trade, and the colonial mind grouped them under one ethnonym, but they were distinct populations with separate histories, and the archaeology of each runs along its own line. To collapse them into a single polity is the first error to avoid; to treat them as strangers is the second.

What did join them was language. Kakán — also written Cacán — was spoken across the Calchaquí valleys, the Santa María basin, and the Tucumán plain, and a related speech reached into the Chilean valleys. It is now lost. The single dictionary ever compiled, the work of the Jesuit missionaries Alonso de Bárzana and Pedro Añasco in the closing years of the sixteenth century, did not survive; the tongue itself fell silent in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, taken down with the societies that carried it. What remains is a scatter of place-names ending in -gasta, -ao, -il across the map of the Northwest, the fossil grammar of a language read now only in the ground it named. The people who are reclaiming that name today — the Diaguita-Kakán of the Chilean valleys — write the word with a k and treat its recovery as part of the work of recovering themselves.

The clay

The spine of Diaguita life, and the surest thing the record preserves, is the pottery. On the Argentine side the dominant tradition is the one archaeologists call Santa María, after the valley where it was first defined — a ceramic style that flourished across the Northwest from roughly 850 to 1480 and persisted into the Spanish period, so distinctive that for a long time the Santa María culture and the Diaguita were taken to be one and the same thing. Its great form is the funerary urn. These are large vessels, swelling at the body and narrowing to a flaring neck on which a human face is set: two broad eyes painted as nested arcs, brows, a small modeled nose, a mouth, the whole face an abstraction so confident it reads at once as a portrait and as a sign. The body below carries the cosmos in bands — geometric registers in black and red on a cream slip, broken by rows of the suri (the Andean rhea), of toads, of plumed serpents and felines, the recurring animals of a desert that watched for water.

The urns were not display. They were graves. The Santa María urn was above all a vessel for the dead, and very often for the youngest dead: infants and small children, drawn up in the flexed posture of Andean burial and set into the great painted jars, which were then buried beneath the floors of houses, under the feet of the living. To raise a child’s urn under one’s own dwelling was to keep the dead inside the household rather than beyond it — the soul of the child held within the lineage’s own ground, attended where the family lived. The face on the neck of the urn looked outward from the floor. A number of these vessels traveled far from that ground: a collection of Santa María urns now sits in the Kislak holdings of the Library of Congress, abstractions of the human form carried out of the valleys they were made to stay in.

Across the cordillera the Chilean Diaguita worked a different and equally refined ceramic. Their hallmark is a polished, thin-walled ware painted in black, white, and red, the designs running in tight geometric lattices that echo the patterns of textiles — the same grammar of zigzag and stepped rhomb that the loom produced, transferred to the curve of a pot. Two forms are signatures. One is the jarro pato, the “duck jug,” a pitcher whose spout and handle are modeled into the head and tail of a bird, the body sometimes carrying a small human figure painted as if wearing the same designs as the vessel. The other is the shallow open bowl, its interior a field of painted geometry meant to be read from above. This was the art of the river oases of Coquimbo and the Huasco, made by potters whose descendants in the Limarí valley are now relearning the craft from the surviving pieces and the clay sources their ancestors used.

The fortified valleys

The Diaguita built in stone as well as clay, and the most visible thing they left on the land is the pucará — the hilltop fortress-town, raised on a defensible spur above the valley floor, its walls of dry-laid stone enclosing dense terraces of dwellings, storehouses, and plazas. The largest of these is the settlement above the Río Santa María that the Spanish came to call Quilmes, after the lordship that held it: an immense stepped town climbing the flank of a mountain in the Calchaquí valley, founded by the ninth century, sustained by a system of irrigation canals and andén terraces that wrung crops from an arid slope, and grown into the most extensive pre-Columbian settlement in what is now Argentina. From its upper works the whole valley can be watched. The pucará was both home and stronghold, the architectural form of a society that lived in permanent readiness — many lords in many valleys, each fortified, capable of combining against a common enemy and otherwise keeping their own ground. It is the same decentralized political shape that the chachapoya wore in the cloud forest to the north, and like them the Diaguita would prove a country easy to enter and very hard to hold.

Their religious life was bound to that landscape. Like their Andean neighbors they addressed the earth as mother and provider — Pachamama in the vocabulary the region shares — and they held the high peaks sacred, the snow-mountains that fed the canals being also the powers that governed the rain. When the tiwanaku and later the wari horizons sent their influence south, and when goods and ideas moved up from the coastal worlds of the moche, the nazca, the paracas, and far back to the chavin cult that first set the iconographic terms of the central Andes, the Diaguita valleys took part in that long traffic of forms while keeping their own. The mountain held the dead and the water both; the canal that carried the snowmelt to the maize was a religious as much as an agricultural work.

Under Tawantinsuyu

Late in the fifteenth century the largest of the Andean states reached the Diaguita country. The Inca, expanding their empire southward down the spine of the cordillera, incorporated the Calchaquí valleys around 1480, weaving the region into the road system and the administrative order of Tawantinsuyu. They built. The great Inca center at Shincal de Quimivil, in Catamarca, rose with its plaza, its platform mounds, and its ushnu, a node on the imperial road tying the southern frontier to Cusco far to the north. The Inca governed in part by absorbing the local sacred geography into their own — assigning communities their guardian mountains, folding the apus into the state cult, transforming how the Diaguita of the northern Calchaquí valley had related for centuries to high peaks like the Nevado de Cachi.

The fit was uneven. The Diaguita accepted incorporation in some valleys and resisted it in others, and the imperial hold, where it held, was barely two generations deep when it was cut off at the root. The same trait that made the Inca conquest partial — a landscape of separate lordships with no single throne to capture — meant there was no center whose fall would settle the matter. When the empire itself broke, the valleys were still very much themselves. The Inca had ruled the Diaguita far more briefly than they ruled the chimu of the northern coast, and with far less of the totalizing grip the empire managed elsewhere.

The long war

What the Inca could not fully digest, the Spanish could not swallow at all without a war that ran, in phases, for more than a hundred years. The Calchaquí Wars are among the most sustained Indigenous resistances to the Spanish conquest anywhere in the Americas — a record of refusal matched in the southern cone only by the mapuche holding the Spanish at the Bío Bío. They fall into three campaigns across the second half of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.

The first war broke out in 1560, led by the kuraka Juan Calchaquí — whose name the whole valley system would afterward carry — together with the lords Quipildor and Viltipoco. It drove the Spanish back and burned their early towns, and it set the pattern: the valleys rose, combined, struck, and dispersed again into their separate fortified strongholds where no single defeat could finish them. The second war, from 1630 to 1637, ended harder, with the Spanish executing the curaca Chalamín and deporting valley communities into servitude. The third and final war, from 1658 to 1667, opened with one of the stranger episodes of the colonial Andes: an Andalusian adventurer, Pedro Bohórquez, presented himself to the valley lords as the heir of the Inca — styling himself Inca Hualpa, descendant of the last emperor — and was, for a time, accepted as a figurehead of the rising before the whole improbable arrangement collapsed and he was taken and executed by the Spanish. Behind the imposter the war was real, and it was the valleys’ last.

It ended with the breaking of the Quilmes. The lordship that held the great pucará above the Santa María was the most stubborn knot of the resistance, and when it fell the Spanish answer was desnaturalización — denaturalization, the deliberate tearing of a people from its land. In 1667 the surviving Quilmes were marched out of their valley on foot toward Buenos Aires, more than a thousand kilometers across the country, to a reduction on the pampa near the colonial capital. The numbers that come down are stark: of the people set on the road, only a fraction reached the end of it, and the reduction founded to hold them — recorded in the parish censuses between 1667 and the early eighteenth century — registered a steady decline until the community there was counted as gone by around 1716. The modern industrial city of Quilmes in the province of Buenos Aires stands on that ground, carrying the name of the people who were force-marched to die there. The deportation was meant to be an ending. The nineteenth-century histories of Argentina took it as one, writing the Diaguita and Calchaquí out of the present tense and into the closed past — a “disappearance” that later scholarship has shown to be in part a thing the historiography produced rather than recorded.

The people now

For the deportation did not end the Diaguita, and the closed past was a fiction of the chroniclers. Across the Calchaquí valleys, communities held the ground their ancestors had farmed, and held also the documents and the memory that proved it. The Indigenous community of Amaicha del Valle, in Tucumán, possesses collective title to its territory grounded in a royal deed of 1716 — the same years the Quilmes reduction on the pampa was being counted into extinction, the valley people at home were securing in colonial law a possession they have never relinquished. Amaicha today numbers some twenty-five hundred comuneros organized in more than a dozen base communities. The descendants of the Quilmes themselves reconstituted as the Comunidad India Quilmes in the 1970s, fought for decades to reclaim the great pucará from the tourism business that had been run over it, and since 2008 co-manage their Ciudad Sagrada — the Sacred City — as its own people. The ruins the chroniclers called a dead monument are administered by the living heirs of those who built them.

On the Chilean side the recovery has its own milestones. For most of the twentieth century the official assumption was that the Chilean Diaguita had not survived the colony — until anthropologists working the Huasco Alto in the late twentieth century found that the valley people’s beliefs, foods, and customs ran in unbroken line with the ancient ceramics and graves around them, the descendants of the Las Ánimas potters never having left. On 8 September 2006 the Chilean state passed Law 20.117, recognizing the existence of the Diaguita ethnicity and the indigenous character of the Diaguita people. They are now among the most populous Indigenous nations in Chile, after the Mapuche and the Aymara, their communities pressing land and water claims in valleys where industrial mining threatens the glaciers and rivers that the old religion held sacred and the canals still need. In the Limarí valley, Diaguita-Kakán potters working with their own cultural association have begun relearning the ancestral ceramic from the surviving vessels and the very clay beds their forebears dug — making, again, the painted ware that is the people’s oldest signature.

The record and its keepers

The Diaguita come down to the documentary record through three filtered channels, and the central task of reading them honestly is to know which channel one is in. The first is the archaeology — the pucarás, the canals, the urns and the painted ware — which speaks materially and in great quantity but in no words. The second is the colonial chronicle, written by the conquerors of a people they were in the act of destroying, in which the Diaguita appear chiefly as rebels and the Quilmes deportation is recorded as a victory. The third, and the one to which weight properly shifts, is the interpretation now being authored by the descendants themselves.

The historiographical problem is sharply drawn. The French-trained historian Christophe Giudicelli has shown, in his study of the Argentine national narrative between 1875 and 1910, how the “disappearance” of the Diaguita and Calchaquí was in part manufactured — a measuring-out of extinction that served the young Argentine state’s account of itself, and that the persistence of the valley communities flatly refutes; his “Measuring a disappearance” reads the very category of the vanished Indian as an artifact of the archive. The corrective is to read the material culture with, rather than against, the living tradition. The Library of Congress holds and has written on its Santa María urns — its “Eternal Abstractions” examines the burial vessels as the work of art and belief they are — while the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino sustains the standard account of the Chilean sequence from El Molle through Las Ánimas to the Diaguita proper. The model the present work follows is the collaborative one: the British Museum’s South American collections project, working directly with the Diaguita-Kakán association Lasta Anku in the Limarí valley, has put the Aticks Ypachay initiative — the recovery of ancestral pottery — in the hands of the community whose ancestors made the pieces, so that the interpretation of the clay belongs to the people of the clay. That is the order in which a Diaguita account should be assembled: the descendants first, the material as their inheritance, the colonial chronicle weighed as evidence of what was done to them rather than as the verdict on who they were.

The face on the neck of the urn was painted to be looked at from the floor of a house that is still, in the Calchaquí valleys and the river oases of the Norte Chico, a house with people in it. The potters of Limarí are mixing the old clay; the Sacred City answers now to the Quilmes who built it; and Amaicha holds a royal deed of 1716 — drawn in the very years the chroniclers were counting the Quilmes on the pampa into extinction — title the valley people have never once let go.

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