History of Ayacucho

Some of the earliest human remains in South America, dating back 20,000 years, have been found in Ayacucho. Pre-Inca inhabitants of the region included the Pocras, the Chancas and the Wari. The last, whose civilization flowered between 1000 and 1500 AD, created a sophisticated city of 40,000 people, called Wari.

The empire-building Incas conquered the tribes of the area between 1438 and 1532, but not without resistance from the Pocras and the Chancas. Inca Emperor Huiracocha launched a genocidal campaign against these groups, witnessing for himself the final bloody battle which was to give Ayacucho its ill-fated Quechua name — ‘corner of the dead’. Those few Pocras and Chancas who survived Inca ire escaped into the remotest highlands. They are, it is said, the ancestors of some of Peru’s poorest and most isolated peasants of modern times, the Iquicha.

The orderly Incas

The Incas took over the ancient city of Vilcashuaman in Ayacucho. Strategically placed on the Inca grid of major routes that linked a massive Andean empire, Vilcashuaman became an important military-religious centre. Inca civilization was hierarchical and tyrannical, but wiser and less chaotic than many of the regimes that followed it.

State-sponsored irrigation and terracing projects were expanded to bring more land under cultivation. Inca administrators were careful not to disrupt the existing tribal traditions of reciprocity and group work. But they also imposed taxes and forced labour for public, military and agricultural works.

Inca civilization was well-organized, hardworking and nobody starved. But this orderliness was achieved at a price. Those who paid it were the disenfranchised medley of tribal societies who became the first historically documented peasantry of Peru.