HuanucoPampa

Huánuco Pampa’s location suited the Inca strategy of founding settlements in remote areas to control scattered natural resources and human labor. At the same time, although the city only had a small, permanent population, its more than 4,000 buildings could have housed the many thousands who gathered there to celebrate festivals and to be entertained by the Incas, filling the city at intervals with color and life.

Much of the region’s output, in fact, was stored in the 500 or so storehouses, poised in orderly rows on a hill south of the city. There, in stone storage chambers roofed with thatch, archaeologists uncovered the remains of tubers, maize and other foodstuffs. But the Incas not only warehoused staples to feed the small resident population and lavish celebrants during the city’s festivities. The storehouses also held more exotic foodstuffs such as aji peppers and coca from tropical regions to the east, and stockpiled utilitarian goods such as sandals, wood products and pottery as well as sumptuary goods such as gold, silver, fine cloth and feathers.







The city is perhaps one of the best-documented Inca provincial centers, thanks to a multi-disciplinary study that not only carried out excavations at Huánuco Pampa, outlying settlements and subject communities, but also conducted archival research. Researchers uncovered valuable visitas, or sixteenth-century fact-finding picture borne out by archaeological excavations. The city’s main feature is an enormous central plaza more than half a kilometer long. In the center sits a rectangular platform of dressed stone known as an ushnu. Pairs of animal figures, probably pumas, flank the entrances that led to the summit of the ushnu. Ushnus feature prominently in Inca provincial centers and served as viewing platforms for visiting Inca dignitaries or were used to stage religious ceremonies. Most of the buildings facing the plaza are long, rectangular structures with several doorways, known as kallankas.



These housed passing armies, mitmaq colonists en route to other parts of the empire and official visitors and their retinues.

East of the main plaza the emperor Topa Inca built a palace compound, linked to the plaza by a series of fancy gateways. Excavations in this area revealed that feasting took place there, for archaeologists uncovered fragments of hundreds of pottery vessels used for brewing, storing and serving maize beer, or chicha. A large compound north of the main compound housed the aqlla, or chosen women, who brewed chicha and wove fine cloth.




Archaeologists identified their residences and workshops by the spinning and weaving implements and the chicha brewing jars found in the compound.

Several unfinished structures at Huánuco Pampa show that people abandoned the city in the turmoil of the civil war between rival Inca rulers and the Spanish invasion. Its remote location proved marginal to the Europeans. After a fleeting venture at settlement in Huánuco Pampa’s central plaza, the Spaniards founded the city they called León de Huánuco at the headwaters of the Huallaga river, almost 2,000 meters lower in altitude than its Inca namesake.

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