Article About the Unknown Peruvian Text (Numbers, Letter and the Word 'Tayac')

8/8/2019 Article About the Unknown Peruvian Text (Numbers, Letter and the Word 'Tayac')

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RESEARCH ARTICLES

Traces of a Lost Language and Number System Discovered

on the North Coast of Peru

Jeffrey Quilter, Marc Zender, Karen Spalding, R´ egulo Franco Jord ´ an,

C ´ esar G ´ alvez Mora, and Juan Casta ˜ neda Murga

ABSTRACT Sometime in the early 17th century, at Magdalena de Cao, a community of resettled native peoples in

the Chicama Valley on the North Coast of Peru, a Spaniard used the back of a letter to jot down the terms for numbers

in a local language. Four hundred years later, the authors of this article were able to recover and study this piece

of paper. We present information on this otherwise unknown language, on numeracy, and on cultural relations of

ethnolinguistic groups in pre- and early-post-Conquest northern Peru. Our investigations have determined that, while

several of the Magadalena number terms were likely borrowed from a Quechuan language, the remainder record

a decimal number system in an otherwise unknown language. Historical sources of the region mention at least

two potential candidate languages, Pescadora and Quingnam; however, because neither is documented beyond its

name, a definite connection remains impossible to establish.

Keywords: languages, numbers, Peru, transconquest, indigenous

RESUMEN En los inicios del siglo diecisiete, en el sitio de Magdalena de Cao, una comunidad de ind´ ıgenas reducidos

en el valle de Chicama en la costa norte del Per ´ u, un espa ˜ nol us ´ o el reverso de una carta para anotar las palabras

que traduc´ ıan n ´ umeros en un idioma local. Cuatrocientos a ˜ nos despu ´ es, la carta fue recuperada y estudiada por

los autores de este art´ ıculo. Presentamos informaci ´ on acerca de este idioma desconocido, tanto como sobre los

conceptos num ´ ericos, y sobre las relaciones culturales de grupos etnolingu´ ısticos en la costa norte del Per ´ u antes

y despu´ es de la conquista espa ˜ nol. Nuestras investigaciones hab´ ıan determinado que, mientras algunas de las

palabras num ´ ericas son probablemente prestadas de un idioma quechua, los dem ´ as vienen de un sistema num ´ erico

decimal de un idioma hasta ahora desconocido. Las fuentes hist ´ oricas en la regi ´ on mencionan al menos dos idiomas

como candidatos potenciales, o sea Pescadora y Quingnam, pero como no sabemos sino esos dos nombres, es

imposible identificar a que idiomas pertenecieron.

THE DISCOVERY AND ITS CONTEXTS

Archaeological excavations at a Colonial Period site on theNorth Coast of Peru have revealed the first traces of a

lost language. A combined research team of U.S.–Peruvianarchaeologists at the site of Santa Marıa Magdalena de Caowithin the El Brujo Archaeological Complex in the ChicamaValley has found a document that lists a few but importantwords that serve as keys to unlocking the intricacies of anative language that was spoken in prehistory and into theColonial Period but has since become extinct.1

Since 2004, our archaeological research has uncoveredthe remains of a town and church complex occupied from

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 3, pp. 357–369, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. c2010 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01245.x

1578 to circa 1780 (Franco et al. 2003; Mujica Barreda2007; Quilter n.d.). This work has resulted in the amassingof a wide variety of artifacts, including a corpus of paper

documents, all of which are providing new information onthe early Colonial Period in Peru when Spaniards and indige-nous peoples were struggling in one of the great transitionsof the Early Modern era.

A catastrophic collapse of the walls of the Magdalena deCao church compound in the late 17th century trapped awide array of materials under piles of adobe bricks. Com-

bined with the remarkable preservative qualities of the drydesert environment, these materials included items of the



358 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010

daily lives and religious calling of the Dominican friars wholived and worked in the compound. Among the many papersretrieved in our excavations of these deposits is a completeletter concerning a minor event in the life of the church andtown community. The reverse of this paper, however, waslater used to record a list of terms for numbers in a language

previously unknown to scholars. How and why this doc-ument was created and later discarded is linked to largerissues in the history of the site and of Peru.

Although Francisco Pizarro captured the supreme Inkaruler, Ata Wallpa, in 1532, and the Inka capital, Cuzco,the following year, it was more than three decades beforeSpanish hegemony was firmly consolidated. The tumult of the conquest struggles included massive depopulation of indigenous peoples through war, epidemics, and general so-cial destabilization. One attempt to control the situationand indigenous peoples was the establishment of reducciones,

FIGURE 1. Map of the archaeological remains of Magdalena de Cao Viejo. The asterisk is placed next to the excavation unit where the document discussed

in the text was found.

Spanish-style towns in which conquered populations weremade to live, forced to abandon their rural homes and com-munities. The reducciones were places where people of different regions were often mixed together, all subject toSpanish civil and religious authorities’ attempts to “civilize”and Christianize them.

Santa Marıa Magdalena de Cao was one such reduccion.It was first established near the mouth of the Chicama River,

butthatsitewasabandonedandwashedawaybecauseofmas-sive rains and floods in an El Nino event in 1578. The towninhabitants fled to the El Brujo terrace, several meters abovethe deluge, and established a new settlement, the ruins of which have been the subject of our investigations. The newtown and church complex were built on the remains of anabandoned temple complex from the Moche era, circa C.E.100–700 (see Figures 1 and 2). The church complex andthe town prospered for over a century, but in the late 17th



Quilter et al. • Traces of a Lost Language and Number System 359

FIGURE 2. Excavating exterior perimeter wall of church compound. Note

the ancient temple in background and the deposits where paper was found

in block at far right.

or early 18th century the church was abandoned, caused orhastened by an earthquake that collapsed many of its adobewalls. The town remained occupied, however. Residencesthere were single-storied structures made mostly of quincha(wattle and daub), and so they suffered much less damagethan the tall all-adobe church structures. After the Domini-cans left, the townspeople mined the ruins of the churchfor various materials for their use. At some time, probablyduring the first half of the 18th century, the townspeoplealso abandoned the site, for reasons still unclear, and movedfour kilometers to the north to the site of the modern com-

munity of Magdalena de Cao. No significant occupation of the El Brujo terrace subsequently occurred, although a fish-ing village and lightly built structures for summer residenceswere established on the nearby beach, and local agriculturalfields almost certainly continued to be worked.

As the townspeople mined the collapsed church, theyremoved and relocated a great variety of materials, deposit-ing much of the refuse outside the north and west wallsof theformer atrium. It was in an excavation unit in one of theseareas, next to the outside of the west atrium wall and justsouth of its northwest corner, that we found the documenton which traces of a lost language were written.

When found, the paper was folded; when opened, itmeasured 21 centimeters in width and slightly more than12 centimeters in height (see Figure 3). Writing coveredmost of one side of the paper, which had been orientedso that its width was greater than its height in relation tothe text. We define this side as the obverse because weassume the letter was written first and then the numberswere recorded later on the back of the letter.

The proper right and bottom sides of the paper appearto be original edges while the others were cut from a largersheet. To judge from the writing in relation to paper edges,this cutting must have taken place before the paper receivedany text. Creases, both at right angles and diagonal to the

FIGURE 3. Obverse of the document: the letter.

existing edges, indicate that the paper was folded morethan once, likely in relation to the two different texts oneither side of the document. Which text was written first

is difficult to determine with certainty, but the writing thatextends across the width of the document, albeit with awide left-hand margin, most likely predates the number list.At some point in time, the letter was folded from left-to-right, rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, and then usedto record the numbers.

The relatively extensive text on the obverse of the docu-mentis a letter toa priest froma servant or agent regarding adispute between the priest anda tradesman or merchant overthe price of some cloth, possibly for church use, as for analtar or liturgical vestment (see Figure 3). The paleographictranscription and the English translation are as follows:

Mi Padre agora fuy a buscar los dos baras de bramante floresti yno lo quieren darme nos de a catorce reales bea buesa Paternidadsi lo quiere que luego al Punto le llebara el muchacho y todo lomas q.e buesa Paternidad mandase a quien guarde m.s.

De buesa Paternidad Lope Fernandez de uaq.ta

[Father, I just went to get the two varas of fine cotton cloth,and they do not want to give them to me for 14 reales; yourFatherhood should decide if you wish the boy to bring it later tothe Punto together with anything else that your Fatherhood whocares for us commands.

From your Fatherhood, Lope Fernandez de Vaqueta]2

The handwriting conforms to a style common in theearly 17th century. The number list, on the folded, reverseof the paper is written in a different, less florid hand than onthe obverse and with a quill with a thicker nib (see Figure 4).The recipient of the message may have later used the backof the letter to record the numbers—although, of course,other writers cannot be discounted. The person wrote outthe Spanish names for the numbers 1–3 in a single column,then changed to writing Arabic numerals for the rest of thesequence on the left-hand side of the page. The numbersproceed from one through ten. Numbers six and eight areeach followed by a period and then a dash and the otherswith only a dash followed by handwritten words for what




FIGURE 4. Reverse of the document (folded): the number list.

we interpret as the equivalent number in a native language.After the numeral ten, the sequence continues with 21, 30,100, and 200.

Both the format and the contents of the brief list sug-gest that the author may have been recording numbers withthe aim of understanding the numerical system in question,possibly during or shortly after an interview with a nativeinformant. This is hard to determine, of course, but it sug-gests that the recorder understood that by asking for the

numbers in question, the rules of the number system could be determined. The choice of numbers indicates that the in-terviewer was numerate and educated because the numbersqueried for native-language equivalents above ten providedkeys to understanding the system’s combinatory rules. Therecorder apparently asked for the terms for the first tennumbers. Then, he (assuming it was a Spanish cleric) askedfor the next round number in the tens series, 20, and thefollowing number, 21. The questioner then recorded, pos-sibly because he had asked for them, the number terms for30, 100, and 200. This pattern of recording and presumablyquestioning implies that the recorder thought that by learn-ingthesenumbershecouldfillintherestofthesequence.Forexample, that the number term for 22 would be similar tothe manner in which 21 was constructed; the number termsfor 44, 123, or any other number could be produced by aformula or pattern derived from how 21 was constructed;and higher-order numbers would follow the same structuralorganization, as numbers indeed tend to do. By question-ing and recording in this manner, the person who createdthe document also left posterity a key to understanding thatnumber system as well as the language of which it was a part.Before turning to these issues, however, we present a brief review of what is known of native languages on the NorthCoast of Peru in the 17th century.

INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES IN NORTHERN PERU

The indigenous languages of Peru are known primar-ily through the windows provided by various documentsprepared in the Colonial Period (1532–1821) by literateSpaniards or native people. As is typical with such docu-ments, however, information is often incomplete or difficult

to interpret, and there is considerable evidence that manylanguages existed that were not mentioned at all or have yetto be discovered.

The archaeologicalrecord of the more remote past iden-tifies archaeological cultures that are known mostly in out-line from about 10,000 B.C.E. onward. Then, betweenabout C.E. 100 and 800, a widespread archaeological cul-ture known as Moche or Mochica was extant throughout theNorth Coast. Whether this was a single state or multiplepolities is a subject of current debate (e.g., see Quilter andCastillo 2010). No discussion has been made of what lan-guages were spoken by those people now identified underthe rubric of “Moche,” but it is likely that more than onetongue was spoken and that no clear connection betweenthe later language identified as “Mochica” or “Muchik” can

be made.There were two regions of the Moche culture that

seem to have had slightly different cultural trajectories.The Northern Moche and the Southern Moche (Castillo andDonnan 1994) were separated by the Paijan desert; interest-ingly, after the Moche collapse, the subsequent Lambayeque(or Sican) and Chimu archaeological cultures arose, respec-tively, in the north and south in the same territories previ-ously occupied by the different Moche groups (Moseley andCordy-Collins 1990). Chimu appears to have conquered,

absorbed, or succeeded Lambayeque and then continued toexpand to become one of the largest empires and rivals of the Inka in late prehistory. Although the Chimu are knownfrom ethnohistorical records as a political entity referred toas the Kingdom of Chimor (Rowe 1948), the issue of thelanguage(s) spoken by members of this culture is uncertainwhile those spoken by the archaeological cultures prior to itare even more so.

The canonical interpretation of the culture history of Peru attributes the Inka conquest of the North Coast to aperiod early in the establishment of the Inka Empire. Thisconquest probably occurred in one or two invasions, likelyin the 1460s or early 1470s, by Pachakuti Inka or his sonand heir Thupa Inka (D’Altroy 2002; Rostworowski de DiezCanseco1999; Rowe 1948). Although theconquest hasbeenknown since it was first recorded by early chroniclers (e.g.,Garcilaso de la Vega1941–45), detailsof the Inka occupationof the North Coast remain obscure. Archaeological signa-tures of the Inka presence are not commonly recognized,and field research directed to their study is relatively scant.There is substantial evidence to suggest that the Inka activelyworked to co-opt or coerce local elites into Inka culturalpractices as a means of political control, and it is well knownthat they also brought the sons of local leaders to Cuzcofor training in such practices. The degree to which the Inka




actively sought to spread their language beyond a handful of elites, however, is uncertain. Indeed, what constituted “Inkalanguage,” by no means a static entity, is presently a topic of considerable discussion (Cerron-Palomino 1999; Durston2007; Heggarty 2005; Urton in press). Although the subjectis hardly settled—and is too involved to discuss in depth

here—it is nonetheless clear to the majority of scholars whostudy the topic that many languages were extant in Peru inlate prehistory.

A highly complex linguistic and cultural landscape thathad been created through millennia of human interactionswas still present in the mid-16th-century era of the Spanishintrusion. The palimpsest of societies and tongues owingto historical processes of the rise and fall of empires andmovements of peoples was augmented by a variety of specificcultural practices as well, such as the placing of coloniesacross the landscape voluntarily, by communities, as well asforcibly, as under Inka imperial policy. This led to perhapsan even more discontinuous patterning of languages thanmight otherwise have been the case (Mannheim 1982).

The Spanish recognized widespread “general languages”(lenguas generales) and local tongues (lenguas particulares).There were a number of different Quechuan dialects andlanguages, and although it has traditionally been assumedthat the Inka spread Cuzco Quechua, some scholars now be-lieve that the Inka chose the version of the Central Coast astheir imperial lingua franca (Durston 2007) while Inka elitesmay have spoken another language (see Heggarty 2005).Central Coast Quechua, however, is now extinct, and it isan open question as to how many other variants of Quechuamay have been present in Peru at the time of the Spanish

arrival.As in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas, when the

Spanish arrived they adopted the practical policy of learninglocal languages to spread the Gospel, rather than attemptingto instruct multitudes of peoples in either Spanish or Latin.Yet it was also to their advantage to reduce the numberof tongues needed for this enterprise. Thus, they not onlyspread some variant of Quechua butalso successfullyworkedto minimize thenumber of indigenous languages used in bothmissionary and pastoral contexts.

Running counter to the attempt to reduce languagevariation, former prehispanic patterning in languages acrossthe landscape was disturbed by demographic collapses of varying intensities and population movements as a resultof the Spanish invasion and subsequent political turmoil.Adding to this complexity, our understanding of languagesand their distributions in the early Colonial Period relieson reports written by Spaniards whose accounts frequentlyare incomplete, vague, and often based on misinformation,misunderstandings, and the inevitable copying errors at-tendant to any manuscript tradition. Such complicationsenter into any attempt to evaluate the Magdalena de Caodocument.

The indigenous languages of the North Coast have beenstudied since the Colonial Period, albeit with varying de-

grees of information available and with different theoriesunderlying specific studies (Bruning 1989; De la Carreray Daza 1939; Grasserie 1896; Middendorf 1892; Torero1986; Zevallos Quinones 1941). Different colonial author-ities state that the fisherfolk of the North Coast spoke theirown language, referred to as “la lengua pescadora” (lit.,

Fisherfolk’s language), “la lengua yunga pescadora” (lit., theYunga Pescadora language), or simply “la pescadora” (lit.,fisherfolks’ [language]). Yunga is a Quechua word meaning“hot land” or “valley,” but it was used by the Inkas andSpaniards to refer to the coast as well as other regions, andit was employed without the pescadora modifier to refer tothe language of the coast. This distinction of two differentlanguages on the North Coast is almost certainly a reflectionof the socioeconomic organization of the region, in whichfishing communities at the shore likely constituted a differ-ent social group than inland farmers (Rostworowski de DiezCanseco 1977).

In his early and extensive treatise of 1644, Fernandode la Carrera y Daza (1939) clearly used the term Yunga torefer to what today would be called “Mochica.” At aboutthe same time, Antonio de la Calancha (1974), a friar of anAugustinian monastery in the Jequetepeque Valley, statedthat the language of the Chimu monarchs was Quingnamand that it had spread southward to Lima and northwardto the Jequetepeque Valley, throughout the Chimu coastalempire. He alsoindicated that another dialect, called Mochicaor Muchic, was spoken north of this zone along the coast.Calancha then mentions Pescadora as a third language. Allof this has greatly complicated the question of how manylanguages were once spoken on the North Coast.

It is quite possible that some of the people identifiedwith the Lambayeque or Chimu archaeological culturesspoke Mochica or a variant of it. Indeed, the noted lin-guist Rodolfo Cerron-Palomino titled one of his works onMochica “La Lengua de Naimlap” (1995); in titling it as such,he referenced a mythological culture hero associated withan ethnohistorically reported dynasty of the Lambayequeregion. Despite this likelihood, however, the nature, diver-sity, and spatial patterning of indigenous languages in lateprehistory and even early in the Colonial Period are subjectsthat require greater investigation.

The relationships between Quingnam, Mochica, andPescadora are particularly unclear. None of these languagesis spoken today, although enough Mochica speakers sur-vived into the 19th century that various word lists areavailable (Salas 2002). No such records exist for Quingnamor Pescadora, however. Given these complexities, coupledwith the consideration that the term Yunga is used differentlyin various colonial sources, scholars often cannot ascertainto which language the term Yunga refers (Cerron-Palomino1995:29–41).

In a volume prepared between 1781 and 1790, the bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Jaime Martınez de Companon(MartınezdeCompanon 1985; Schjellerup2008), included achart of comparative word lists for eight languages within his




bishopric, including the North Coast and nearby highlands.On the chart, “Yunga” is listed as a language of the provincesof Trujillo and Sana (Zana). As Martınez de Companonprovided a word list, we can see that what he referred toas Yunga was clearly what today is referred to as Mochica,

based on extensive word lists collected by Carrera and later

scholars and thanks to its relative longevity as a spokentongue. Companon’s volume also demonstrates that otherNorth Coast languages including Quingnam—at least as atongue recognized as distinct—had ceased to be spoken inthe greater North Coast by this time.

WithextensivewordlistsavailableonlyforMochica,therelationships of that language with, respectively, Quingnamand Pescadora must remain highly uncertain. Historically,opinions have ranged from considering Mochica, Quing-nam, and Pescadora as three separate languages (Larco Hoyle1939; Zevallos Quinones 1946) to viewing them as dialectsof the same tongue (Netherly 1977; Rivet 1949) and toa proposal that Mochica and Quignam were closely re-lated while Pescadora was distinctly different (Rabinowitz1982). More recently, Cerron-Palomino (1995:29–41) hasreviewed these theories and, following Calancha’s state-ment, argues that Quingnam was a separate language fromMochica. Furthermore, he suggests that what locals called“Pescadora” was Quingnam, spoken throughout the oldChimu realm from the area of modern Lima to the ChicamaValley where it overlapped with Mochica, which was spo-ken in more northern valleys (see Figure 5). Finally, inan intriguing study of toponymy (the linguistic study of place names), Zevallos Quinones proposes that Quingnamwas spoken in the Chicama, Moche, and Guanape valleys

(Zevallos Quinones 1993), a region conforming to the“core”area of the Chimu culture. Unfortunately, even if this is ac-cepted as a valid interpretation of the data, it still does notresolve the problem of Quingnam’s relationship to the othertongues. Neither do we know the economic organization of the Chimu: for example, whether fishing communities wereseparate from agricultural ones, which might allow for thedevelopment of the two tongues, or whether occupationalspecialization and residential isolation were less in opera-tion. Absent the requisite comparative linguistic data, theidentities and interrelationships of Mochica, Quingnam, andPescadora must remain an open question.

REVIEW AND ANALYSIS OF THE NUMBER LIST

Given that there is so much ambiguity concerning the lan-guages of the North Coast that can only be resolved asadditional research is carried out—and, it is to be hoped,new discoveries are made—we may now turn to the frag-ment of language on the discovered paper. Intriguingly, thisarchaeological time capsule provides unique data in the formof a previously unknown language that nonetheless bearsunequivocal signs (in the form of borrowed vocabulary) of along history of interaction in the region, begging to be fittedinto the linguistic syntheses reviewed above.

FIGURE 5. Map of the distribution of indigenous languages in northern

Peru, after Cerr on-Palomino. The extent of use of Culli is uncertain; see

Lau in press.

The text on the reverse of the paper is quite well pre-served and relatively easily transcribed. Nonetheless, several

portions remain unclear. This is in part because of the ap-parent rapidity with which the list was written but also ourinability, given the unique nature of this document and itscontents, to verify the form of these terms against otheriterations except where (as thankfully with chari, mari-, apar,bencor, pachac) several forms repeat within the brief list it-self. Here follows our working transcription of the list, withuncertain elements queried:

uno—charidos—mariantres—apar4—tau5—himic [?]

6.—sut [?]7—canchen8.—mata9—yucan10—bencor21. maribencor chari tayac30 apar bencor100 chari pachac200 mari pachac

The list is clearly a set of numbers, and just as clearly itincorporates the regularities typical of functional numericalsystems. As with many decimal systems, as this appears to

be, there is no repetition of elements within the first ten




numbers, but such repetition becomes commonplace there-after. Thus, apar bencor, identified as “30,” clearly combinesapar (three) with bencor (ten). Literally, the compound signi-fies “three tens.” Similarly, the higher-order multiples chari pachac and mari pachac self-evidently encode“100” and “200”;in those cases, the compounded version of marian (two)

seems to be the reduced form mari-, a pattern strikingly sim-ilar to, for example, the English three being abbreviated tothir- when used in thirteen and thirty. The numeral pachac islikely a borrowing from the Quechuan term pachak meaning“hundred.”3 As we discuss below, other numerals in this listalso show Quechuan influence.

The most complex of the compounds: maribencor charitayac, identified as “21,” appears to again involve the reducedform mari- (two) prefixed to bencor (ten) in what, to judge

by apar bencor (30), must have been the form of the number“20.” This is followed by chari (one) and tayac, the latter

being perhaps a conjunction or a compounding element.4

Taken together, the whole can be analyzed as mari-bencor chari tayac, literally “two-ten one and/plus” or, rearrangingsome elements, “two tens and/plus one.” However, wemust leave open the morphemic analysis of tayac, whichmight easily involve more than one significant element andthe precise semantic scope of which cannot be ascertainedfrom a single occurrence. In any case, such recourse tomultiplication and addition within a single system is typicalof numerical systems generally (Closs 1986).

As mentioned, the numbers from one to ten are quiteprobably monomorphemic (i.e., unanalyzable and distinctunto themselves), a common feature for the terms of thefirst few numbers in any numerical system. For the most

part, they are strikingly unlike any numbers hitherto doc-umented on the North Coast of Peru (see Table 1). As acaveat, we consider it possible—albeit unlikely on the ba-sis of present evidence—that mata (eight) could conceivablyhave originated as ma-ta (two fours). Yet we would hasten toadd that the other numbers show no sign that such a reducedform of mari(an) “two” is possible, and tau itself may wellhave been borrowed from Quechua (see below). If so, thereplacement of whatever native term may once have existedfor the number “six” by the possible Quechua borrowing sut(again, see below) makes it difficult to test any hypothesis of polymorphemic numbers between five and ten.

Theissueofwhatisborrowedornot,however,isacom-plex one that we touch on below. For now, we note that thenumbers four, six, and seven are all remarkably similar toQuechuan terms for these numbers. (See Table 1; the rele-vant comparisons are tau< tawa, sut< soqta and canchen<qanchis.) Apart from the previously mentioned term pachac(100)—itself quite likely borrowed from Quechuan—thereare no further similarities between this list of numbers andother core Quechua numbers. These similarities suggest twothings. First, when the well-documented lexical impact of Quechua on other languages in the region (Campbell 2004;Heggarty 2007) is considered, the relative proximity of thenumbers four, six, and seven suggests that the number sys-

TABLE 1. Terms for Numbers in Relevant Andean Languages

Culle, Quingnam, and Pescadora number terms are not known. The Mochica termsfor “21” are our reconstructions based on Carrera’s 1644 discussion. The “Mochicaprefixes” column lists variants of the numbers “1” to “4” when prefixed to wordsmeaning “ten” (compare the Mochica terms for “21” and “30”), the ordinal suffix-xa, and the frequentative suffix -xia. Sources are as follows. For Quechua-Cuzco:Cusihuaman 1976; Farf an 1942. For Quechua-Ancash: Parker 1976. For Aymara:Briggs 1993; Hardman 2001. For Mochica: Altieri 1939 [Carrera 1644]; Hovdhaugen

2004; Salas 2004.

tem of the Magdalena list reflects a short but significantperiod of contact and resultant influence from Quechuanspeakers, including, possibly, speakers of a now-“lost” Cen-tral Coast version of the Quechua language. Second, thediscontinuity of the influence—which skips the smallest,most common numbers (one through three), as well as the

basic compounding features noted in the multiples of ten(21, 30), only reappearing in the widespread form for “100”(related forms for which recur, let it be noted, even in Ay-mara and Mochica)—strongly indicates that the Magdalenalist largely records an otherwise unrecorded language of theNorth Coast into which these few Quechuan numbers wereintrusive.

Which languages borrowed from which is a questioncomplicated by the fact that we have no records for entiretongues and precious little understanding of the wealth of regional dialects that must have been present, not least theversions of Quechua previouslymentioned. Nonethless, thatvarious Quechua terms for numerals five and higher wereap-parently borrowed by thenearbyPeruvianlanguagesUrarina(a Macro-Andean language), Cocama-Cocamilla (a Tupıan




language) and Inapari and Chamicuro (both Maipurean lan-guages), as discussed by Lyle Campbell (1997), stronglysupports our preferred interpretation that the similarities

between the Quechuan and Magdalena numerals for four,six, seven, and 100 are best explained by cultural influ-ence and contact rather than by positing the Magdalena

numeral system as itself a member of the Quechuan family.Paul Heggarty’s (2007) recent suggestions for a much ear-lier northward expansion of Quechuan languages than waspreviously supposed may also be seen as a measure of sup-port for this proposal, as it increases the amount of time thatQuechuan would have had to influence indigenous languagesof the North Coast.

If indeed the Magdalena document exhibits a previouslyunknown language with Quechuan borrowings, then it isinteresting to note that Quechuan final -a has been lost intwo of them: ∗tawa > tau (phonetic [su]?) and ∗soqta >sut (phonetic [su t]?). This seems to agree with the radicalconsonant-final phonology of all but two of the other formsin the list. Indeed, it is even possible that the orthographicforms chari and mata themselves hide a final -h, - , or similarweak, glottalic consonant. These phonological accommo-dations are another strong indicator of a periodic (ratherthan prolonged), remote (rather than recent), and roughlysymmetrical (rather than asymmetrical) period of ethnolin-guistic contact between Quechuan and the language of theMagdalena document. Had the contact been either moreprolonged or asymmetrical (i.e., promulgated by a groupof relatively higher sociolinguistic status), we would haveexpected to see more suppletion of the original system, aswas the case with other languages surveyed above and their

contact with the Inca or possibly other high-status speakersof Quechuan. Had the contact been more recent, we mighthave expected to see less accommodation of borrowed vo-cabulary to the phonological constraints of the borrowingsystem.

That the number system is decimal in structure is of interest because the Inka system was also base-ten (Ascher1986; Urton 1997). Although little research has been doneon other Peruvian prehistoric number systems, there is fairlystrong evidence that the Moche culture (ca. C.E. 100–800),which preceded Chimu on the North Coast, also used a base-ten number system (Donnan 2007:199–202). Together,these lines of evidence suggest that base-ten number sys-tems may have been widespread in the ancient Andes andnot a late invention of the Inka. The likely commonalityof such systems means that we should not be motivated toexplain the decimal system of the Magdalena document asanother aspect of Quechuan influence.

Importantly, the number terms on the Magdalena paper bear no obvious affinity to Mochica numbers known fromearly sources (e.g., onœc [one], atput [two], copœt [three];see De la Carrera y Daza 1939). One possible exceptionis himic (possibly nimic) “five.” Although never collected ina phonemically precise form, various Mochica sources listthe number five as exllmœtzh-, ¨ agmetc, and igmetz ∼ egmets,

among others (see Table 1). The variation is enough to sug-gest a comparison to himic, yet the similarities also seemwell within the realm of coincidence, especially absent anyother similarities (systematic or otherwise) in the numeri-cal vocabulary. Particularly troubling to any suggestion of a deeper relationship between the Magdalena numbers and

Mochica is the consideration that their words for the firstthree numbers betray no similarities whatsoever. Compara-tive historical evidence reveals these numbers to be part of the endolexicon (core vocabulary) of a language, resistantto change and borrowing. Consider, for example, the En-glish one, two, and three and its patterned similarities to theGerman ein, zwei, and drei and Latin unus, duo, and tri- asthe legacy of these languages’ shared descent from Proto-Indo-European. Comparing the first three numbers acrossTable 1 reveals that both Quechuan varieties (predictably)

betray strong and systematic relationships in these numbers and also disclose certain relationships with Aymaran(whether genetic or areal is still a matter of debate), butneither Mochica nor the numbers of the Magdalena docu-ment reveal any similarities with the lower numbers of theselanguages. The most parsimonious conclusion, supported

by comparison across the numbers as a whole, is that theyare not related languages and that, furthermore, neither isrelated to Quechuan or Aymaran.

Number systems commonly are built on bases of five,ten,or20,andtheseseemtoberelatedtothedigitsofasinglehand, both hands, or hands and feet, respectively, althoughmany other bases are known (see Ascher 1991, 2002; Closs1986; Menninger 1969; Urton 1997). Furthermore, a dom-inant number system may be used by a particular society

that employs other systems simultaneously. For example,until recently in the United Kingdom, the general numbersystem was base-ten; one system for linear measurementwas base-12 (inches in feet); currency used both base-12 (12pennies in a shilling) and base-20 (20 shillings in a pound);and years could also be counted in base-20 (“four score andseven years ago”). Number systems also can sometimes en-fold one another so that a base-ten system contains within itan interest in base-five. Mochica appears to have had such aconcern with base-four. De la Carrera y Daza (1939), writ-ing in the 17th century, noted that the numbers one throughfour had two variants, one used alone and the other (seeTable 1: Mochica prefixes) employed as a prefix for wordsmeaning “ten” as well as before the ordinal suffix -xa and thefrequentative suffix -xia (Hovdhaugen 2004:26).

The numbers from the Magdalena document are there-fore best seen as examples of a “new,” previously undoc-umented language. Further, as a logical exercise, withoutforgetting our earlier caveats concerning the paucity of rele-vant linguistic evidence, consider the following: if Mochicaand Quingnam were related, then the language of the num-

ber list must be neither of these tongues; alternatively, if Quingnam and Pescadora were related or were the sametongue, as Cerron-Palomino (1995) proposes, then it may

be that language or a relative. It also does not appear to




be related to Culli (or Culle), an autochthonous languagespoken in the adjacent highlands in Huamachuco (Lau inpress; Topic 1998:109–127). Although we have very lit-tle information on Culli, and no evidence whatsoever of itsnumeral system, available word lists reveal a radically dif-ferent phonology than that disclosed by the language of the

Magdalena document.

IDENTIFICATION OF THE LANGUAGE

Although the number list on the Magdalena document pro-vides evidence of a newly discovered numeral system, italso impedes easy comparison with other languages. Num-

ber sequences do not necessarily provide linguistic cluesto how languages are generally structured because numberscommonly are relatively isolated within a narrow, repetitivesystem. The apparent borrowing of some of the numbers onour document from Quechuan, however, does offer somedata that allow us to consider the nature of this previouslyunknown tongue.

It is possible that the language of the numbers isPescadora. Calancha says of it:

That which among them is called La Pescadora more resemblesa language for the stomach, than for understanding; it is clipped,tough-sounding, guttural, and surly; with these two most com-mon languages the communication of the valleys was held, andthe commerce and business dealings of these territories was con-ducted. [Rabinowitz, trans., 1982:250]

Although the derogatory remark on the guttural sound of Pescadora is a subjective judgment, the list of numbers wehave found does present a series of words that might under-standably have been interpreted as short (because they are

monosyllabic)andclipped(becausetheyareconsonantfinal),especially given the preference for polysyllabic, vowel-finalwords in Spanish as well as in Quechua and Aymara, easilythe best-known South American languages during the Colo-nial era. More significant, perhaps, is the mention that twodifferent languages were used for commerce and businessdealings. The separate number system expressed in the doc-ument suggests just such a role for the language in question.Although we note the apparent Quechuan borrowings in therecorded words above, we also stress the periodic, relativelysymmetric, and remote nature of the probable contact situ-ation. We in fact know so little of indigenous languages inprehispanic Peru that the few words in question could eas-ily be accounted for by interactions of fishing communitiesalong the coast, including contact with a lost Quechua of the Central Coast, rather than necessarily being the result of the mixing of people and languages during the tumult of theearly Colonial Period (see Ramırez 1996).

Sometime between 1555 and 1560, the Dominican friarReginaldo de Lizarraga (1987) journeyed to the ChicamaValley. He reported that there were two tongues spoken

by the “indians of the valley.” The one spoken by fisherfolkwas “extremely difficult” (difficultosısima) and the other lessso, although few spoke “the common tongue of the Inkas.”The time of Lizarraga’s journey was before the implemen-

tation of the reduccion policy and before the El Nino floodthat destroyed the first Santa Marıa Magdalena de Cao set-tlement. However, more than three decades later in 1589,Torıbio Mogrovejo, a missionary who traveled widely overPeru, visited the town when it was at the archaeological sitewe investigated. Torıbio reported that the resident priest

there, Fray Bartolome de Vargas, was a good speaker of thepescador languages (buen lenguaraz de las lenguas pescadora;Benito 2006:52). How the use here of the plural—the lan-guages, rather than language, of the fisherfolk—should beinterpreted is open to question. It does suggest that morethan one indigenous language (or, at a minimum, more thanone dialect) was spoken by the local padre and, therefore,

by local people.As we know little about “standard” languages of the pre-

Inka conquest and prehispanic periods, we know even lessabout how groups that were socially peripheral, althoughextremely important economically, to agricultural and pas-toral communities, such as fisherfolk, may have interactedwith one another. The question is an important one, for thecombinationof linguistic diversity and economic interdepen-dency is a recipe for the creation of pidgins (simplified tradelanguages modeled on the vocabularies of higher-status lan-guages, tethered to widely shared grammatical and seman-tic features in the borrowing languages). Joel Rabinowitz(1982:258–259), for instance, interprets Pescadora as pos-sibly a highly developed pidgin, evolving initially from theunique environmental distinctiveness, subsistence special-ization, and social isolation of fishing communities, as noted

by Marıa Rostworowski de Diez Canseco (1977). He alsoemphasizes that communities with high mobility that are

engaged in commerce commonly develop their own pidginlanguages for ease of communication. Theapparent Quechuainfluencesinthenumberlistmightinthisviewbeinterpretedas part of such a pidgin language, but the problem remainsthat the borrowed terms are limited and do not replace thelowest numbers. Thus, although the confident identificationof a pidgin language in this region could stand to tell us agreat deal about the nature of socioeconomic relationshipson the prehispanic North Coast of Peru, it must unfortu-nately await significantly more data than that provided bythe short list of numbers on the Magdalena document.

Alternatively, the Chimu culture was strongly focusedon maritime activities, and one or more languages spokenwithin it also seem to have had strong maritime associ-ations (Campana Delgado 2006; Pillsbury 1996). Again,if Pescadora is, indeed, Quingnam, as Cerron-Palomino(1995)suggests, then the language of our document mayalso

be Quingnam–Pescadora. Given the dearth of our knowl-edge on the rich and varied languages of Peru in late pre-history and the Colonial Period, however, a final resolutionof this issue remains elusive. That said, the recent discoveryof the Magdalena document is testament to a potentiallylarge and previously untapped body of information againstwhich present ethnolinguistic models and theories may yet

be profitably tested.




CONCLUSION

Although this small list of numbers has offered new data onlanguage and numeracy in prehispanic and Colonial Peru, italso emphasizes how much remains to be learned. We donot definitively state that the number list documents previ-ously unrecordedwords from theQuingnam–Pescadora lan-

guage(s), but we believe that it remains a viable possibility.We can definitively state, however, that this language is notMochica and that its speakers must have had at least somecontact with Quechuan speakers (as revealed in the bor-rowed vocabulary for several numbers)—albeit of a punc-tuated, symmetrical, and probably remote nature. It is cer-tainlya previouslyunknown language, although we hope thatit is further chronicled in documents yet to be discovered,whether by archivists or archaeologists.

As the global diversity of human languages and numbersystems continues to decline (Austin 2008; Comrie 2005),this small piece of paper, recovered by the archaeologist’sspade, has helped to open a window on these often evanes-cent aspects of culture. Nevertheless, much remains to beunderstood regarding this information recorded some fourcenturies ago. It presents novel views related to theories of the language history of the Central Andes, such as the rela-tionship of Quechua with other tongues as well as variabilityin Quechua itself (Heggarty and Beresford-Jones in press).And although Franz Boas taught us long ago that race, lan-guage, and culture are not inextricably bound together, theyoften are linked to each other as well as to issues of class,population movements, and many other aspects of societyand culture. This little piece of paper, thus, is an exam-ple of how the “traditional” subdisciplines of anthropology

and related fields—in this case, archaeology, linguistics, andhistory—can still work cooperatively to investigate data andissues of shared concerns.

Jeffrey Quilter Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology,

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138

Marc Zender Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology,

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138

Karen Spalding Department of History, University of Connecticut,

Storrs, CT, 06269

R ´ egulo Franco Jord ´ an Fundaci ´ on Wiese, Lima 27, Peru

C ´ esar G ´ alvez Mora National Institute of Culture, Trujillo, La Liber-

tad, Peru

Juan Casta ˜ neda Murga National University of Peru, Trujillo, La

Libertad, Peru

NOTES

Acknowledgments. We thank many for helping us with the var-

ied aspects of retrieving and studying the Magdalena document. In

particular, we thank Jaime Jimenez S., Assistant Field Director of

excavations at Magdalena de Cao, and Marıa Fernanda Boza C., crew

chief. The latter quickly realized the importance of the paper when

it was discovered under her supervision. We also greatly appreciate

the ministrations of Carmen Gamarra, Laboratory Director of the

Museo de Cao, in cleaning and conserving the letter as well as many

other artifacts that we have recovered in our work. We also wish

to thank Sra. Ada Arrieta, librarian and paleographer at the Instituto

Riva Aguero of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, for her

help with the transcription of the letter. Zender wishes to acknowl-edge several years of fruitful conversations on comparative numeral

systems with R. Radhakrishnan and Adam Singerman. We would

also like to thank Tom Boellstorff, AA editor-in-chief, Gary Urton,

our colleague here at Harvard University, and three anonymous AA

reviewers. We found all of their comments on earlier drafts helpful

and insightful, and they have stimulated considerable improvements

to this article in its final version. Michele L. Koons also was of great

help in researching and developing Table 1. The research that led to

the discovery of this paper was funded, at various stages, by Dumbar-

tonOaks, theNationalScience Foundation (Grant No.0514330), the

National Endowmentfor the Humanities(Award No. RZ-50423-05),

the National Geographic Society, and the Peabody Museum, Harvard

University. All are profusely thanked. A special thank you is also

offered to the Fundacion Wiese, Lima, and to Marco Aveggio of that

institution, whose generosity to project members is extraordinary

and very much appreciated.

1. The full name of the settlement was Santa Marıa Magdalena

de Cao, but it was commonly called Magdalena de Cao, Mag-

dalena, Cao, and other shorthand terms even during its occu-

pation, which we know from some of the written letters we

have found. We use these as well as Magdalena de Cao, Viejo

(Old Magdalena de Cao), to refer to the archaeological site at

the El Brujo Archaeological Complex. The modern town of

Magdalena de Cao is four kilometers north of the site.2. A vara was a common unit of measurement equaling approx-

imately 1.68 meters. A real was a coin worth one-eighth of a

silver peso.

3. Theword pachak is long enough to make coincidence unlikely,

the form and its history are reasonably clear in the Quechuan

languages (see Table 1), and the same term is well-known

as a loan from Quechuan into Aymaran, Mochica, and other

languages of the region (Campbell 1997). Given these con-

siderations, and other apparent Quechuan loan words in the

document under investigation, borrowing seems the more

parsimonious explanation of pachac as well.

4. As one of our reviewers cogently observes: “While the ef-

fect of tayac is clearly to indicate addition, a look at other

languages across the world suggests a wide range of possible

linguistic devices, including, in addition to a conjunction or

compounding element, an adposition (e.g. ‘on’) or an adverb

(‘left over’).” We concur wholeheartedly and do not mean to

propose “plus” as a literal or definitive rendering butmerely as

a term of convenience for the evident mathematical function

of the word in this context. Indeed, absent any other contex-

tual evidence, we would leave open questions of the precise

morphemic division, grammatical status, and semantic range

of tayac.




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Article About the Unknown Peruvian Text (Numbers, Letter and the Word 'Tayac')

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Transcript of Article About the Unknown Peruvian Text (Numbers, Letter and the Word 'Tayac')