A pre-Inca Peruvian kingdom, the Ychsma, imported live parrots from the Amazon rainforest across the Andes Mountains centuries before the Inca Empire's rise. Scientific analysis of feathers from noble headdresses reveals the birds were wild-caught far away and then kept in captivity on the coast, fed a local diet.
This practice demonstrates the Ychsma possessed a sophisticated, long-distance trade network spanning at least half a continent to transport these valuable live birds. The findings highlight the cultural and economic significance of exotic parrot feathers for Andean and coastal societies.
The main topics covered are pre-Inca trade networks, archaeological scientific analysis, and the cultural value of parrots in ancient Peru.
Centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire, a much smaller kingdom on the central coast of Peru already had a sophisticated trade network—one it used to import live parrots across the Andes from the Amazon rainforest.
Australian National University conservation geneticist George Olah and his colleagues recently studied feathers from a headdress in a Ychsman noble’s tomb, dating to 1100–1400 CE (the centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire). DNA and chemical isotopes reveal that the parrots the feathers came from (still bright blue, yellow, and green after all these centuries) were born in the wild on the far side of the Andes but kept in captivity somewhere on the Peruvian coast. To pull off importing live parrots from hundreds of miles away across the steep, towering Andes, the Ychsma (who the Inca annexed around 1470) must have had a far-reaching trade network that spanned at least half a continent.
And they must have really liked birds.
Long-distance trade before the Inca roads
Olah and his colleagues carefully selected fragments of individual barbs (the thin keratin strands that make up the body of a feather) from 25 feathers sewn onto funerary headdresses found at the pre-Inca city of Pachacamac, located on the dry coast of present-day Peru, just south of Lima. From each fragment, researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA and measured the ratios of certain nitrogen and carbon isotopes, which can reveal information about a creature’s diet.
The results suggest the parrots were born in the wild but spent at least a year in captivity eating local maize. That means they must have been captured hundreds of kilometers away, because parrots don’t tend to flock to the desert on their own.
The Ychsma kingdom grew out of a fragment of the old Wari Empire (known for its hallucinogenic beer, its canal system, and for breaking up around 1100 CE after a solid 500-year run). Centered at Pachacamac, the Ychsma built pyramids and irrigated their arid river valleys to grow crops. And like most of the cultures that lived in the Andes highlands and along the coasts of modern-day Peru and Chile, they really had a thing for parrot feathers.
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