Peru History

History

The first inhabitants arrived in this part of the world from Asia about 20000 years ago. They were primarily hunter-gatherer tribes among whose achievements can be attributed the domestication of animals such as the llama, alpaca and guinea-pig and the cultivation of cotton, beans and squashes throughout the regions that are now modern day Peru and Bolivia.

By 1000 BC these tribal peoples began to develop what we would now recognise as a regional culture in art, religion and agricultural methods, but for unknown reasons these began to diversify into individual pockets of expertise. These smaller tribal peoples became experts in their fields and archaeological evidence of their existence can be found across Peru, for example in the Nazca Lines and a series of temples.

From 600-1000 AD the Wari tribe were the dominant and fastest expanding people but they were unpopular with their neighbours despite their cultural development due to their suppression of the ways of those they conquered and the empire fractioned. This left the way open for the Inca expansion of the 1430s in which the Inca people ruled a great swathe of the continent from Colombia to Chile. However, the Inca's suppression of other cultures left them open to unpopularity, and series of civil wars left the empire prone when the Spanish arrived in the 1530s.

The Spanish founded their capital on the coast at Lima, but wars with the native people continued until 1572 when Inca Tupac organised the final Inca rebellion that ended in defeat for the indigenous people and Inca Tupac was brutally executed.

The 17th and 18th centuries were relatively peaceful as the colonists expanded their wealth at the expense of the land and those with local blood. The Colonial art and architecture that is now widely found in Peruvian cities was developed often tacked onto the outside of Inca temples, as in Cuzco, and hence Inca architecture has been better preserved in Cuzco than in other Latin American cities.

Independence was achieved in 1824 driven by the discovery of further natural resources and high taxation by the Spanish, but this did not bring peace. Wars took place between Peru and Spain, Ecuador, and Chile throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

In the 1960s and 70s the politics of Peru were characterised by military dictatorships, with civil rule beginning in the 1980s, but this early democracy was plagued by terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Political and economic reform, controversial but widely regarded as successful, was brought in by President Fujimori who was voted-in in 1990 and continued until he resigned after a questionable vote in 2000 when Alejandro Toledo replaced Fujimori as president.