Aimara

The Aymara are altiplano natives around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and Peru. Ancestors shared the basin with Tiwanaku, founded around 110, though the Aymara whom the Spanish met no longer remembered its builders. By the fifteenth century kingdoms and chiefdoms divided them, among them the Colla and Lupaca of Chucuito, farming potatoes and quinoa and freeze-drying chuño.

Inca conquest after 1438 was complete by 1500 under Pachacuti and son Topa Yupanqui; repeated revolts, one lasting twelve years, were crushed; mitma colonies and labour duties bound the region to Cusco, yet Aymara speech and clans survived.

Pizarro's men came in 1532-1534; in 1542 the altiplano entered the Viceroyalty of Peru. Encomiendas, reductions and the Potosí mita took heavy toll: eleven thousand native labourers worked Potosí in 1573, only 1,600 by 1673. Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio recorded Aymara in the early seventeenth century. Unrest ran from 1629 to the Andean insurrection of 1779 to 1781, associated with Túpac Amaru II and Aymara leader Túpac Katari; after the 1810-1825 independence wars the Aymara became Bolivia's and Peru's subjects.