The Producer's Story:
Unearthing Suppressed History
by Graham Townsley
When I first looked at background material on the project that
became "The Great Inca Rebellion," I had mixed feelings, I
must admit. I loved the idea of returning to Peru. I had spent
many years there as an anthropology graduate student doing the
fieldwork for my doctorate at Cambridge, and the place is very
close to my heart. It has always inspired me. But when I
looked hard at the story, my secret thoughts were these: Here
we go again, another one of those TV films that make a big
deal out of a minor archeological find, and we get to tell the
story of the conquest of Peru for the 200th time!
The story seemed slight. I thought I knew exactly how it would
all evolve.
It wasn't. I didn't.
That perfectly round little hole in that 500-year-old
skull—if you haven't seen the film, have a quick look at
the
program description
to learn what I'm talking about—that hole turned out to
be the doorway to one of the most exciting scientific and
intellectual adventures I have ever been part of.
Shaking an edifice
The scientific questions were clear enough: Was this or was
this not a bullet hole? Were these or were these not the
victims of the first battles of the conquest of Peru? If we
could get a conclusive forensic result, that in itself would
have been a real first: the first-ever forensic remains from
one of the battles of the conquest, not just in Peru but
anywhere in the Americas. In my experience, absolutely
conclusive archeological or forensic results are few and far
between, so I was amazed when we actually did get a conclusive
result. It really was a bullet wound. These really
were the first victims of the conquest ever found. And
it was all beyond a shadow of any reasonable doubt.
The forensic trail was fascinating enough, but it was just the
beginning of the adventure. When we were able to put the
forensics together with a statistical analysis of the remains
showing that although these individuals clearly died in a
conquest skirmish, most of them appeared to have been killed
not by Spanish weapons but by Indian ones—at that point
things became even more interesting. When we connected those
results up with painstaking and pioneering work done over the
past few decades by historians of the conquest, I realized we
had the makings of something truly remarkable—a new
vision of the conquest and a radical deconstruction of one of
the grand narratives of world history, the European conquest
of the Americas.
Pizarro's conquest of Peru is at the core of that
long-established narrative and has traditionally been taken to
exemplify its key themes: the great march of European
expansion, the West's invincible technological prowess, the
cosmic bad luck of the Indians' lack of resistance to European
diseases, the tragic but beautiful Indian inability to
comprehend what was happening to them, and so on. But here was
a discovery that seemed to challenge all of that.
Reconstructing the story
The forensic side of the story started with the Peruvian
archeologist Guillermo Cock's discovery of a mass grave of
Indians, whom he was able to determine were killed at one of
the most famous battles of the conquest, the Siege of Lima.
This battle has conventionally been portrayed as the brave
rout of a vast Inca army by a handful of wily and determined
conquistadors commanded by Pizarro. Cock's discoveries pointed
in the opposite direction. This pivotal battle of the conquest
was won not by Spanish cruelty or brilliance, not by European
technological superiority, nor by European diseases. This was
essentially a clash of Indians against Indians.
I felt like I was creating a collective memory for people and
events erased from history.
And this, I found, corroborated the recent findings of
historians like the Peruvian Maria Rostworowski, who, in
long-forgotten legal documents, have found striking evidence
of the broad scope of the alliances between conquistadors and
rebel Peruvian chiefdoms that were anxious to free themselves
from Inca domination.
Again, I saw the potential for a really captivating film: not
only a genuinely new story to tell about the conquest, but a
very poignant human drama, the final day and deaths of the
people killed at the Siege of Lima.
What was that day like? What did Mochito—the Indian
whose brutalized remains led researchers to give him this
name, meaning "the severed one"—and his people think as
they went off to their deaths? To spend days around their
battered skeletons, hear from the forensic scientists about
the moment of each person's death, learn from the
archeologists and historians what was probably going on around
them as they died, became a strangely moving experience. The
longer I spent trying to imagine their last day, the closer I
felt to them.
It became very important to me to tell the stories of their
lives and deaths well. I felt like I was creating a collective
memory for people and events erased from history because they
didn't fit a narrative constructed by their conquerors. I went
to great pains to try and recreate that last day of their
lives as faithfully as possible. The actors and extras were
wonderful. Mostly drama students or actors working in Peruvian
soap operas, they threw themselves into the project with great
enthusiasm. Like everybody involved with the film, I think
they found it refreshing to help tell a quite different story
of the conquest from the account they had all grown up with.
No simple heroes
The production left us all with vivid memories and big
questions. What does it do to the traditional narrative of the
conquest to learn that its battles were overwhelmingly decided
not by Spanish technological or intellectual superiority but
by bitter conflicts within the Indian world? That the Spanish
were to some extent bystanders of an Indian civil war?
The first thing it does is to complicate our understanding in
compelling ways. The conquest of Peru looks less like the
inevitable march of European expansion and more like a fluke.
Pizarro looks less like a conquering hero and more like the
adventurer he was, who had the enormous good fortune to wander
into an Indian civil war and the wit to know how to manipulate
it to his advantage. The Inca look less like noble victims and
more like complex human beings with sophisticated thinking and
complex motivations, some of them just as low and scheming as
the Europeans'. Suddenly everything appears a lot messier and
more interesting. We no longer have a saga with clear heroes,
villains, and victims. We're back in the real world, where
things never quite happen the way they do in stories.
In a funny way, making this film also restored my faith in
television documentary.
The realities we reveal in our film also raise the intriguing
question of why all this was erased from history in the first
place. We did not have space to delve into this in detail, but
it is fascinating and really deserves its own film. On the one
hand, it is easy to see how the true story of the conquest
does not flatter anybody involved, for exactly the reasons
outlined above. Nobody comes out as either good hero or good
victim, and much in terms of self-image was at stake in
maintaining those roles.
History's higher stakes
There were also, however, very real political and economic
considerations. The conquistadors enlisted the massive support
of Indian allies by promising them huge payoffs once the war
was over. They would receive lands, money, and influence. When
the war really was "won," it was enormously beneficial
economically to the conquistadors to simply forget their
promises and debts. And who, after all, was going to enforce
them?
On the Indian side of the equation the dilemmas were harsher.
When the great chiefs who had allied themselves with the
Spanish realized that they were not, as they had thought,
equal partners in the much-desired ousting of the Incas but
had in fact colluded in the self-destruction of their entire
world, they were horrified and, finally, ashamed. Naturally,
they did not want to go down in the grand narrative as the
collaborators who had betrayed their own people. So they too
had something to gain from a tale of inexorable Spanish
victory. It at least allowed them to salvage some pride from
the disaster.
Faith restored
I find all this curiously moving and powerful. It seems to
restore to the world of Inca Peru, so complex and divided
against itself, a sort of epic and tragic grandeur.
In a funny way, making this film also restored my faith in
television documentary. As I said earlier, like all filmmakers
I know all too well the pressure to always simplify, to rehash
old, well-known stories in an attempt to make them
entertaining all over again. It sometimes seems that TV lives
in a world of endlessly recycled cliché.
"The Great Inca Rebellion" was different. NOVA immediately
bought into the freshness and rich complexity of the story,
and the whole experience was heartening. It reminded me that
it is possible to tell new and intricate stories on TV, and
that people want to see them. That potential is, after all,
why I became a filmmaker in the first place.
