The home of an Inca farmer was a square, single – room hut. Together
with a few of his relatives and friends, the farmer gathered stones for
the foundation of his home. He grooved and fitted them into place. The
walls of the hut were built of adobe brick. The men worked together to
make the brick, usually making enough to build more than one hut. They
dug up the clay dirt, poured water into it and mixed it with a spade.
The
roof was supported by five thin poles, one at each corner and one in
the center. It was made of thatch and covered with pebbles and mud to
keep the thatch in place.
There were no windows or smoke
holes in the hut. The only opening was the doorway, which faced east,
toward the rising sun. Most doorways were covered with a blanket or a
piece of hide. Wood was sometimes used for doors, but not very often,
because most of the trees had been cut down centuries before. The Inca administrators
in an effort to conserve the few wooded areas that still remained, did
not allow anyone to chop down a tree without special permission.
In
those high altitudes it is hot during the day when the sun shines. As
soon as the sun sets, however, it grows bitterly cold. Men and boys
stripped to the waist as they worked outdoors in the sun.
At
night the Inca Farmer slept on grass mats, which rested directly on mud –
packed floor, and covered themselves with animal skins and wool capes
to keep warm.
There was no stove or fire inside the
hut. It was customary to have a cooking shed, spate from the living
quarters, which two, three or even four neighbors shared. The stove the
Indians used was something like a camp stove. It was small, round, and
made of clay, with three openings at the top for cooking. Since a meal
was usually made in one pot, three women could cook their meals on the
stove at the same time. Dried llama dung and grass were used for the
fire, which was built through an opening in the side of the stove. This
convenient, economical clay stove seems to have been an Andean
invention.
The farmer’s wife rose before dawn to grind corn
for the morning meal. Huddling in her woolen shawl eh ran the short
distance from her house to the cooking hut. There she put some llama dung into the side opening of the little clay stove and blew on the embers from last night’s fire to start a new fire going.
On
one of the burners she set a pot of water to boil. While it heated, she
ground dry corn on large, three-legged, sloping slab of stone. On the
stone the woman threw corn kernels, a handful at a time, and with a
large handstone, crushing them into flour. She poured the flour into the
pot of boiling water, added some peppers, and let the mixture boil into
mush.
When the food was ready, the woman carried the hot pot
back into the hut. The family hunched over the meal and ate it quickly.
The Indians believed in witchcraft, and they were afraid that a witch
might get to their food and sicken them, so they tried to eat it as fast
as possible. Often, when a man was among strangers, he ate his food
facing a wall, to hide him from anything evil.
There were only
two meals a day and they varied little from day to day. The Indians ate
orn meal, other cereal and beans, or a simple stew of potatoes and
beans. After a harvest, corn was sometime boiled in its husk. A few
times a month, on festive occasions, the Indians ate duck, guinea pig,
or occasionally, the meat of an old llama or alpaca. Whatever meat was
left over was pounded and dried carefully in the sun.
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