Yuraq Qaqa: Indigenous Engineering and Mapmaking Before the Inka in the Colca Valley of Highland Peru

Carved boulders and outcrops depicting agricultural terraces, irrigation channels, and reservoirs—referred to as maquetas—have been found in multiple highland regions in the Andes, especially the Colca Valley. In 2024, our team found a maqueta, known locally as Yuraq Qaqa (white rock in Quechua), a massive 7,000 m3 carved outcrop of rhyolitic tuff making it among the largest documented maquetas to date in the Andes. With funding from a 2025 Archaeological Institute of America Site Preservation Grant, we have been documenting and working with the community to preserve this unique site. Yuraq Qaqa attests to centuries of agricultural experimentation, innovation, and knowledge production prior to Spanish colonization of the Colca Valley. While other known maquetas depict relatively circumscribed terrace and irrigation systems, Yuraq Qaqa serves as a regional map of mountains, glaciers, and agricultural systems that encompass not just the valley, but much of the region of Arequipa. Yuraq Qaqa is also unique in its incorporation of abstract artistic elements, including circles, spirals, and rectilinear petroglyphs, which challenge western forms of cartographic knowledge. Taken together, Yuraq Qaqa suggests communities in the Colca Valley engaged in regional-scale environmental engineering and coordination between communities in the centuries before Inka expansion.

About the speaker: Lauren Kohut (Ph.D., Anthropology, Vanderbilt University) is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Anthropology at Winthrop University. As an archaeologist and anthropologist, she is interested in the complex interactions between humans and their environment across deep time scales. Her research investigates how periods characterized by social and ecological crisis–like warfare, climate change, and colonialism–disrupt and transform society. Since 2004, most of her research has taken place in the Peruvian Andes where she has been engaged in long-term field research. Her research has been supported by the Archaeological Institute of America, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.