Encyclopedia of the Incas

■TAMARA L.  BRAY

CHICHA
This term, which today refers to maize beer or other fermented beverages
consumed in communities throughout the Andes and Amazonia, was adopted by
sixteenth-century Spaniards from Arawak-speaking peoples of the Caribbean or
from the Kuna of Panama. The term quickly replaced the Quechua name for the
drink, aja, or ajsa, as well as the Aymara term kusa. Virtually every chronicler
who wrote about the Incas noted the enormous amounts of chicha consumed at
every occasion, ranging from the great festivals in Cuzco’s main plaza, where
ritual drunkenness prevailed (so much so that one chronicler noted that the
plaza’s drains ran with urine throughout the day “as abundantly as a flowing
spring”) to drinking by small groups of laborers tilling a field or building an
irrigation canal. The state was required to provide work parties engaged in state
labor service with food and drink, as part of the Incas’ reciprocal labor
obligation to their subjects. “They never celebrate an event, whether joyful or
sad, in any way other than by dancing and drinking to excess,” noted the
chronicler Bernabé Cobo (1979 [1653]). When a conquered curaca, or
headman, submitted to Inca rule, the two parties sealed the pact with a toast of
chicha, consumed in gold, silver, wooden, or ceramic tumblers (the material
reflected the status of the drinkers), known as keros. Chicha was the principal
offering made to sacred objects or places, the huacas.
Although virtually every ancient civilization consumed some sort of fermented
beverage, the enormous investment by the Inca state in increasing maize
production, largely for chicha production, through conquest is unprecedented in
the ancient world. Chicha production and state hospitality were crucial to
provincial administration. The state’s ability to increase chicha production was
key to political and economic expansion. The maize fields of Cochabamba, in
present-day central Bolivia, provide perhaps the most dramatic example of this:
there the ruler Huayna Capac transferred the local population to other regions
and replaced them with 14,000 mitmacuna and mit’a laborers who cultivated the
maize fields for the state (see Labor Service).