Paloma Manu

Paloma Manu
Baroness Pelters at an archaeological dig near Sacsayhuamán; 1749 AN.
Who's Who of Nouvelle Alexandrie
Full Name	Paloma Sumaq K'anchay Inti-Carrillo y Flores
Titles & Offices	Baroness Pelters Director of Excavations, Sacsayhuamán Heritage Foundation
Birth Date	22.VI.1726 AN (35 AN years)
Birth Place	Parap, Wechua Nation
Parents	Prince Manu Laura Flores
Family	House of Inti-Carrillo
Education	Royal Academy of Parap University of Cárdenas Royal University of Parap
Alma Mater	Royal University of Parap
Occupation	Archaeologist
Employer	Sacsayhuamán Heritage Foundation
Political Affiliation	None
Organizations	Sacsayhuamán Heritage Foundation Royal University of Parap
Known For	Wechua domestic archaeology Heritage preservation Heritage survey after the 1757 Cajamarca micrasquake
Notable Works	Hearth and Storehouse: Food and Storage in Pre-Federation Wechua Households (1755 AN)
Religion	Faith of Inti
Languages	Alexandrian Martino Wechua Istvanistani
Residence	Parap, Wechua Nation
National Origin	Nouvelle Alexandrie
Citizenship(s)	Nouvelle Alexandrie

Paloma, Baroness Pelters (Alexandrian: Paloma, Baronne de Pelters; Wechua: Paloma Sumaq, Pelters Kuraqa; born 22.VI.1726 AN) is a New Alexandrian princess and archaeologist. The eldest daughter of Prince Manu, Count of Sacsayhuamán and Laura Flores, she is a granddaughter of King Sinchi Roca I. She works at the Sacsayhuamán Heritage Foundation, which her father founded, and her research concerns the domestic life of pre-Federation Wechua communities. Her excavation of the Weaver's House at Chillka Pampa and her book Hearth and Storehouse (1755 AN) established her reputation in the field.

Paloma holds the courtesy title Baroness Pelters, derived from her father's secondary holdings in Santander. A member of the House of Inti-Carrillo and niece of King Sinchi Roca II, she has kept her life centered on archaeology rather than court. Since 1758 AN she has directed the Foundation's excavation program, and her survey of historic sites damaged in the 1757 Cajamarca micrasquake brought her work its first wide public notice. She attends major royal functions but carries no regular ceremonial schedule.

Early life

Paloma Sumaq K'anchay was born on 22.VI.1726 AN at the Palace of Chinchero in Parap, during the first months of the Recession of 1726. Her Wechua names, chosen in consultation with traditional yachaq (wise ones), mean "beautiful" (Sumaq) and "light" (K'anchay). She was the first child of Prince Manu, who had married Laura Flores the previous year.

Prince Manu had joined the faculty of the Royal University of Parap in 1722 AN and pursued archaeological research throughout Paloma's early years. She grew up among artifact catalogs, excavation photographs, and the steady stream of students and colleagues who visited her father's study. By the age of five, she could identify common Wechua pottery styles and had developed the habit of examining any stone wall she passed for evidence of ancient construction.

The title Count of Sacsayhuamán had been her father's since 1725 AN, and as his eldest child Paloma was its heir presumptive from birth. The county includes Sacsayhuamán and many other archaeological sites in the Wechua Nation. In 1728 AN, when Paloma was two years old, her father established the Sacsayhuamán Heritage Foundation to coordinate preservation and research throughout the county. The young princess was a regular presence at the Foundation and accompanied her parents on site visits from an early age.

Laura Flores offered a counterweight to this archaeological upbringing. From a family of textile merchants in Parap, she had trained as an artist and art historian before her marriage. She encouraged Paloma's developing eye for detail while making sure her daughter's world extended beyond the excavation trenches. Paloma learned to draw from her mother.

The death of King Sinchi Roca I in 1735 AN was Paloma's first experience of public royal duties. At nine years old, she attended her grandfather's state funeral at the Cathedral of Viracocha in Parap, where an estimated twelve million people lined the streets for the procession. She had known the King primarily through formal occasions and holiday gatherings, but the scale of public grief made an impression. Her uncle Sinchi Roca II ascended to the throne.

The Spring Crisis of 1739 occurred when Paloma was twelve. Too young to grasp its full political implications, she remembers the tension in the household as news arrived of the attempted coup and her family's relief when her uncle's radio broadcast declared the coup illegal. Her father later told her that the crisis reinforced his belief that their family's role was to preserve Wechua heritage for future generations, whatever the politics of the day.

Education

Paloma received her primary education from tutors at the Palace of Chinchero, following a curriculum that emphasized languages, history, and mathematics alongside the customary subjects for children of the royal household. Her father supplemented this formal instruction with informal lessons in archaeology, taking her on site visits and explaining what each layer of soil or style of pottery could reveal about the past.

At age twelve, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Parap, the same institution her father had attended decades earlier. The school, which served the Wechua aristocracy and professional classes, was academically demanding. Paloma excelled in history and languages but showed less enthusiasm for the physical pursuits that occupied many of her classmates. Teachers noted her methodical approach to problems and her patience with difficult material. She graduated in 1744 AN with honors in history.

For her university education, Paloma chose the University of Cárdenas rather than the Royal University of Parap where her father taught. She wanted credentials independent of her father's reputation. Cárdenas offered a strong archaeology program with methodological traditions different from Parap's.

At Cárdenas, she studied under professors who had no particular reason to favor a royal student. She kept her title out of casual conversation and introduced herself simply as Paloma Inti-Carrillo. Some classmates eventually realized her identity, but by then she had demonstrated her commitment to the discipline. Her undergraduate research focused on household archaeology, examining the domestic spaces where ordinary Wechua families had lived.

She completed her undergraduate degree in 1748 AN and returned to Parap for graduate study at the Royal University of Parap. Having proven herself elsewhere, she could now work under her father's supervision, and Prince Manu's expertise in Wechua epigraphy and site documentation complemented her interest in domestic contexts. Her graduate research examined ceramic assemblages from household sites near Sacsayhuamán and developed methods for identifying activity areas within ancient dwellings.

Archaeological career

Paloma joined the staff of the Sacsayhuamán Heritage Foundation in 1750 AN upon completing her graduate studies. She began as a staff archaeologist, leading excavation projects, supervising conservation work, and contributing to the Foundation's educational programs.

Her specialization in domestic archaeology distinguishes her work from her father's focus on military architecture and monumental construction. Where Prince Manu studies how the Wechua built their fortresses, Paloma examines how people lived within and around them.

The excavation that made her reputation was the Weaver's House at Chillka Pampa, a hillside hamlet in the County of Sacsayhuamán, which she dug between 1752 AN and 1754 AN. A slip of earth had buried the dwelling with its contents in place: loom weights still lay where a backstrap loom had been anchored to the floor, spindle whorls sat beside the hearth, and two dye pots kept traces of their last batch. The arrangement showed spinning, dyeing and weaving carried on in the same room as cooking, through the ordinary working day of the household. Her report, published in 1754 AN, challenged the long-held view that Wechua cloth was made mainly in specialized workshops, and the Foundation placed the site under permanent protection. She credits her mother, whose knowledge of Wechua textiles helped her read the dye residues, as a silent coauthor of the work.

Her research on food preparation and storage across household sites in the county became her first book, Hearth and Storehouse: Food and Storage in Pre-Federation Wechua Households, published by the Royal University of Parap Press in 1755 AN. The study drew on six field seasons and more than forty excavated dwellings, and it argued that storage practice, more than house size, marked the differences in wealth between Wechua families, and that households kept their own reserves alongside, not in place of, the Sapa Wechuas' state storehouses, the forerunner of the National Qullqa System. Hearth and Storehouse was well received. Reviewers praised the care of its fieldwork, and the Royal University adopted it as a set text for its Faculty of Anthropology's course in Wechua archaeology, where it remains in use.

When the 1757 Cajamarca micrasquake struck the Wechua Nation, the older villages around Cajamarca took the heaviest damage, and many of their buildings predated the Federation. The Foundation lent Paloma to the regional authorities to lead a survey of damaged historic structures. Her team recorded collapsed and cracked buildings before clearance crews reached them, marked the ones that could be saved, and recovered household material exposed by the collapses. The survey's records were used in the reconstruction under the Cajamarca Reconstruction Act, 1757 to decide which old walls were rebuilt rather than replaced.

The survey's best-known moment came in a hillside village above the city, where her team found a household shrine in the ruins of a collapsed adobe house: a wall niche holding small carved stone figures that the family had kept as protectors of its herds and harvest for generations. Paloma traced the family to a shelter camp outside Cajamarca and returned the figures to them in person. A photograph of the handover was carried by newspapers across the Federation, and it became the image by which she was known outside academic circles.

In 1758 AN the Foundation appointed her Director of Excavations, placing its whole field program under her direction. She sets the annual excavation plan, trains the field staff, and manages the Foundation's partnerships with university departments.

Her work has also turned outward. In 1756 AN she presented a paper in Lindström comparing storage in Wechua dwellings with that in Natopian farmhouses, and in 1759 AN a paper in Petropolis on the placement of hearths in highland and lowland homes. The two papers began a comparative study of domestic sites beyond the Wechua heartland, which colleagues expect to become her second book.

Research interests

Paloma asks how Wechua households organized their living space and how families processed and stored food, questions that the study of monumental sites tends to leave aside. She answers them by mapping activity areas from the distribution of pottery fragments, ground stone tools, and food remains, the method she began developing in her graduate research.

A particular interest is the role of women in Wechua households. Drawing on historical sources and her excavations at Chillka Pampa and several smaller sites, Paloma argues that women controlled much of domestic production, from food preparation and weaving to the management of household stores.

Field practice

Field seasons take up much of her working year, and her excavations are thoroughly documented even when they yield no dramatic finds. She will spend an entire afternoon recording a single feature.

Her field crews are led by Teodoro Huallpa, a foreman who first worked on her father's excavations in the 1740s AN and has run her trenches since she was a graduate student. He calls her Doctora, never by her royal style, and she has kept that informality as a rule: on her excavations no one uses titles below the trench line, including her. Visiting officials have occasionally found the rule awkward, but her crews hold to it.

She insists on drawing every significant find by hand before it is photographed, a habit she learned from her mother. Her field sketchbooks, filled with pencil studies of potsherds, loom weights and wall sections, circulate among colleagues and students as models of the practice.

Among the laborers hired for the Cajamarca survey was Wayra Ccahuana, a young woman from one of the damaged villages, who showed an aptitude for recording that impressed the team. Paloma sponsored her place at the Royal University of Parap, and Ccahuana has since joined the Foundation as her field assistant.

Personal life

Paloma lives in Parap, near her parents and the Royal University of Parap, in a modest apartment. Her home reflects her professional interests: bookshelves filled with archaeological reports, artifact drawings pinned to the walls, and a drafting table where she works on field illustrations. Friends describe her living space as comfortable but unremarkable for someone of her royal status.

Her social circle consists primarily of colleagues and university peers. She prefers small gatherings to large social events and has little patience for court ceremony. Colleagues at the Heritage Foundation sometimes forget her rank during long field seasons, only to be reminded when she must leave early for a state occasion. Drawing is also how she relaxes, and on rare free evenings she might spend hours rendering a potsherd in pencil.

Many highland sites lie beyond the end of the roads, and she reaches the most remote of them on horseback, a skill learned on her father's survey seasons. A highland herding dog named Rumi has followed her to every excavation since Chillka Pampa and is a fixture of her camps.

Paloma has two younger sisters. Lady Mariela, two years younger, works as a painter in Punta Santiago and carries on the family's artistic tradition. Lady Cristina, the youngest, trained as a physician and practices in Parap. The three sisters remain close despite their different careers and, in Mariela's case, geographical distance. Paloma speaks with both regularly and confides in them outside work.

Cristina served at the shelter camps after the micrasquake while Paloma led the survey, and the two worked in the same district for several weeks. The sisters have described those weeks as the longest time they had spent together since childhood.

Her father remains her closest intellectual companion. She and Prince Manu consult frequently on research questions, and during field seasons they often work side by side. He still calls her "bebita," a childhood endearment she tolerates with mock exasperation in professional settings. Since 1758 AN he has handed her much of the Foundation's daily running, though he keeps final authority over its expenditures. When she will take over the Foundation, and with it the expectation that she will one day succeed to the County of Sacsayhuamán, is the open question in the family.

She has not married, and she keeps her personal life out of public view.

She gives an annual public lecture at the Royal University of Parap on the year's excavations, and in 1759 AN she became patron of the Foundation's schools program, which brings classes from across the Wechua Nation to working excavations. She remains reluctant to give interviews and prefers that coverage focus on the sites rather than on her.

Royal duties

As a member of the House of Inti-Carrillo, Paloma holds formal standing within the royal family. Her grandfather was King Sinchi Roca I, her uncle is the reigning King Sinchi Roca II, and her first cousins include Crown Princess Sayari, heir to the throne. She stands eighteenth in the line of succession, far enough from the crown that her position has no practical political significance.

Her courtesy title, Baroness Pelters, derives from secondary holdings associated with her father's estates. Pelters is a small mountain community in Santander, distant from the Wechua heartland where Paloma lives and works. She has visited the community several times but keeps no regular presence there. The title carries no duties.

Paloma attends major royal occasions when the family gathers: state funerals, royal weddings, the Sapphire Jubilee celebrations and others like them. She appeared at Crown Princess Sayari's wedding in 1750 AN, visible in official photographs among the extended royal family, and has since attended the family's principal occasions, among them the weddings of her cousins Princess Urpi in 1754 AN and Prince Xanthorr in 1758 AN. Apart from her patronage of the Foundation's schools program, she keeps no schedule of ceremonial engagements or public appearances independent of these family gatherings. Society pages identify her as "Baroness Pelters" without elaboration, and academic publications list her simply as "P. Inti-Carrillo."

With her royal cousins she is cordial but not close. Princess Urpi, the same age as Paloma, represents the closest parallel in the younger generation, but their lives have diverged considerably. Urpi fulfills regular royal duties and has a family of her own, while Paloma directs excavations in the highlands. They see each other at family events and exchange pleasantries, but share neither daily experiences nor professional concerns.

Titles, styles, and honors

Titles and styles

• 22.VI.1726 AN - present: Her Royal Highness Paloma, Baroness Pelters

Honors

New Alexandrian honors

• Dame of the Order of the Sun and Eagle (1726 AN)

Foreign honors

• Lady of the Order of the Holy Lakes, by blood
• : Member of the Order of the Royal and Imperial Blood (1753 AN)

See also

• House of Inti-Carrillo
• Prince Manu, Count of Sacsayhuamán
• Sacsayhuamán Heritage Foundation
• 1757 Cajamarca micrasquake
• Royal University of Parap
• Nobility of Nouvelle Alexandrie