Words & Picture - Jake Brennan

:Every ruin has a story to tell. Their historic details have tumbled with their bricks, so it falls to subsequent generations to fill in the gaps. But what will the reconstruction look like? It depends whom you ask. And history, as we know, is written by the victors.

The Victors' version

The Diaguita indigenous people thrived and numbered as many as 5000 at Quilmes, in the arid Calchaquíes Valley in what is now northwestern Argentina. The first foreign "visit" (read: attempt at conquest) was from the Inca in about 1480, then from the Spaniards in the 1540s.

But the series of sentinels atop the mountain the town was built into gave the Diaguita a view through the clear desert air for a hundred kilometres in either direction, making a surprise attack impossible. Plus, since these mountains were so steep, their rocks so loose and sharp, any climbing invader was a sitting duck. The Diaguita thus enjoyed dominion over the vast valley for more than half a millenium.

But the Spaniards, ever persistent when it came to South American conquests, finally cracked the problem in 1667. They laid siege to Quilmes until the exhausted women and children descended, then raped and tortured the women to draw out the men. To further demoralize the vanquished, the Spaniards forced them to walk to their new slave lives as far away as Buenos Aires, thousands of kilometres to the east. Most of them died en route, but those who didn't inhabited the new barrio of Quilmes in Argentina's eventual capital.

To make amends for these atrocities and the centuries of racism that ensued, Argentina's military junta government (1976-83) undertook a vast reconstruction of the site's centre. Today Quilmes, with its ordered walls built into the hillside, is widely considered South America's most important pre-Columbian ruin, after Peru's Machu Picchu.

That's how the official story of Quilmes goes – the one you'll get from guides in the site's tiny museum or in most books. And our guide, Sebastian, three-quarters Diaguita, related all this. But he also provided details that characterized the history and reconstruction quite differently.

The Vanquished's version

Sebastian grew up not 20 km away from the reconstructed site, in Amaicha del Valle, today the tourist base for the ruins, yet never once took a class field trip to see them. It was as though his once proud and powerful people existed for international tourist dollars rather than any national celebration of Argentina's cultural heritage.

During the reconstruction, the rich site was closed to all but a handful of government archaeologists. When the site was finally opened to the public, it quickly became clear why: most of the Diaguita artefacts unearthed had been irretrievably spread around the globe, sold on the black market.

The reconstruction was a double-whammy public-relations front: the government profited immensely from the sale of unearthed artefacts, and continues to rake in revenue from the tour buses flocking to Quilmes year-round. The Diaguita's chance to learn more about their history is limited to a paltry display at the site's museum.

And the cultural insults continue. The Posada Quilmes, the lavish new hotel intended to connect tourists with the Diaguita's past, does so a little too well: it's built on top of the ancient settlement's cemetery. And the Posada's sizable pool? Keeping it filled against desert evaporation is draining the valley's water table, making farming for the Diaguita who remain in the valley more difficult every year.

So next time you see a gesture to refurbish a downtrodden people's past, scratch the surface. Or as the Watergate scandal's informer Deep Throat put it, "follow the money."