"Inca chronicles and legends persist that the Cloud People were tall fair (skin and hair) warriors. This is reinforced by an unusually large proportion of blond, fair natives in this zone who know of no European ancestry. However Julio C. Tello and anthropologists speculate the Chachapoyans may have been a jungle culture that migrated there through the Magdalena Valley of Columbia, and preferred the mountaintops. Whatever case, the Cloud People don’t fit the pattern of other Andeans. They lived behind walls in well crafted stone round houses with a pointed thatch “tepee” roof. One would suspect they farmed better land below the cloud forest, which wasn’t leached out and eroded, but lived on the peaks.
That particular tribe is very well known and their mummies have been x-rayed and studied. They come up in all the liturature as standard NA’s (but not Inca). The only thing white about them seems to be their tombs.
I looked up Julio Tello and he’s listed as an anthropologist native to Peru born about 1880. Given that he wasn’t an english speaker, it would be interesting to see what he wrote that was interpreted as describing the Cloud people in european terms.