The Inca empire was the largest state in the Americas at the time of the Spanish invasion in 1532. From its political center in the Cuzco Valley, it controlled much of the area included in the modern nations of Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia. But how the Inca state became a major pan-Andean power is less certain. In this innovative work, Brian S. Bauer challenges traditional views of Inca state development and offers a new interpretation supported by archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence.
Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attributed the rapid rise of Inca power to a decisive military victory over the Chanca, their traditional rivals, by Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. By contrast, Bauer questions the usefulness of literal interpretations of the Spanish chronicles and provides instead a regional perspective on the question of state development. He suggests that incipient state growth in the Cuzco region was marked by the gradual consolidation and centralization of political authority in Cuzco, rather than resulting from a single military victory. Synthesizing regional surveys with excavation, historic, and ethnographic data, and investigating broad categories of social and economic organization, he shifts the focus away from legendary accounts and analyzes more general processes of political, economic, and social change.
The Cuzco region of highland Peru was the heartland of the Inca empire, the largest native state to develop in the Americas. Archaeologists have studied Inca monumental architecture for more than a century, but it is only in recent decades that regional survey work has systematically sought to reconstruct patterns of settlement, subsistence, and social organization in the region. This monograph presents the results of regional surveys conducted (from 2000 to 2008) to the north and west of the city of Cuzco, a region of approximately 1200 square kilometers that was investigated using the same field methodology as other systematic surveys in the Cuzco region. The study region, referred to as Hanan Cuzco in this volume, encompasses considerable environmental variations, ranging from warm valley-bottom lands to snow-capped mountains. The chapters in this volume present settlement pattern data from all periods of pre-Columbian occupation—from the arrival of the first hunter-gatherers to the transformation of valley-bottom fields by the last Inca emperors. A chapter on the colonial period discusses how Spanish colonial practices transformed an imperial landscape into a peripheral one. Together, the chapters in this volume contribute to the archaeological understanding of several central issues in Andean prehistory.
The crown jewel of the Inka Empire was their capital, Cusco. So celebrated was the Cusco of Inka times that we sometimes forget how little we know of earlier times in the region. This book presents Allison Davis’ pioneering excavations at the high-altitude Formative site of Yuthu. Davis presents all her data on early households and evidence for the villagers’ subsistence strategies, craft production, and mortuary practices. From her excavations we learn a great deal about daily life and public rituals, each conducted in a different sector of Yuthu. An unexpected bonus of Davis’ excavations was the discovery that some well-known Inka practices actually had their origin in the early villages of the Cusco region. Before her work at Yuthu, so few early houses and ceremonial structures had been published in detail for the Cusco area that we had much less evidence for understanding sacred versus secular space. Davis’ excavations contribute to our understanding of one of the most important transitions in Andean history: the shift from autonomous egalitarian villages to multicommunity polities with hereditary inequality. She is able to link archaeological houses, sites, and multisite clusters to socially meaningful units such as families, villages, and communities. Davis is also able to combine her excavations with settlement pattern data to develop a regional picture of the Formative period in Cusco. This volume is not only the first excavation report on a Formative village in the Cusco area, but is also a study that contributes new data on many traditional Andean themes, including zonal complementarity, sacred landscapes, community composition, mummies and ancestor veneration, ritual canals and religious rites, and intra-village subdivisions.
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