Pilgrimage and geography of power in the Inca state (original) (raw)
Related papers
Inca Sacred Landscapes in the Titicaca Basin
Sacred landscapes are networks of meaningful places that are often woven together in mythic frameworks. Frequently they are understood as narratives, which are re-enacted through rituals and processions. We present archaeological data from the Copacabana Peninsula and Tiwanaku to show how the Inca appropriated pre-existing places and transformed the sacred landscape of the Titicaca Basin to inscribe the politically powerful Viracocha creation narrative, which held that Viracocha emerged on the Island of the Sun and travelled to Tiwanaku, where he created the sun, the moon, and the ancestral couples of all people, beginning with the Inca. We argue that this creation narrative was a key element in the Inca Empire’s ideology of legitimation. Consequently, the Inca appropriated and modified ritual places so that this narrative could be inscribed, reenacted, commemorated, and remembered, and they developed an infrastructure to support these rituals and related processions.
Sacred Landscapes and Imperial Ideologies: The Wari Empire in Sondondo, Peru (2005)
Archeological Papers of The American Anthropological Association, 2005
Expanding empires not only establish political and economic bases of control as they consolidate their occupation of new territories, but they also create or modify ideological bases of power in each region. Evidence from the Sondondo Valley suggests that the Wari Empire manipulated local belief systems in order to express its power and legitimate its domination. Wari imperial ideology was expressed through an iconography of power and an imposing style of architecture. Local belief systems can be reconstructed through the use of modern and historic observations combined with archaeological remains, and I identify one and possibly two major shrines that were in use during the Middle Horizon. Among the sites established by the Wari in the Sondondo Valley was Leqles Pata, located in proximity to local shrines in such a way as to exert control over their access and experiential nature. It is not unlikely that Wari strategies of ideological control were tailored to each region, much as were their economic and political reforms. The use of local belief systems as a form of resistance cannot be seen clearly in the case of the Wari occupation, but I cite the Taki Onqoy movement as an example of 16th-century resistance by the people of Sondondo against the Spanish. I conclude that Wari used ideological power as an important component of its imperial project.
In Pursuit of the Sacred: Understanding Inka Colonialism in the Andes
Comparativ 30(3/4), 2020
The Inka Empire, or Tawantinsuyu, was the largest ancient empire in the Americas. During the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Inkas managed to conquer vast regions of the South American Andes, subduing a variety of groups and polities. But the Inkas did not expand their realm for the sole purpose of extracting resources and accumulating wealth. To various degrees, they developed a colonial project that aimed at reshaping the political, economic, cultural and religious institutions and practices of the colonized. There is no doubt that Inka colonialism involved, among other things, corvée labour, the strategic relocation of people(s) and the exploitation and production of staple crops and luxury goods. Nevertheless, we argue in this paper that, above all, the Inkas expanded into the Andean region to meet and relate to the Sacred. Inka expansionism was a sort of religious quest through which the Inkas built up their authority and legitimized their rule.
The role of temple institutions in Wari imperial expansion at Pakaytambo, Peru
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2023
During the Andean Middle Horizon (CE 600–1000), the highland Wari emerged as an expansive power that formed the largest pre-Inka imperial project in the Andes. Although territorially discontinuous, the introduction of Wari state institutions to disparate regions of Peru knit together far-flung and diverse social groups. Recent excavations at Pakaytambo in southern Peru have uncovered a Wari ritual complex replete with a d-shaped temple, patio-group architecture, and monumental platform construction. The complex was established in the upper Majes-Chuquibamba drainage of Arequipa at ∼ 1700 masl and was strategically placed along a major pre-Inka road at the nexus of highland-coastal populations and socio-ecological zones. In this article, excavations at Pakaytambo are presented and discussed in terms of architectural canons, site chronology, and material studies in consideration to broader changes during the late Middle Horizon. d-shaped temples represent the most ubiquitous form of civic-ceremonial architecture related to Wari religious institutions and imperial ideology. Thus, Pakaytambo provides invaluable insights into the production of state authority through public ritual and performance in regions beyond a state heartland. A focus on institutions, their group members, norms, shared objectives, and archaeological patterning provides a middle-level unit of social analysis complimentary to high theory of the state.
Latin American Antiquity
Reconstructing access patterns, in particular processional and liturgical movement in ceremonial architecture, can illuminate social processes within expansive states. Extensive excavations from 2010–2012 in the uniquely preserved Tiwanaku temple at the Omo M10 site in Moquegua, Peru (ca. AD 500–1100), shed new light on connectedness and access patterns of the temple. Extensive areal excavations confirm past interpretations of a central axial series of doorways and staircases presided over by stelae and U-shaped, altar-like structures leading from public plazas to the sunken court and a central shrine. However, new findings revealed separate lateral pathways through the structure, which suggest liturgical processions to walled patio groups that were isolated from the central axis. We posit that these small patios and their roofed chambers may have functioned as chapels for distinct groups or pluralistic cultic activities that were separate from those of the central axis. Implications for Tiwanaku social structure are studied in light of other examples of triple entryways in Tiwanaku monumental architecture, and Kolata's suggestion of " Taypi " as a structural amalgam of a center and complementary halves, with implications of mediation and bilateral complementarity between ethnicities, genders, moieties, or other pluralistic entities within Tiwanaku state and society.
Society for American Archaeology, 2018
Andean archaeology consistently uses the Spanish colonial written record as a guide in interpreting the characteristics of the different societies that fell under the Inka rule. However, a growing body of scholarship on the material culture of such incorporated societies shows that the nature of their relationship with the Empire was variable, and that Inka control was not territorially continuous. One key strategy through which the Inka incorporated these groups was the entangling and capture of their local religious practices with those of the official state cult. In this paper, I propose to flip this model and ask how local polities interpreted the Inka within their own memory and history. In other words, what were the narratives that some of these polities spin to define their own standing within the Empire? I focus on the Yauyos people from the highlands of Lima, Peru. Through and archaeological and historical analysis, I argue that local rituals and spaces served as the critical medium through which the Yauyos defined their own interpretation of the Inka and their new position within their empire, thinking of themselves as allies as of the Inka as subjected to their own local deities.