Review: Histories from the South

Reviewed Work(s): Landscape and Politics in the Ancient Andes: Biographies of Place at
Khonkho Wankane by SCOTT C. SMITH: Southeast Inka Frontiers: Boundaries and
Interactions by SONIA ALCONINI
Review by: Jorge Gamboa
Source: Latin American Antiquity , September 2017, Vol. 28, No. 3 (September 2017), pp.
441-443
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26563982

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 Histories from the South: Memory,
Frontiers, and Interaction in the Andes
Landscape and Politics in the Ancient Andes: Biogra-
phies of Place at Khonkho Wankane. SCOTT C.
SMITH. 2016. University of New Mexico Press,
Albuquerque. xv + 277 pp. $75.00 (hardcover), ISBN
978-0-826-35709-0.
Southeast Inka Frontiers: Boundaries and Interac-
tions. SONIA ALCONINI. 2016. University Press
of Florida, Gainesville. 248 pp. $79.95 (hardcover),
ISBN 978-0-813-06291-4.
Reviewed by Jorge Gamboa, Escuela de Arqueología,
UNASAM, Perú
Archaeological research is a privileged method for the
reconstruction of local and regional histories, and—
as demonstrated by the works reviewed here—South
America is a first-rate location for that enterprise.
These two books present advances in research in
diverse parts of the current territory of Bolivia; both
works also show the possibilities and challenges of
the (re)building and representation of indigenous pasts
that are still sometimes called “prehistoric.”
The contribution by Smith examines the Khonkho
Wankane site and places it in the forefront of research
on the emergence and evolution of complex societies
from the Titicaca Basin between 800 BC and AD
500. The volume is outstanding in its content and also
because of the implications of its theoretical position-
ing for the understanding of precolonial Andean his-
tory. The book begins by exploring the potential of the
concept of biography of place—a term encompassing
the diverse meanings given through time to a territory
by its inhabitants—for the reconstruction of a histor-
ical trajectory. The approach to place-making at the
site is, consequently, conducted through the constant
use of the idea of entanglement among people, objects,
and concepts. Another emphasis of the book lies in its
analysis of the local dynamics of political power, seen
as contested and fluid rather than vertical.
The built landscape of Khonkho Wankane was, in
its time (as it is today for the area’s communities), a
source of interest and amazement. The platforms and
sunken courts could be conceived as mountains and
circulating bodies of water. The details of that artificial
space are discussed in sections that present the position
of Khonkho Wankane in the sequence of the altiplano’s
Formative period and the results of recent excavations
at the site. Khonkho Wankane is also examined as
a privileged space for the construction of traditions.
For Smith, the proximity to the caravan routes in
the southern part of Lake Titicaca was a key factor
in, first, that process and, second, in the rise to
power of the settlement as a hub for the distribution
of products coming from distant zones. Although
originating in mortuary celebrations, the local making
of place included innovative traditions. One example
would be the defleshing of individuals with special
status, a practice that was apparently represented in
one of the stelae at the site. Smith believes defleshing
was developed to facilitate the transport of ancestors’
remains. The curation of some human remains could
also correspond to other categories of individuals,
victims of sacrifice for example, something that must
be verified as studies in the area progress.
The local experience of place and belonging,
and the generative power of public architecture in
Khonkho Wankane, are presented next. The analysis of
the architectural environment brings the author to not
only disarticulate the elements of its spatial syntax but
also to discard a rigid dichotomy between integrative
forms of social cohesion and divisionist ones. For
Smith, the site, in spite of maintaining the role of axis
mundi, experienced a gradually increasing restriction
of access to its inner ceremonial loci. Smith’s intr-
asite analysis of the Khonkho Wankane inclusivity-
exclusivity ranges reveals an early emphasis on inti-
macy and commensalism. Generations later, the prin-
cipal sensorial experience of the public would have
been obtained through processions directed by dif-
ferent groups. That alteration suggests changes in the
conception of the human body, which went from being
a transformative agent of offerings to becoming part of

Latin American Antiquity 28(3), 2017, pp. 441–453

Copyright © 2017 by the Society for American Archaeology
doi:10.1017/laq.2017.23

441

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442 LATIN AMERICAN ANTIQUITY
a larger process of collective transformation obtained
through rituals and solemn (and festive) progressions.
The data-based definition of the site’s capacity to
decentralize its own agendas is one of the strengths
of the publication. That position is welcome, and the
book joins a set of other new works that highlight
the capacity of the public in ancient societies to criti-
cally examine official performances. The relationship
between the final phase of Khonkho Wankane’s history
and the dynamics of the caravan routes is treated in
the final chapter. Working on perspectives previously
advanced by Núñez, Dillehay, and Nielsen, the author
interprets the activity of the camelid caravans as vital to
the management of periods of climatic stress that in the
past affected the altiplano’s peoples. The confluence
and dispute between locally devised goals and those
based on contact with foreign groups were, for Smith, a
means of local political practice. In his view, Khonkho
Wankane ideology and economy were interlocked in
a cosmovision that equally privileged communal and
individual negotiation.
For Smith, the integration of landscape, settlers,
and memories was both source and end of the ambigu-
ity and tension visible in local principles of authority.
His reconstruction does not end there. According to
Smith, the meeting between division and convergence,
secrecy and revelation, was instrumental to the con-
struction of Khonkho Wankane’s rules of power and
social positioning. What about the deconstruction of
those principles? For the author, as the experience of
place at the site became more centralized, the caravan
leaders looked for new alliances, recreating the process
once more in new and different places. In time,
the human experiences in Khonkho Wankane were
restarted in other spaces—particularly in Tiwanaku,
one of the settlements that benefited from its fall.
The book by Alconini explores the southeast fron-
tier of the Inca state and the collision from AD 1450 to
1532 between that expansive polity and the Guaraní-
Chiriguano ethnic groups. Mentions of that episode
in colonial documents and travel narratives written in
the nineteenth century converted Inca rule in Bolivia’s
southern valleys and part of the Chaco into an accepted
fact in the memory and political discourses of several
Andean countries. That reconstruction of the past was
a simplistic one and promoted the idea of the clash
between a civilization and some “savage” peoples in
a rhetoric similar to, if not inspired by, the idealized
history of Rome and its Germanic neighbors. Alconini
reveals a distinct and more complex reality related to
the identities and purposes of groups that had acted in a
constantly disputed territory since before the fifteenth
century. Her book is also placed within a wider context,
that of frontiers as real and imagined contested spaces.
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[Vol. 28, No. 3, 2017]
The encounter between Incas and Guaraní was,
no doubt, one in which divergent forms of social and
economic organization came together in a violent way.
The author starts her analysis of the politics of Inca
expansionism by conceptualizing the preindustrial
empires and defining the agency of frontier commu-
nities as based in their liminal physical and symbolic
position. The Incas reorganized the social and eco-
nomic institutions of numerous Andean peoples and
created a multiethnic state. The transformation of the
absorbed regions was carried out through a “language
of reciprocity” in which gift giving became central to
the legitimation of political asymmetries and compro-
mises. Other strategies included the resettlement of
mitmakuna and yanakuna groups in distant regions,
among them the borderlands with the Chiriguano
groups.
The Guaraní entry to the Andes was, however, part
of larger population movements carried out across the
South American lowlands. Alconini’s review of the
economic and ideological motivations of that mobility
does not omit analysis of ethnohistorical references
in the search for Candire, the place or embodiment
of abundance pursued by some Guaraní groups in
constant peregrination—a mention that invites com-
parison with similar cases in northern Mesoamerica.
The area invaded by the Chiriguanos was occupied
by the Charcas societies and included the zone settled
by the Yampara, who would become allies of the Incas
and defenders of the territory in conflict. The demogra-
phy and cultural patterns of the Yampara sector during
the period of Inca and Guaraní influence are examined
through new data available for the Yampara sector
and especially for Oroncota, a main administrative
and religious imperial center provided with prestige
buildings and households for local and mitmakuna set-
tlers. The low frequency of ceramics from the eastern
valleys in the area is also contrasted with the ethnohis-
torical background, an exercise revealing the distance
between the materiality of Chiriguano presence and
the mentions of their territorial advance in the written
records. Alconini’s characterization of expressions of
Inca power in the Yampara zone—with low disruption
of native settlement patterns and selective forms of
adoption of foreign values—will be of particular
interest to scholars of preindustrial colonialism.
Cuzcotuyo, another fortified Inca settlement, was
located in the Khosko Toro region, closer to the
Chiriguano lands. The final occupational phase of the
site saw an increase in the use of vessels stylistically
related to the tropical valleys, something that for
Alconini suggests hospitality directed toward some
allied or less belligerent Chiriguano groups. The final
section of the volume compares the model generated
 REVIEWS
by research in Oroncota and Khosko Toro with the Inca
frontiers in Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile. Through
that exercise, the dynamics of the southeast Inca
frontier are placed in a context that, given the extension
of Tawantinsuyu, reaches a continental scale.
The biographies of places—such as those
of Khonkho Wankane and the southeast Inca
borderland—are biographies of communities; at the
same time, they have a direct relationship to our posi-
tion regarding the ancient and modern societies that
we study. There are other aspects to be mentioned. The
books by Smith and Alconini describe in detail sites
and regions important to South American archaeology
that are also impacted by modern occupations. Both
works should be published in Spanish, in support of
the preservation of that cultural heritage. Finally, these
works also bring us to reflect on the making in the
present of frontiers that, like those of the past, seem
destined to be as soon constructed, or proclaimed, as
surpassed.
Documenting Change in Maya Excavations
Excavations in Residential Areas of Tikal: Group 7F-1.
WILLIAM A. HAVILAND. 2015. Tikal Report
No. 22, University Museum Monographs No. 141,
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology, Philadelphia. xiv + 138 pp., 43
figures. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-934536-81-0.
Ixlú: A Contested Maya Entrepôt in Petén, Guatemala/
Ixlú: Un Disputado Entrepôt Maya en Petén, Guate-
mala. PRUDENCE M. RICE and DON S. RICE.
KARLA CARDONA C., translator. 2016. University
of Pittsburgh Memoirs in Latin American Archaeol-
ogy No. 23, University of Pittsburgh Center for Com-
parative Archaeology/Universidad Francisco Marro-
quín, Museo Popol Vuh, Pittsburgh and Guatemala
City. xvi + 97 pp. 30 figures, 5 tables. $22.00 (paper),
ISBN 978-1-877812-94-1.
Reviewed by Sarah E. Jackson, University of
Cincinnati.
Despite clear differences in the size of the sites
discussed and the scale of excavations undertaken,
these two volumes are united by topic: Classic-era
Maya settlements located in the central Petén region
that span important moments of political change, nego-
tiation, and transition. For Tikal, William Haviland’s
in-depth study of Group 7F-1 documents material
traces of changes in political power during the Early
Classic period. At Ixlú, Prudence Rice and Don Rice
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443
examine the site as a contested entrepôt that repre-
sents the fragmented political and ethnic landscape
of the Postclassic period. In addition to the thematic
parallels between the investigations, these two sites
were linked politically during the Late and Termi-
nal Classic Periods, with Ixlú using the Tikal/Mutal
emblem glyph and architecturally referencing Tikal.
Methodologically, while both volumes focus on the
results of archaeological excavations, they also inte-
grate evidence from multiple sources: Haviland’s
analysis includes information from hieroglyphic and
iconographic sources, while Rice and Rice emphasize
ethnohistory, in addition to glyphs and images, as
integral to their interpretation.
The Tikal report focuses on Group 7F-1, an
elite residential group located 1.25 km southeast of
downtown Tikal and occupied from the Early to
Terminal Classic periods; excavations in this area
were conducted in 1957, 1963, and 1965. This group
was initially occupied by lesser elite residents, then
abandoned. Toward the end of the Early Classic,
the group was refounded (“New Group 7F-1,” in
Haviland’s parlance). It seems to have been occupied
by the surviving family of one of Tikal’s Early
Classic rulers, Kaloomte’ Bahlam (Ruler 19), who
was interred within the group in a spectacular tomb
(Burial 160), according to Haviland. The royal fam-
ily’s move to this group may have been the result of an
ignominious end to this segment of the ruling dynasty.
Haviland suggests that the family then occupied Group
7F-1 until the Terminal Classic period, with periods
of improved relations with the ruling dynasty in
Tikal. This apparent détente is seen through episodes
of elaborate ceremonial activity within the group—
presumably sanctioned, and in phases characterized by
the absence of adult male burials, which may indicate
reversion to their placement in central Tikal. Group 7F-
1 is described as a typical elite residential group, with
large vaulted masonry residences, a temple structure
and associated platform, and service structures or
outbuildings located around a central plaza. Carved
monuments (Stelae 23 and 25), which may have been
reset within the group, are associated with Group 7F-
1. This is notable, given its remove from the site core,
but further supports the group’s royal connection.
The volume is organized by categories of exca-
vated material (architecture, burials, caches and prob-
lematic deposits, artifacts, and monuments and mis-
cellaneous stones), with synthesis offered in the
concluding chapter; appendixes, including data and
additional interpretations, and figures, including
detailed captions, follow. The documentation of field
investigations is impressive and comprehensive, pro-
viding a convincing foundation for the author’s