The Oxford Handbook of the Incas

Sonia Alconini (ed.), Alan Covey (ed.)

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190219352.001.0001
Published: 2018 Online ISBN: 9780190219376 Print ISBN: 9780190219352

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CHAPTER

Introduction 
Sonia Alconini, Alan Covey

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190219352.013.61 Pages 1–6

Published: 05 April 2018

Abstract
The Inca Empire was not only the largest state of the pre-Columbian Americas; it was also a complex
political organization that swiftly conquered most of the Andes in less than a century. The Oxford
Handbook of the Incas is a comprehensive volume dedicated to bringing together a broad array of new
work that presents the Inca from multidisciplinary perspectives at di erent geographic and temporal
scales. It has three main goals: (1) to weave together the complex tapestry of interpretations,
methodologies, and approaches in order to reconstruct the nuanced political relations and cultural
practices developed across this multiethnic empire; (2) to outline central debates on Inca studies in
order to highlight major theoretical trends, emerging research paradigms, and challenges, and (3) to
provide a longue-dureé perspective of the rise, development, and demise of this empire, along with the
ways in which colonial and contemporary Andeans have used, interpreted, and reappropriated the
past.

Keywords: Inca empire, Andes, pre-Columbian past, Cuzco, Inca provinces

Subject: Archaeology by Region, Archaeology
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online

THE Inca Empire was not only the largest state to develop in the pre-Columbian Americas; it was also a
complex political organization that swiftly conquered most of the Andean region in roughly a century of
campaigns. Without a standard writing system accessible to wider audiences, or currency that could
facilitate administration of far- ung regions, the Inca Empire challenges long-standing preconceptions of
statehood and forces scholars to develop new explanations and paradigms to understand non-Western and
pre-capitalist empires. In recent years, signi cant advances have been made in revealing the complex
nature of this pre-Columbian empire, thanks to research that cross-cuts traditional disciplinary
boundaries. Moving beyond conventional perspectives that foreground the deeds of Inca rulers and repeat
colonial Inca descriptions of the state institutions and policies that made up their empire, recent
scholarship employs di erent approaches, lines of evidence and scales of analysis to contribute a more
 nuanced understanding of the actors and social groups that made up this singular polity. In addition,
vigorous research conducted in the more distant provinces challenges claims made by Inca nobles in the
imperial capital, revealing a suite of practices and strategies deployed by imperial agents and indigenous
populations as they negotiated their standing and power in the emerging social order. These studies have
revealed not only how state policies and institutions were implemented, but also, perhaps more important,
how they were actually adapted and negotiated, and what e ects they had on the lives of the millions of Inca
subjects and other Andean peoples.

Goals of the Handbook

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Recognizing the value of emerging research to explain new facets of the Inca story, we designed The Oxford
Handbook of the Incas to be a comprehensive volume dedicated to bringing together a broad array of new
work that approaches the Incas from multidisciplinary perspectives and at di erent geographic and
temporal scales. Readers will nd in this volume investigations that draw on archaeology, ethnohistory, art
history, ethnography, history, architecture, and biochemistry to gain a deeper understanding of this empire
p. 2 and its people. As editors, it truly has been exciting to have the opportunity to integrate such varying
themes, regions, and scholarly work into a cohesive body of work. As we prepared this volume, we
envisioned three main goals:

1. We aimed to weave together the complex tapestry of interpretations, methodologies, and approaches
in order to reconstruct the nuanced political relations and cultural practices developed across this
multiethnic empire.

2. We sought to outline central debates in Inca studies in order to highlight major theoretical trends,
emerging research paradigms, and challenges.

3. We worked to develop a longue-dureé perspective of the rise, development, and demise of this empire,
along with the ways in which colonial and contemporary Andeans have used, interpreted, and
reappropriated the past.

Because of these goals, the scope of the book is broad. At a geographic level it presents new syntheses from
the imperial heartland and adjacent provinces, as well as those in the more distant provinces and frontier
regions. The themes are also varied—some controversial, and some just emerging in the scholarly
literature. Whereas some chapters address the nature of Inca institutions, and how Andean principles of
social organization helped the Incas to build a vast and complex empire, other contributions use bottom-up
perspectives to assess how such institutions and practices were actually implemented and modi ed by
competing actors. Complementing these approaches, there are also chapters that combine bioarchaeology
and geochemical analysis. Applied to human remains, these analyses help to provide a detailed examination
of the health, geographic origins, and hardships experienced by many ethnic groups. Applied to cultural
materials like metal or ceramics, geochemical analyses contribute to better reconstructions of how goods,
peoples, and ideas moved within the empire.

On a temporal scale, the Handbook places the century of Inca imperial growth within a broader context. It
starts with the predecessors of the Inca state, including those that in uenced the eventual rise of this
empire. This is followed by an examination of political economy and institutions that facilitated the growth
of the Inca realm, and the trajectories of outlying provinces, based on a set of case studies. Rather than end
with the arrival of Spaniards in the Andes in 1532, the Handbook contains chapters on the colonial and later
periods, exploring not only the e ects of the European invasions on the lives of the indigenous populations,
but also the cultural continuities and discontinuities. Moving into the present, the volume ends will an
overview of the Inca in uence on the collective imaginary, and the ways in which the past is memorialized
 and reinterpreted by contemporary Andeans and others. Assembling such a diverse array of themes, we have
drawn on the expertise of national and international scholars from various disciplines and nationalities.
This has also required standardizing the orthography of Quechua concepts, terms, and names in light of
their wide variation across regions and even time. We have adopted a Spanish spelling in order to make the
di erent parts of the volume comparable, using common spellings for sites and place names.

p. 3 Because of the integrated nature of this volume, we hope that this Handbook will serve as an important
contribution to Inca and Andean studies of the twenty- rst century. It highlights major achievements of
Inca scholarly work, while also setting the ground for future research. Organized into eight parts that

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address speci c themes and debates, this Handbook contains 39 chapters written by leading experts in the
eld. In order to ensure the coherence of each part, each ends with an additional concluding chapter written
by the editors, where we highlight commonalities, discrepancies, and future research avenues. Because the
eld of Inca studies is vast, the concluding chapters also highlight relevant research by scholars who were
unable to contribute to the volume.

Structure of the Book

The Handbook is divided into eight main parts, organized as follows.

Part 1, The Origins and Development of the Inca Empire.

In this part, readers are introduced to the Incas as a society that developed in the Cuzco region of what is
now highland Peru, expanding their imperial power across the Andes around 1400, until the arrival of the
Pizarro expedition in 1532. The authors in this part discuss the Spanish documentary accounts of Inca
history and society, as well as ways that earlier Andean states, such as Tiwanaku or Wari, in uenced the
Inca religious ideology, political organization, and artistic manifestations, as well as the unique features
that the Incas developed to build and govern their empire.

Part 2, Royal Estates and Inca Imperial Centers.

The contributions in this part assess the importance of royal estates and imperial centers in the Inca
political economy. Using case studies from the Sacred Valley in the Inca imperial heartland, as well as the
provincial regions of Collasuyu (Incallajta, Cochabamba), northern Ecuador (Caranqui, Tomebamba), and
the Paci c coast (Pachacamac), the chapters in this part also explore the architectural con guration of Inca
installations, the status of their residents, and their social adscription. Tracing the trajectories of royal
estates in the heartland and the more distant provinces, this part reveals the signi cance of these facilities
in supporting imperial expansion, and in materializing competing claims by the state, noble Inca families
(panacas), and provincial lords. An important component of this examination is the role that “Other
Cuzcos” played in the imperial politics of conquest and cultural incorporation.

Part 3, Inca Hard Power: Militarism, Economy, and Political Hierarchies.

In this part, the authors discuss the structure of the Inca political economy and the institutional power of
the state through the lenses of production, specialization, and the redistribution of food and gifts by the
Inca ruler and state o cials. Chapters focusing on food production (farming and shing) help to highlight
p. 4 how Andean environmental diversity presented variable opportunities and challenges for building
imperial economic power. Bringing in recent research from di erent regions, this part also considers the
importance of ethnicity, gender, and status in such organizational processes, and the ways in which
emerging regional elite were incorporated and co-opted by the empire.
 Part 4, Inca Imperial Identities: Colonization, Resistance, and Hybridity.
This part of the volume is devoted to assessing the complex forms of interaction that the Inca Empire
maintained with the multitude of subjects residing in the provinces. In contrast to the preceding part, which
emphasizes hard forms of imperial power, this part takes a bottom-up approach to examine the
multistranded e ects and reactions of the conquered populations at a more granular level. Local reactions
to Inca expansion included organized rebellion, heightened inter-elite competition, strategic emulation,
and emergence of new identities (ethnogenesis). Regions explored in this part include Northwest Argentina,
Northern Chile, and the frontier zones along the eastern tropical forest, such as the Chachapoya and Chaco

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regions, and the Amazonian slope of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. The authors explore a range of topics,
developing landscape perspectives and discussing how indigenous administrative centers were
appropriated, became sites for competing political claims, or were progressively marginalized with the
expansion of the Inca royal road system. Other authors place particular emphasis on the agency of
indigenous lords, and how local leaders played a pivotal role in the provincial extraction of strategic
resources such as metals. Moving beyond a monolithic representation of Inca state control, this part reveals
the complexity of colonial encounters and the roles that provincial lords played in the implementation and
modi cation of the imperial agenda.

Part 5, Sacred Landscapes.

In this part, the authors explore how the Incas extended their territory to incorporate a vast landscape lled
with local histories and memories, which they imbricated into a complex fabric of ritual practices,
ideologies, and sacred places. Some regions discussed include the Cuzco heartland, the Titicaca Basin, the
central highlands, and Northwest Argentina. The authors also discuss how the Incas modi ed and
appropriated indigenous sacred geographies through the deployment of a set of combined strategies.
Whereas many shrines (huacas) from rebellious polities were actively destroyed and vanished from history,
others become the subject of special veneration to ease acculturation and resource extraction. As in the
earlier Tiwanaku state, local religious centers became the origin places of the Inca rulers and their cosmic
divinities. By comparing the sacred geography of Cuzco with those from the outlying provinces, other
chapters explore practices of local and regional pilgrimage systems, the ritual signi cance of royal Inca
roads, and the e ects of child sacri ces (capacocha) in the construction of empire. This part also highlights
emerging theoretical debates on landscape and space memorialization.

Part 6, Art, Iconography, and Record-Keeping.

In comparison, this part illuminates the ways that the competing forces of unity and diversity in uenced
p. 5 the production of Inca imperial styles and gave them signi cance in wider processes of cultural
traditions and information transfer. The authors discuss the aesthetics and production practices of Inca
pottery, textiles, architecture, and other portable materials, including record-keeping devices and personal
adornments. Therefore, the chapters assess the ways in which such materials were used to convey—or even
contest—a set of religious, political, and ideological principles sponsored by the Inca state. This part also
evaluates how such materials were used as a means of communication in an empire that did not develop
written records, and how Inca traditions developed after the Spanish Conquest.
 Part 7, The Colonial Era: Continuity, Change, and Adaptation.
This part is dedicated to the collapse of the Inca Empire and the persistence of Inca material culture, people,
and identities in the early years of Spanish colonial rule. Several chapters engage with the traditional dates
for the end of the Incas: Francisco Pizarro’s capture of the Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, and
Francisco de Toledo’s 1572 invasion and destruction of Vilcabamba, the last independent Inca stronghold.
The authors place these moments in historical context to re ect on the complexity of the colonial
encounter, and the disruptions, continuities, and discontinuities that millions of Andeans experienced
during this dramatic historical transition. Chapters in this part consider the spread of Catholicism in the

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early years, as well as the toll that the colonial practices cloaked by this missionary project took on
indigenous bodies. In the face of disruption and discontinuity, the continued signi cance of Inca
architecture and the genealogies of noble Inca households in Cuzco underscores the fact that the Incas never
disappeared entirely from the stage during the centuries of Spanish colonial rule.

Part 8, The Many Uses of the Inca Past in the Present.

In this nal part, the authors discuss the image of the Inca in the collective memory of modern Andeans,
and the ways in which Inca sites and cultural materials and practices are constantly appropriated, displayed,
enacted, and rebranded. These chapters also explore the e ects of tourism in broader discourses of
indigeneity, national patrimony, and heritage in contending political claims. By focusing on Cuzco, Machu
Picchu, and the Inti Raymi celebration, the authors reveal competing forces of national identity,
globalization, and multivocality. There are also chapters that explore the commodi cation of Inca cultural
materials, and the role that museums and collectors have played in this process since the Andean region
gained its independence from Spain. Using concepts like pachacuti, this part also reveals the continued
in uence of the Inca in current political movements.

The study of the Incas has come a long way in the long century since Hiram Binhgam encountered the ruins
of Machu Picchu, the mountainside retreat of the legendary Inca ruler Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. This
Handbook re ects the intellectual growth of Inca studies in recent years, especially the ways that
international scholarship has moved beyond Inca kings and their monuments to understand the rich
experiences of Andean life before, during, and after Inca times. It has taken decades of painstaking
p. 6 eldwork and analysis by researchers from around the world to de ne Inca styles and state projects, and
to place them into broader social, environmental, and historical contexts. This work continues today, and
the Handbook re ects some of the emerging collaborations that are bringing new methods and materials
into Inca studies. In editing this volume, we have found ourselves inspired by both the progress of our eld,
as well as the prospects for new interpretations that will come in the future. We hope that the scholars and
students who consult this Handbook take away a sense of this excitement.

The Editors