State and religion in the Inca Empire

SABINE MACCORMACK

The Incas built the largest imperial state of pre-Columbian America, which at its height extended over 4,000 kilometres along South America's Pacific coast, and across the cordillera of the Andes from what is now southwestern Colombia to Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia into Chile and Argentina.

Sources of Andean history

News of Tahuantinsuyu, the empire that was ‘destroyed before it became known',^{[714] [715]} caused a sensation in Spain and Europe. Reports by some of the invaders were soon printed in Seville, and before long several of them circulated across Europe. So did historical works based on more detailed information that were published during subsequent decades. Examples are the Chronicle of Peru by the soldier Pedro Cieza de Leon and the Royal Commentaries of the Incas by Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of an Inca lady and a conquistador. Numerous other historical works, however, remained in manuscript until the nineteenth or twentieth century, most notably the Narrative of the Incas by Juan de Betanzos, a conquistador who lived in Cuzco and married a relative of Atahuallpa, the Historia Indica of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, and the First New Chronicle and Good Government by the Andean nobleman Guaman Poma de Ayala. Collectively, these texts are known as crδnicas, ‘chronicles'. Documents produced by Spanish officials containing demographic, administrative and economic information supplement these accounts, especially regarding the provinces of the Inca Empire. There is also the important, and partially autobiographical, History of How the Span­iards arrived in Peru by Titu Cusi Yupanqui, a grandson of Guayna Capac (r. 1493-1527), the last Inca emperor to rule before the arrival of the Spanish.^[716] Even so, what for the most part is missing is information produced by the

Incas themselves.

The Inca Empire was not the first imperial polity in the Andes. Pedro Cieza de Leon noted the distinct architectural and sculptural style of Tiahua- naco on Lake Titicaca, where - so he was told - Titu Cusi Yupanqui's father Manco Inca was born. But all that Cieza was able to learn about the site, some of it abandoned and ruined, was that it had been built by ‘people of understanding' who ‘will have perished in the wars', and that ‘the first Incas spoke of setting up and making their court and its seat in this Tiahuanaco'. Another impressive abandoned site that Cieza noticed, with buildings ‘that are not of the same design as those the Incas built or ordered to be built, because this building is square and those of the Incas are elongated and narrow', was a place he called Vinaque, now known as Huari, on the edge of the Ayacucho Valley. And at Mohina, now Pikillacta, some 30 kilometres east of Cuzco, Cieza noticed ruined ‘grand buildings' where the Spanish had looted ‘much gold and silver and even more precious clothing'.^[719]

But these sites remained enigmatic and silent until, from the late nine­teenth century, they and many others attracted the attention of archaeolo­gists, historians and linguists. The ruins of Tiahuanaco, Vinaque and Mohina that interested Cieza pertain to the two contemporaneous imperial cultures of Tiahuanaco and Huari that flourished between c. 500 and c. 1000 cb. Tiahuanaco and Inca pottery sequences point to the stylistic and ideological influence that the Tiahuanaco culture exercised on the Incas.^[720] It was an influence that the Incas themselves acknowledged.

During the period of Huari hegemony in the Cuzco valley, Cuzco itself was a chiefdom producing an agricultural surplus that was probably sent to Pikillacta, along with individuals performing labour service there. Huari cultural influence in the close vicinity of Cuzco is revealed both by imported Huari ceramics and by locally produced ceramics that display Huari influ­ence. But the absence of Huari architecture in the archaeological record of that vicinity seems to point to a merely indirect Huari presence in this region, rather than to the direct control so clearly manifest at Pikillacta.

Inca origins in documentary sources

Documentary sources provide a very different perspective on Inca origins. Versions of the Inca myth of origin that were included in the cronicas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were all collected in Cuzco. They begin with an account of Creation in the Andes, followed by the emergence of the first Incas, a group of four brothers and their four sister consorts from ‘windows' in a rock located in a perhaps mythic place called Pacaritambo or ‘inn of the dawn'. Mythic or historical, Pacaritambo is an Andean pacarina, ‘place of the dawn', a rock, lake, spring or other feature of the landscape, from which Andean peoples - not just the Incas - traced their origins.^[726] During their migration to Cuzco, two of the Inca brothers were metamorph­osed into stone: that is, they became huacas, sacred markers in the landscape and recipients of cult.

Having brought the Inca ancestors to Cuzco, these accounts of Creation and first settlement shift into a different narrative mode by recounting the doings of some eleven or twelve Inca rulers (who were known by the title of ‘the Inca’), generation by generation, down to Guayna Capac and Atahuallpa. Forging marriage alliances with neighbouring lords, engaging in conflicts and conciliations over irrigation rights and territory in the Cuzco Valley and the Sacred Valley, and waging wars to gather plunder with which to meet ever-growing demands of gift exchange and reciprocity, the early Inca rulers as portrayed in the cronicas gradually enhanced their power and status. Where thus archaeology sees process and behaviours conditioned by economic, environmental and cultural conditions, the narrative traditions recorded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries foregrounded specific events and named individuals, Inca rulers, their consorts, allies and enemies. In these narrative traditions the interests and commitments of the individ­uals - mostly Spaniards - who did the recording inevitably played as large a role as did the material they collected.

The Huari Empire is nowhere mentioned in these narratives because, even if some form of recollection about it might have endured in the Cuzco Valley and elsewhere, the Incas deliberately portrayed themselves as the founders and originators of civilization in the Andes. In the words of Pedro Cieza de Leon: ‘From the accounts that the Incas of Cuzco give us, there was in ancient times great disorder in all the provinces of this kingdom that we call Peru', the ancient times being the times before the advent of the first Inca ruler.1⁵ Here, the narratives that Cieza and others picked up in Cuzco reflect an Andean pattern. It is probably no accident that not one of the Andean Creation myths recorded during the century or so after contact with the Spaniards describes a universal origin that was valid once and for all. Instead, these myths open with a prior Creation that failed because of dysfunctional relations between the creating deity and the beings he made, and because the creating deity omitted establishing an order of worship and a social order. The operative, present Creation thus represented a correction and improve­ment of a preceding one. ^{[727] [728] [729]}

Take the Creation myth told at the great oracular pilgrimage shrine of Pachacamac, the ‘Maker of the World', near Lima. The original world order brought into existence by Pachacamac contained people, but no food. The resulting cosmic turmoil was remedied by a child of the Sun, to whom the Sun gave three eggs, one of gold, another of silver and the third of copper. From these eggs proceeded the lords and rulers of society, their womenfolk and the common people respectively. In short, the revised Creation entailed a social order and, along with it, an order of nature and cult, whereby Pachacamac and the remnants of the prior world that remained alive as integral parts of this present world, would receive the reverence and offer­ings due to them. This idea, that what matters above all is an ordered society in which functions of governance and religion are fittingly distributed, also speaks in Inca self-perceptions as rendered in our sixteenth-century Spanish accounts. The origin of the Incas as seen by themselves was not tantamount to the origin of life or human life. Rather, it was tantamount to the origin and nature of ordered human life, of life in society.

The cronicas all describe the gradual expansion of Inca power and influ­ence in the vicinity of Cuzco during the reigns of the first eight rulers, which led to rapid conquests and the extension of a system of roads with their way stations (tambos), and of imperial administration into the four suyos. The contrast between these historical narratives, centred as they are on persons and events, and the results of archaeology which describe gradual transform­ations of settlement patterns, the refinement of agricultural techniques, territorial consolidation and the accumulation of resources that together facilitated the formation of the Inca state, is striking. But this does not mean that historical narratives have nothing to tell us. As remembered by the Inca informants whose statements are reflected in the cronicas, the shift from small-scale warfare by the early Inca rulers to Andean-wide campaigns occurred in the course of conflicts with the neighbouring Chancas, a loose confederation of fortified agro-pastoralist settlements centered around Anda- huaylas.1⁶ A grand assault launched on Cuzco by two Chanca lords repre­senting the upper and lower moieties of the confederation caused the Inca Viracocha and his designated son and successor Inca Urco to take flight. With the Chancas in possession of Cuzco, Viracocha's younger son Pachacuti (r. 1438-71) received in a vision the Creator's promise of assistance, which

¹⁶ Brian S. Bauer, Lucas C. Kellett, and Miriam Araoz Silva, The Chanka: Archaeological Research in Andahuaylas (Apurimac), Peru (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2010).

became manifest when stones, henceforth known as pururaucas, rose up, turned into soldiers and helped to defeat the enemy. The mythic quality pervading these narratives conveys the importance with which the Incas endowed the Chanca war. The very name of Inca Pachacuti, ‘Turning of the Time', designates cataclysm and recovery.

The Inca and the Sun

The Chanca war differed from earlier wars not only because of its scale, resulting in the incorporation of Chanca territory under Inca administration, but because it generated a theoretical and religious reconceptualization of the Inca ruler's power and position in relation to other lords. Betanzos, who collected this information from his Inca wife's kinsfolk, described Inca rulers collectively as Capac Cuna or Ingas Capac Cuna, and explained the title Capac as meaning ‘very much more than king'.^[730] The title was used widely throughout the Andes to differentiate paramount lords and kings from chieftains, sinchi. But times were changing, and after his Chanca victory Pachacuti was ready ‘to subject those other towns and provinces to the city of Cuzco and to remove the title of Capac that each little lord of those towns and provinces was holding, because there would only be one single Capac and that was he himself'.1^[731]

According to Cieza, the very first Incas claimed to be ‘sons of the Sun'. Like Capac, however, this title also was claimed by other lords in the Andean world. For Inca rulers, the title became more concrete when they brought the Titicaca region and Tiahuanaco under their control. For it was at Tiahuanaco that, according to local sacred histories, the Creator had made ‘the sun and the day, the stars and the moon', and it was on the Island of the Sun in the lake that the sun had first risen from a rock.1^[732] These histories provided a basis for incorporating the Inca myth of origin from Pacaritambo with the grander story of the origin of the Sun: according to the resulting expanded origin myth, the Sun had sent the first Inca ancestors from Lake Titicaca via Pacaritambo to Cuzco.²⁰ The Sacred Rock on the Island of the Sun from which the sun had risen was already a local huaca (sacred marker) before 400 ce and was then incorporated into a sacred precinct, the goal of a pilgrimage, by the Tiahuanaco state. With the demise of this state, the rock receded once more into local obscurity, until Pachacuti visited the island and initiated the development of the site into a major sanctuary, empire-wide pilgrimage centre and oracle, where sacred history enshrined in ritual imparted legitimacy on the Inca conquest of Collasuyo, and of the empire at large. The project was brought to completion by Pachacuti's son and successor Tupa Yupanqui (r. 1471-93), and was designed to inculcate Inca might and majesty. The access of pilgrims to the Sacred Rock was guided and controlled even while they were still on the mainland, and more carefully once they crossed to the island, their progress being punctuated by repeated confession of sins in the presence of religious specialists. Finally, having walked the length of the island, they reached a sequence of three gateways, the last of which opened towards an offering area with the Sacred Rock, which was draped in precious textiles and adorned with plaques of gold and silver at one end. In front of it stood a golden brazier for offerings.²¹

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In Cuzco also, the cult of the Inca Sun became more prominent in the time of Pachacuti, who according to Betanzos built the Sun's temple of Corican- cha, the ‘golden enclosure', perhaps on the site of Manco Capac's house Indicancha. Echoing the building's name, its external walls were later adorned with a band of plates of gold affixed on all sides beneath the thatch roof.²² After solemnly consecrating Coricancha, Pachacuti ordered the image of the Sun, represented as a one-year-old boy, to be cast of solid gold. The image was dressed in the finest Inca cloth, its head adorned with the Inca royal headband and a golden solar paten. Having been solemnly placed on a royal seat, the image received daily offerings that were burnt in a brazier for the Sun's sustenance ‘as if the Sun were a person who ate and drank'. At his inauguration, the Inca ruler, as ‘son of the Sun', received the royal headband from the hand of the Sun's image, and a priest with the title vilaoma, ‘diviner who speaks', was specially appointed to attend the image and to deliver oracular pronouncements on its behalf. In Coricancha, as on the Island of the Sun, access to the holy of holies was strictly regulated. Only the Inca and the vilaoma were permitted to appear in the image's presence; Inca nobles came as far as the patio leading to the Sun's chamber, and the people at large worshipped from outside and in Cuzco's main square.

²¹ Brian S. Bauer and Charles Stanish, Ritual and Pilgrimage in the Ancient Andes: The Islands of the Sun and the Moon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

²² Betanzos, Suma, I, 28.

Offerings similar to those given the Sun were made to deceased Inca rulers. When his father Viracocha died, Pachacuti, in accord with Andean and Inca custom, instituted the cult of his mummified body. Viracocha's mummy was clothed in royal textiles, and was honoured ‘exactly as if he were alive'.^[733] Before the mummy, ‘llamas, clothing, maize and coca were burned, maize wine was poured out, and Pachacuti declared that the mummy ate, was a son of the Sun and was with him in the sky'. Concur­rently, Pachacuti reorganized the ceremonial, social and political life of all earlier Incas. Their mummies, ensconced on ceremonial benches, received offerings for their daily sustenance and were attended by members of their kinship group, panaca, who also had the task of reciting ballads detailing the deeds and accomplishments of each Inca, ‘beginning with the song, story and praise of the first Inca Manco Capac, and then these retainers would sing about each lord as they had succeeded one another up to that time. This was the order that was followed from then on, and in this way they preserved the memory of them and their antiquities.'^[734] Commemoration of the past went hand-in-hand with organizing the present and the future, for the Inca ances­tors were not merely treated ‘as if they were alive', they actually were alive in the sense that their attendants, speaking in their voices, pronounced oracular statements about current and future policies, and most especially about the Inca succession.

The transformation of Cuzco from village to town to city predated Pachacuti, but the informants of Betanzos attributed to this Inca the con­struction and organization of Cuzco as an imperial capital. This entailed canalizing the city's springs and the twin rivers that ran through it, improving nearby agricultural land, building storage for foodstuffs, clothing and other products, and above all, reorganizing the population, which amounted to expelling the original inhabitants and demolishing their houses before build­ing new ones resting on solid stone foundations. Cuzco is built on an incline sloping from below the majestic structures of Sacsayhuaman (often misde­scribed as a fortress) that were built in the time of Pachacuti and Tupa Yupanqui, down into the Cuzco valley. Upper Cuzco, extending uphill from Coricancha towards Sacsayhuaman, was set aside for the dwellings of Pacha- cuti and his panaca (kinship group) and for the panacas of former Inca rulers; Pachacuti's successors and their panacas also resided there. Lower Cuzco on the incline into the valley southwest of Coricancha became the home of other Incas.^[735] Coricancha itself was the religious centre of both Cuzco and the empire. From here, forty-one sight lines or ceques, subdivided into four groups, each ceque being punctuated with shrines both great and small, radiated towards and beyond the horizon in the direction of the four suyos.^[736] Within each group, the ceques were ordered in a threefold hierarchy where one may remember the three eggs of gold, silver and copper which, according to the myth of Pachacamac gave origin to the three-ranked orders of human society. Accordingly, the ranked ceque shrines were looked after by the families and kinship groups of Cuzco who were also ranked.

While Coricancha represented Inca myth and cult on an imperial scale, the ceque shrines expressed more intimate concerns closer to home. Many shrines were very small indeed, such as a simple stone or stones. Others were features in the landscape, fountains, springs, boulders, or a piece of ground where an earthquake had been felt. There were also the places that became shrines because an Inca ruler had slept or dreamt a dream there. Other shrines marked episodes in Inca history, most especially Guanacauri on the road to Collasuyo, the most venerable of all the ceque shrines, where, when the Inca ancestors were travelling to Cuzco, one of them was turned into stone. There also were the pururaucas who, after having helped Pachacuti Inca win his victory, became stones again, and there was Qapi, the root of a quinoa tree, said to be ‘the root from which Cuzco originated'.^[737] Collect­ively, the shrines speak of the nature of Inca religion, which drew no dividing line, or only a rather tenuous one, between human beings and a natural environment that was imbued with an energy on which humans could draw and which they revered. On a different level, the ceques anchored the city of Cuzco in its historical past, aspects of which were re-enacted every time representatives of each of the kinship groups walked along their ceque to make the appropriate offerings to its shrines. In this way, the sacred and the secular, the Inca and the Inca's ancestors along with traces of his supernatural helpers and protectors were intertwined with ongoing manifestations of the Inca's power and were inscribed on the landscape surrounding Cuzco and in the city itself. Systems of ceque shrines existed elsewhere in the Andes, which

meant that Inca ideas about the relation between human beings and the supernatural fitted into a larger Andean order of belief and practice.^[738]

In one sense, the city of Cuzco was the outcome of its past going back to the time of Manco Capac and indeed beyond. The cronicas described what archaeology has amply confirmed, how during centuries Cuzco grew from a settlement of adobe huts into a city the beauty of which astonished even the hardbitten Spanish invaders. In another sense, however, the city that the Spanish admired was the outcome of Pachacuti's energies. This, at any rate, was the opinion of the informants consulted by Betanzos, at least some of whom appear to have belonged to Pachacuti's kinship group, whose task it was to remember his deeds and recite his praises. When planning the new Cuzco, Pachacuti arranged for the fields near the city to be painted and measured for distribution to their future owners, and surveying the contours of the land to be built on, ‘he imagined within himself the order' to be followed.^[739] The houses and lots of upper and lower Cuzco were modelled in clay before construction began, and the clay model was later used to distribute the dwellings among the new residents. Similarly, the Inca painted and drew bridges and roads near Cuzco and elsewhere, generating puzzle­ment among his followers who found these activities to be ‘beyond their understanding'.^[740] However, these particulars permit a glimpse into the significance and intent of Inca architecture and urban planning, where the aim was not so much simply to build, but to complement and refine what had been provided by climate and environment, and in doing so to shape society.^[741] Put differently, the work of the Inca paralleled the work of the Creator. For when, at Tiahuanaco, after making the sun and the day, and the moon and the stars the Creator populated the land, he ‘made certain people of stone as a model of the people he would produce later. He made them in this way, that he made of stone a certain number of people and a lord who would govern and rule over them, and many pregnant women and others who had given birth and had their babies in cradles, according to their custom', proceeding in the same way for all the provinces of Peru. The Creator's companions then placed these stone models into their pacarinas (‘places of the dawn') - springs and rivers, caves and crags - and from there called them to come forth into life.^[742] When thus the Inca painted and made clay models of the distribution of fields and houses, roads and bridges, thereby giving order to society, he continued in a human, historical context what the Creator had done at the beginning. In a sense, as the Inca Atahuallpa said of himself, an Inca ruler, in imitation of the Creator, had to begin ‘a new world'.^[743]

Conquest and diplomacy in Inca expansion

Pachacuti's victory over the Chancas and the incorporation of the Chanca settlements under Inca rule that followed led to further campaigns that, combined with diplomatic overtures, brought increasingly distant polities into the framework of Tahuantinsuyu. The combination of diplomacy and warfare, which is a regular theme in the cronicas that narrate the conquests of Pachacuti and his successors Tupa Yupanqui and Guayna Capac, is adum­brated in two distinct strands in the Inca myth of origin. In some versions of this myth, the first Inca Manco Capac's consort was a ferocious warrior and untiring enemy of any and all opponents whom the first Incas encountered, a most effective partner of her not quite so ferocious husband. Other versions, in which Manco Capac is portrayed as a cultural hero and religious founder, make of his consort the teacher of the art of spinning and weaving that in the Andes was seen as both the most useful and the most prized of arts. As for the Incas' long-distance conquests, the cronicas are not always compatible with each other because they all reproduced narratives derived from the Inca kinship groups, each of which exalted the deeds of its own ancestor. Even so, it is clear that a different scale of campaigning began with the expeditions by Viracocha and then Pachacuti into Collasuyo. Pachacuti also initiated exped­itions into Chinchaysuyo, which Tupa Yupanqui extended as far as Quito and beyond. But Tupa Yupanqui's most extensive conquests were in Collasuyo as far as Chile and Argentina, and in Antisuyo. He also finalized the integration of the chiefdoms of the central coast near Lima and visited the great shrine of Pachacamac on the Pacific coast. Guayna Capac, the last Inca to rule before the Spanish invaded, undertook further campaigns in Chinchaysuyo, extending the Incas' reach north of Quito.^[744] The incorporation of this region into the empire was a long process, having been envisioned even in the time of Pachacuti. The project was brought to completion by Guayna Capac, who built a northern capital at Tomebamba, which he named after his kinship group and deliberately planned to be ‘another Cuzco', a northern capital (see Map 24.1). Apart from dwellings for the use of the Inca, agricultural terraces and storehouses to supply the needs of the court, there was a temple of the Sun and other sacred buildings, one of which housed the gold statue of Guayna Capac's mother Mama Ocllo, which enshrined the remains of her womb. ‘This famous residence of Tomebamba', Cieza wrote, ‘was one of the most magnificent and sumptuous in all of Peru, with the grandest and most beautiful buildings. Whatever the Indians say of this residence is dwarfed by the remains that are still left of it.'^[745]

Prolonged warfare strained relations among the Inca nobles. The cro­nicas mention periodic friction and rivalry between the Inca ruler and those who served in or conducted his wars. On the one hand, the Inca ruler counted on the success of his delegates, but on the other, too much success posed a threat to his pre-eminence. Fearing an usurpation, Pacha- cuti thus arranged for his brother Capac Yupanqui to be killed, rather than allowing him to celebrate his victory over the lord of Cajamarca. The emergence of a delicate, appropriately maintained equilibrium is exempli­fied by Guayna Capac's long and hard-fought campaign south and north of Quito. While withdrawing from a difficult engagement, Guayna Capac's entourage of Inca nobles fled and he fell from his litter. He therefore humiliated those nobles by excluding them from the customary distribution of clothing and rations. But he had not calculated the possible consequence, for the disenchanted lords decided to leave the Inca to his war and to return home to Cuzco. By way of saving face and of averting a military disaster, Guayna Capac sent after them the image of his mother Mama Ocllo along with its priestess, whose task was to deliver oracular statements in the voice of Mama Ocllo. Speaking with Mama Ocllo's

Map 24.i. Inca expansion

authority, this lady pleaded with the nobles to relent, and when they did so, exceptional honours and gifts were their reward.^[746]

Sweeping as the Inca conquests were, warfare was also a matter of negotiation and conciliation between the Incas and the peoples they planned to conquer or annex, and between the Incas and those already conquered or annexed. Although Pachacuti took grim vengeance upon his defeat of the Chancas, he then sent two of their lords with their followers on an expedition of conquest to Lake Titicaca, ‘and they subjected all under the dominion of the Inca'. Yet old enmity was not so easily forgotten: during a subsequent expedition, one of the two lords with some of his men escaped beyond Inca reach to the Amazonian lowlands, while the other, seeing no alternative, reaffirmed his submission to Pachacuti. In return he was rewarded with ‘a stool of honour decorated with gold, and with other distinctions', which acknowledged his status while also serving as tokens of Inca overlordship.^[747] Later, when an Inca army attacked the lord of Cajamarca in the northern sierra, the ruler of the coastal kingdom of Chimor - the only state even remotely comparable to the Incas in power and resources - came to his help, but in vain. In a subsequent campaign Chimor was conquered and its ruler, like other Andean potentates before him, was taken to Cuzco as hostage. The kingdom's very considerable treasure of gold, having been displayed in ‘the most splendid and proud triumph' that the city of Cuzco had ever seen, was used to adorn Coricancha. Even so, in the towns and valleys of the former kingdom of Chimor, descendants of its ruler governed as hereditary lords under Inca and later Spanish oversight, and so did numerous other lords of ancient elite families. But unlike other defeated polities whose troops were incorporated into Inca armies, Chimor appears never to have contributed soldiers to fight in Inca wars.^[748]

Expansion by military conquest was frequent but not universal. The powerful and populous lordship of Chincha on the central coast was annexed by generally peaceful means. In the time of Pachacuti, an Inca lord passed through, and later Tupa Yupanqui annexed Chincha by means of gift giving and conciliation, without prior warfare. The Inca built an administrative and religious compound in Chincha's capital city, juxtaposing it with the local palace, and the pyramid of the oracular deity Chinchaycamac was reoriented in relation to the Inca compound. Chincha ceramics display a high degree of Inca influence that endured even after the Spanish invasion - a suggestion that the Incas may not have been entirely unwelcome. Most notably, the lord of Chincha enjoyed the privilege of having his litter carried side-by-side with that of the Inca, which ‘seemed a remarkable thing, because no person, however distinguished, was allowed to appear before the Inca without a load on his shoulders and with bare feet'.^[749]

These episodes, detailing different methods of expansion, also highlight the diversity of the peoples and polities that the Incas brought under their control and of the different geographical environments in which they lived, from sea level to the high altitudes of the Andes, from the Inca homeland around Cuzco to recently incorporated regions.^[750] Even long before the Incas, Andean polities had taken account of the enormous range of the ecological environments of the Andes and the resources they offered by creating networks of exchange, including maritime exchange, both within Tahuantinsuyu and also extending to peoples living far beyond its boundar­ies. Establishing colonies in diverse ecological niches yielded direct access to crops and resources not available locally. The Tiahuanaco state maintained colonies at lower altitudes not only near Cochabamba and Larecaja, but also near Moquegua on the Pacific coast and near Arequipa, where in due course the Incas followed.^[751] Colonies in outlying ecological niches and ranging in size from a handful of households to village communities were also planted, independently of any state, by ethnic polities desirous of securing access to crops and resources not available in their homes. As emerges from govern­mental inspections conducted by the Spanish, such colonists were not counted by the Inca state in the places to which they migrated, but as members of their original polities and kinship groups. Finally, there were persons described as yanacona, retainers of individual Incas, dead or still living. The people who were resettled in the Sacred Valley to work on the estates of Inca rulers there were yanacona, individuals no longer subject to the curacas (regional lords) in their places of origin. Other yanacona were detailed for the service Tahuantinsuyu's many temples and sanctuaries, and also for work on Inca estates other than those in the Sacred Valley. Yet other yanacona had been ‘given’ by their communities to serve their curacas, and in this sense were no longer incorporated in those communities. The status of acclacona, women chosen for the service of the Sun - whom the Spanish liked to compare to nuns, even though the Inca might give them in marriage to followers and servants - resembled that of yanacona, because they also were separated from their communities of origin. Possibly there­fore these individuals were more intimately bonded with the Inca state than the many others who identified primarily with their own ethnic commu­nities. The existence of yanacona and acclacona would then lead to the conclusion that the Incas were in the process of building a state transcending ethnic identity.

Regions and households

The Incas endeavoured to impose a certain uniformity on these different regions and peoples - at least in principle. The Spanish were often under the impression that the Incas imposed their language on their subjects, or at any rate on curacas. But in effect, Tahuantinsuyu was a linguistic mosaic, even if Quechua, the language of the Inca, was widely understood.^[752] As for Inca administration, viewing it as an ideal scheme, populations were organized into age groups and decimal units of households, sometimes with intermedi­ate subdivisions, from ten to ten thousand, the units being adjusted period­ically in accord with demographic fluctuations. Two or three units of ten thousand made a province, with an Inca official - tokoyrikoq, ‘who sees everything' - at its head. He had under him the chiefs of the smaller units, many of them curacas, lords from local elite families who continued in power under the Inca. All this information, sorted into the moieties of upper and lower that were ubiquitous in the Andes, was recorded on khipus of which duplicates were kept locally and in Cuzco. Garcilaso explained the functioning of such demographic khipus:

they recorded first the inhabitants of each village, and then those of each province. On the first thread they would enumerate the old people of sixty or more, on the second men in their maturity of fifty upwards, the third stood for those of forty, and so on in groups of ten years, down to babes and sucklings. Women were counted similarly by age groups.

Some strings had finer ones attached to take account of exceptions:

for instance the finer thread on the string referring to men or women of a certain age, who were assumed to be married, would mean the number of widows or widowers of that age in a given year, for all their records were annual.^[753]

When a region was incorporated into the Inca Empire, after boundary stones had been placed and a painting or map of the province had been made, all the land was seen as belonging to the Inca, who assigned portions of it for the purposes of religion, for the use of the Inca, and for the people at large.

The demographic counts recorded on khipus were the basis for assessing tribute, which in the absence of currency in the Andes was taken in labour (not in kind), household by household. In the most basic sense, labour was agricultural, the crops cultivated in the fields of the deities being used for their cult, and the crops from the fields of the Inca for his use, and finally the crops from the fields of each household for the sustenance of its members. Households of artisans - miners, weavers, metalworkers, potters, stonemasons, specialists who made sandals, military equipment, cloth of feather work and much more - likewise were assessed in terms of labour. There were also the postal runners who carried messages from one end of Tahuantinsuyo to the other, and the specialists who carried the Inca in his litter, and with this occupation and work they paid their tribute. To them as to all others working for the Inca state, the state - seen as the person of the Inca ruler - supplied sustenance and materials, and in order to do so, redistributed the products that the state gathered from one group of workers and one region to another. People thus worked for the Inca, but did not give the Inca anything they counted as theirs. The supreme giver of gifts was the Inca, and redistribution was a primary task of the Inca state, without which it could not have functioned. Moreover, in an ideal framework, and even in the framework of every day, labour performed for the Inca took place in a context of feasting and gift giving, of reciprocal benefits. The huge kallankas - long halls that are so distinct a feature of Inca provincial capitals - were designed for accommodating crowds during feasts and festivals. When thus, according to Betanzos, Inca Pachacuti was planning to rebuild Cuzco on a grander scale, the regional lords came with gifts which were placed into nearby storehouses. The next five days were taken up with fiestas and celebrations, and only then did the Inca inform the lords of the work to be accomplished next. Once this work was completed, further tasks followed, interspersed with fiestas. Labour for the Inca state was performed in a celebratory framework of reciprocity and of the Inca's generosity; from very different vantage points, Garcilaso and Guaman Poma de Ayala chose to remember it in this way some eighty years after the Inca was gone.^[754]

But we must not underestimate the economic, and hence military and political power that, thanks to this system of reciprocity and redistribution, the Inca state came to possess. The products resulting from all the work performed by the Inca's subjects, accounted for by khipu, were kept in state storehouses. For example, at the provincial capital of Huanuco Pampa, several hundred well-ventilated and insulated storehouses contained agricultural products, cloth, sandals and weaponry. In some places, the stores that had been accumulated by the Inca for times of need and for the uses of the state lasted, despite Spanish depredation, until the early seventeenth century.^[755] Military service was another form of labour performed for the state, often at great cost of life and limb. Equally, if not more, intrusive on the lives of groups and individuals was the resettlement of entire populations for the purpose of working for the Inca. The colonies that ethnic polities within Tahuantinsuyu maintained at distances from their homelands were replicated by the Incas on a much larger scale and also, frequently, for different reasons. When Tupa Yupanqui organized the cult of the Sacred Rock on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, he removed the entire population of the island and replaced them with colonists, mitimas, who were to look after the shrine and were selected from forty-two different nations, the intention perhaps being to represent all of Tahuantinsuyu on the island.^[756] Most resettlements, however, were undertaken for political or economic reasons. For example, after a series of difficult cam­paigns against the Chachapoyas and the Canari, large numbers of colonists from both these polities were resettled to work on the estates of Inca rulers in the Sacred Valley so as to diminish the likelihood of rebellions in their homelands. With good reason, because when the Spanish invaded, the Chachapoya and Canari became their willing allies. They were not alone: as an old man from Hatuncana said in an administrative enquiry in 1571, his father had been resettled by Tupa Yupanqui because he ‘was a valiant man' and the Inca moved him from his home ‘lest he rebel against him'.^[757]

On a far larger scale was the resettlement program involving some 14,000 colonists from many different parts of Tahuantinsuyu that Guayna Capac undertook in the Cochabamba valley. Here, the rationale was economic. Most of the local people were moved elsewhere, and the colonists, who came with their lords for life and for the lives of their descendants, were therefore no longer enumerated on the khipu of their group of origin; they were employed in growing maize for the Inca state. Supremely disruptive as such resettlement was for all involved, the Incas for the most part governed through local lords, who were left in place after a region's incorporation into Tahuantinsuyu and, inter alia, were in charge of organizing work for the Inca, such as raising crops, weaving textiles and transporting whatever had been produced to Inca store­houses. Other work was taken in turns, mita, and involved travel: for example a number of Lupaqa men from Chucuito on Lake Titicaca worked in turn as mitayoc (one who works in turn) to make walls and houses for the Inca in Cuzco.

Such being the contours of the ideal scheme of Inca governance, different aspects of which obtained primarily in the core regions of Tahuantinsuyu, more recently integrated regions displayed much variety. Decimal adminis­tration does not appear to have been imposed in either the northern or the southern reaches of the empire, where the elegant Inca stone carving of Cuzco and the Inca heartland is rarely found. The southernmost part of Collasuyo, reaching from the heights of the Andes to the desert along the Pacific coast of Chile and somewhat beyond contemporary Santiago, was much more sparsely populated than the southern sierra of Peru. Like other regions conquered by the Incas, some parts of the southlands saw intensified agriculture, herding and mining. The roads built by the Inca, with tambos, way stations at intervals, reached beyond Santiago, and the region was protected by a line of forts in the foothills of the Andes that were designed to protect settlements, control movement and discourage raids, but were not designed to maintain a fixed or closed border (see Figure 24.1).^[758] The absence

Figure 24.ι Sacsayhuaman: Inca Ruins (Aivar Mikko / Alamy)

of such a border is also evident from the archaeological record of eastern lowland Bolivia. Here the splendid site Samaipata with its huge kallanka (long hall), remembered by the descendants of Tupa Yupanqui who conducted a long campaign there, proclaimed the Inca presence in what appears to have been a ceremonial and religious much more than a military sense. As for the northern end of Tahuantinsuyu, which, if the descendants of Tupa Yupanqui were to be believed, was conquered by their forebear, it was in effect only integrated into the empire after long wars by Guayna Capac.

Religion in the Inca Empire

When in the 1570s the Spanish conducted enquiries as to how the Incas had governed, many Andean respondents claimed that force had been a major factor - which was the answer that the Spanish were expecting and wanting to hear.^[759] But this was far from being the whole story. Polities like Chincha that had been incorporated into Tahuantinsuyu by negotiation and gift giving are regularly mentioned in the cronicas, war being chosen as a last resort, or if a polity already under Inca control rebelled. In whichever way incorporation into Tahuantinsuyu was achieved, it entailed participation in Inca religion, and the Inca ruler's participation in the religion of his subjects. This two-way incorporation took place at many levels, beginning with the allotment of land and work for the cults of the Inca Sun, of deceased Inca rulers and of further supernaturals, whether Inca or other.^[760] Aside from such economic arrange­ments, diverse existing cults were reorganized within the Inca religious framework. Some were effectively transformed into Inca cults, most espe­cially that of the Sacred Rock on the island in Lake Titicaca. At the coastal sanctuary of the oracular deity Pachacamac, incorporation took the form of juxtaposition. Pachacamac was a religious centre possibly as early as c. 500 ce, and the influence of Huari and Tiahuanaco styles in the ceramics of the site indicate its importance beyond its immediate environment. The cronicas attribute the first Inca visit to the sanctuary of Pachacamac to Pachacuti or Tupa Yupanqui. The latter was said to have spoken of Pacha- camac while still in his mother's womb, and later to have visited the sanctuary because he had dreamt that the ‘Creator of all' was to be found there. Pachacamac, revered as world maker and world destroyer, gave oracles which were sought out by pilgrims from far and wide, who were allowed to approach the shrine only after undergoing extended rites of purification and confession. Given the power of the oracle, the Incas did not redesign the existing temple, but built another one, a huge pyramid dedicated to the Sun and the Day next to it.^[761] Where Tupa Yupanqui associated himself with Pachacamac, his successor Guayna Capac sought out the oracle Catequil near Huamachuco, whose influence reached far into the northern Andean highlands. Catequil, manifest in a rocky crag, was a founding ancestor of the people of Huamachuco, and also a deity of thunder and lightning who was revered along with two other supernaturals - crags flanking the central one of Catequil himself - called Mamacatequil and Piguerao. Like Pachacamac, Catequil had numerous offspring whose oracu­lar statements were sought out at shrines often located at considerable distances from the central sanctuary. One such manifestation of Catequil accompanied Guayna Capac on his northern campaigns.

The Incas sought to introduce some kind of conformity among the multiplicity of divine oracular voices that resonated all over the Andes by sending offerings to their shrines to obtain good harvests, avert disasters and pray for the Inca, especially at his inauguration. These offerings, carried in procession from Cuzco to their various destinations were known as capaco- cha, ‘supreme sacrifice', and for especially solemn occasions included human victims, especially children. This movement of offerings that radiated from Cuzco throughout Tahuantinsuyu was balanced by a movement in the opposite direction by the principal oracles of all the provinces who visited Cuzco annually to deliver their prognostications for the coming year. The oracles were questioned one by one, and each individually, wrote Cieza, ‘answered by the mouth of the priests who were in charge of their cult'. In the following year, the oracles that had predicted correctly were rewarded with a capacocha, while those who had not received ‘no offering but rather, lost reputation'.^[762]

Put differently, by listening to the oracles, the Incas were able to collect news and assess climates of opinion in the different parts of Tahuantinsuyu, or, as Cieza put it, they would learn ‘whether the year would be fertile or there would be drought, if the Inca would live a long time or might perhaps die that year, if enemies were to come from somewhere, or if some peaceful subjects would rebel'.^[763] In effect, however, things were more complicated. Not only did subjects rebel regardless of these efforts, but also, the oracles and local deities did not always comply with the Inca's wishes. Over a century after the event, the people of Huarochiri still remembered how Tupa Yupanqui, when contending with a series of rebellions, had summoned all the local deities and oracles to Cuzco for a consultation. Even Pachacamac went, but Pariacaca the principal deity of Huarochiri refused and only sent his son Maca Uisa. After a long and awkward silence, with the local deities refusing to converse with the Inca, Maca Uisa spoke up and then washed the Inca's enemies away in a mudslide, only to reject the Inca's offerings and require that the Inca come in person and dance for him at his annual festival, thereby challenging the order of dignity in which the Inca stood at the top. Guaman Poma also remembered the incident, but thought that Maca Uisa had said that ‘there was no more time for talking and governing' because soon the Spanish would arrive.⁵⁴ Later, in the Chillon valley, a regional lord, displeased with Inca interference, ordered his people to ‘speak to their local deity so that the Inca Guayna Capac should die, because his predecessor Tupa Yupanqui had already died for the very reason that they had requested it, and the local deity would do the same thing again if they requested that Guayna Capac should die'.^[764] In due course, Guayna Capac's son Atahuallpa fell out not only with Pachacamac but also with Catequil, who criticized the Inca for causing the death of many people. Whereupon Atahuallpa ordered Catequil's shrine to be destroyed, but in vain, because the oracle revived and multiplied in the guise of its many descendants.

It was not only the oracles that frequently spoke with discordant voices. The Inca ancestors, to whose instructions their panacas (kinship groups) attributed their own opinions and interests, did the same. As a result, Inca successions were usually complicated by conflicting claims, all the more so because among the Incas, as in the Andes at large, successors were chosen for their ability, not by primogeniture. In addition, a successor of a regional lord or of the Inca might be his son, but could also be his brother or the son of his sister. Hence, in order to reduce the number of possible candidates for the succession, Inca Pachacuti ordained that the Inca, however many other consorts he might have, should in his capacity of Inca also marry a sister, making a son of this union the preferred successor. Even so, Pachacuti chose Tupa Yupanqui as his successor because he considered him to be his ablest son. Tupa Yupanqui's son Guayna Capac died unexpectedly of one of the infectious diseases that preceded the Spanish invaders, and so, shortly there­after, did his designated successor. This left, in Tumebamba, Guayna Capac's son Atahuallpa whose mother belonged to the panaca of Pachacuti, and in Cuzco, Guayna Capac's son Guascar, whose mother belonged to the panaca of Tupa Yupanqui. It was in the aftermath of the resulting civil war between Atahuallpa and Guascar, from which Atahuallpa emerged the victor, that the Spanish invaders arrived.^[765]

The destruction of Tahuantinsuyu can thus be seen, in one sense, as the consequence of civil war, and in another as the consequence of discordant divinatory voices, both those of the diverse Andean oracles, and those of the Inca ancestors who were looked after by their panacas. It was only after 1565, over thirty years after the onset of the Spanish invasion, that the Andean oracles were thought to speak in one voice in the movement known as Taqui Onqoy, ‘Song of Disease', the disease to be expelled being the Spanish. The pacarina (‘place of the dawn') of the Incas, Titicaca, Tiahuanaco, the volcano Chimborazo near Quito, Pachacamac and some sixty or seventy other local deities and oracles were asking for the traditional Andean offerings that the Incas had been so careful to provide, so as to fight the Christian god, whose turn, mita, must surely be coming to an end. But by that time, when the Spanish hold on Tahuantinsuyu was tightening and the realm of the Incas was on its way to becoming the viceroyalty of Peru, it was too late.^[766]

FURTHER READING

Bauer, Brian S. Ancient Cuzco. Heartland of the Inca. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004.

The Sacred Landscape of the Inca: The Cusco Ceque System. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Bauer, Brian S. and Charles Stanish. Ritual and Pilgrimage in the Ancient Andes: The Islands of the Sun and the Moon. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Benson, Elizabeth P. and Anita G. Cook, eds. Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Boone, Elizabeth Hill and Gary Urton, eds. Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America. Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2011.

Burger, Richard L., Craig Morris and Ramiro Matos Mendieta, eds. Variations in the Expression of Inka Power. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2007.

Covey, R. Alan. How the Incas Built their Heartland: State Formation and the Innovation of Imperial Strategies in the Sacred Valley, Peru. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Curatola Petrocchi, Marco and Mariusz S. Ziolkowski, eds. Adivinacicrn y oraculos en el mundo andino antiguo. Lima: Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru, 2008.

D'Altroy, Terence N. The Incas. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Hyslop, John. The Inka Road System. New York, NY: Academic Press, 1984.

Julien, Catherine. Reading Inca History. Iowa University Press, 2000.

Kolata, Alan L., ed. Tiwanaku and its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization. ι. Agroecology. ii. Urban and Rural Archaeology. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1996-2003.

Lamana, Gonzalo. Dominatian without Dominance: Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

MacCormack, Sabine. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru. Princeton University Press, 2007.

‘Processions for the Inca: Andean and Christian Ideas of Human Sacrifice, Communion and Embodiment in Early Colonial Peru', Archivfur Religionsgeschichte 2,1 (2000): 1-31. ‘The Scope of Comparison: The Roman, Spanish and Inca Empires', in Benjamin Z.

Kedar (ed.), Explorations in Comparative History (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2009): 53-74.

McEwan, Gordon F., ed. Pikillacta: The Wari Empire in Cuzco. University of Iowa Press, 2005.

Murra, John V. The Economic Organization of the Inca State. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1980.

Murra, John V., Nathan Wachtel and Jacques Revel, eds. Anthropological History of Andean Polities. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Niles, Susan A. The Shape of Inca History: Narrative and Architecture in an Andean Empire. University of Iowa Press, 1999.

Parssinen, Martti. Tawantinsuyu: The Inca State and its Political Organization. Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae, 1992.

Pillsbury, Joanne, ed. Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies 1530-1900. 3 vols. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

Quilter, Jeffrey and Gary Urton, eds. Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Rostworowski, Maria, History of the Inca Realm, trans. Harry B. Iceland. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Salomon, Frank. The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Stanish, Charles. Ancient Titicaca: The Evolution of Complex Society in Southern Peru and Northern Bolivia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.

Urton, Gary. ‘From Knots to Narratives: Reconstructing the Art of Historical Record Keeping in the Andes from Spanish Transcriptions of Inka Khipus', Ethnohistory 45,3 (1998): 409-38.

‘Sin, Confession and the Arts of Book- and Cord-keeping: An Intercontinental and Transcultural Exploration of Accounting and Governmentality', Comparative Studies in Society and History 51,4 (2009): 801-31.

Zuidema, Tom. El calendario Inca. Tiempo y espacio en la Crganizacidn ritual del Cuzco. La idea del pasado. Lima: Fondo editorial del Congreso del Peru, 2010.