Urban landscapes: transforming spaces and reshaping communities

GEOFF EMBERLING, SARAH C. CLAYTON, AND

JOHN W. JANUSEK

The growth of cities fundamentally reorganizes economic, social, and polit­ical relationships, defines subjects, and reconfigures physical landscapes, although these effects vary in different cultural traditions and natural envir­onments.

In general, we see urbanism as a process that concentrates people and differentiates population into social categories. As political process, urbanism develops according to tensions and negotiations among a variety of factions and interests, including significantly the relationship between city rulers (and intermediate political leaders) and their subjects. As economic process, the large labor forces available in cities make possible new industries through technological innovation and economies of scale. And as social formation, cities erode some kinds of traditional kin-based relationships, subordinating them to higher authority and placing new demands of labor, tax, and decision­making on them, while also fostering the development of new urban iden­tities. All these processes reshape the built environment of settlements and the landscapes that surround them in ways that structure urban life.

Reorganization of space in cities

The reorganization of space and of human relationships in cities begins with their initial settlement and construction.

Initial settlement location

Existing explanations of urban origins consider cities to have developed in particular locations because they were on trade routes, or in environmen­tally advantageous locations, or in places that facilitated exchange among regions,¹ but there are often many locations that could have been so favored. The initial process of urban coalescence draws people in from a broad area to settle in a more concentrated area. An economic explanation of such developments proposes distributive relationships in which producers of agricultural or craft goods exchanged their goods in markets that were located in cities. In pre-market economies, however, production and exchange were significantly embedded in social and political relationships that constrained the movement of people into these postulated early markets. Arguably, then, political negotiations and authority were involved in the development of most cities.

Other factors are likely to have been salient in the initial growth of some cities, including the desire for safety and security under conditions of persistent conflict or during the anticipation or aftermath of a natural disaster. The growth of Teotihuacan, in the Basin of Mexico, for example, may have been catalyzed by volcanic events in what is now the state of Puebla, where the volcano Popocatepetl evidently erupted during the first century ce.^{[244] [245]} In the area closer to Teotihuacan itself, settlements in the southwestern Basin had long been threatened by the volcano Xitle, which blanketed the pre-Teotihuacan city of Cuicuilco under several meters of lava around 300 ce.^[246] By the time this catastrophic eruption occurred, Cuicuilco had largely been abandoned and the city of Teotihuacan was at its height; nonetheless, the looming threat of disaster may have played a part in the spatial aggregation of populations in a new location and related processes of political, economic, and religious integration.

For some cities, at least, the choice of location was quite deliberate - a political decision that could be supported by readings of divine will. The Assyrian ruler Sargon II (ruled 721-705 bce), for example, wrote that he proposed the location of a new capital city and that the great gods “com­manded that the town be built and the canal dug.”^[247] And according to Aztec tradition, their capital city Tenochtitlan was located following the will of the god Huitzilopochtli where the Mexica would see an eagle perched on a nopal cactus and holding a snake.^[248] Although these sites were supported by divine will, they clearly also responded to political realities. Sargon, as a usurper, was creating a new capital to disenfranchise an existing elite by moving away from their agricultural land and established political networks, and the Mexica, as recent arrivals in the Valley of Mexico, took what territory was available to them.

Primary urbanism - cities built in a region not otherwise in contact with urban populations - would have been built upon existing social and political structures and economies. In those cities, pre-urban forms of authority would not only have built the city but would have persisted in its earliest stages, at least. In Mesopotamian cities, for example, the existence of an assembly of elders very likely represents the persistence of pre-urban polit­ical forms.^[249]

Polity

Cities may have been sited according to the political authority of pre-urban elites, and the ongoing concentration of an increasing population in urban communities created growing numbers of subjects who provided labor, agricultural and craft products, and the possibility of increasing use of military force. In short, cities could provide a basis for increasing political authority, even as city rulers faced the possibility of opposition from other political factions that may have included priests and other temple personnel, non-ruling elite families, and distinct ethnic groups.

Economy

Economies are transformed by the concentration of population in cities. Childe's definition of cities focuses on the growth of population beyond the point at which urban residents can provide their own food, whether through flocks or fields. Urban populations are thus relatively concentrated and specialized. This development also introduces an increased dependency - people cannot feed themselves, but must rely on redistributed or exchanged food. In general, urban processes of production are increasingly specialized, allowing for (and requiring) greater efficiency and employment.^[251] The pace of technological innovation is increased by growing demand from a flour­ishing population and from urban institutions. These processes lead increas­ingly to concentrations of wealth in the hands of the urban elite. In Mesopotamia, the potter's wheel was developed as the first cities were being formed, production of textiles expanded greatly as cities grew, and early technological innovations developed in cities include first bronze-working and later glass-making as a related industry.

Despite the specialized economies and resulting interdependence of urban households for basic provisioning, it is increasingly clear that the food­producing capacity of urban spaces may have been much greater than traditional views of urban-rural interdependence afford. Current research concerning Mesoamerican urbanism, for example, includes studies of urban green space and the use of land surrounding residential structures. In an example from south-central Veracruz, Stark and Ossa argue that the dis­persed urban form that characterized the Gulf lowlands was well-suited to intensive urban gardening and that land use around domiciles was symbolic as much as it was economically practical.^[252] Although residential gardens were generally larger in more dispersed urban settings, they surely played a role in household provisioning and market exchange in densely aggregated cities as well.

Society

The continuing concentration of population into cities begins a process of weakening pre-urban political and social ties, or at least subordinating them to more encompassing political relationships. The leaders of the extended kin units that would have structured communities and economies in towns were subjugated to the emerging urban rulers and their administration. At the same time, extended kin groups were, in many cases, gradually broken down into smaller family units. As urban spaces became more densely settled, it could become more difficult for extended families to remain in close proximity, as illustrated by Mesopotamian texts recording legal dis­putes over inheritance and division of property.¹¹

At the same time, new and larger groups based in part on kinship could develop in cities, including in Mesopotamia of the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800 bce) the babtum, or neighborhood, which had its own political hierarchy.^{[253] [254] [255]} The breakdown of extended families and refashioning of kinship groupings may also reorient subjects in cities toward the urban authorities for resolution of disputes and for economic assistance.

In some cities, on the other hand, residential organization continued to be characterized by the cohabitation of large extended kin groups, including not only blood but also fictive kin, who participated collectively in the specialized production of goods as corporate economic groups. At Teoti­huacan, more than 2,000 multi-room structures were built beginning in the third century ce as the primary form of housing within the city as well as within some coeval rural settlements.

Cities are often divided into quarters, wards, or neighborhoods, and the organization thus produced and maintained may reflect preexisting social divisions, or may foster new ones. This appears to be true of Teotihuacan, where researchers have identified some areas as neighborhoods based on a combination of settlement patterns and the presence of architectural elem­ents with complementary functions. For example, the 25,000-square-meter “La Ventilla” neighborhood included a temple, public buildings, a large open plaza, residential compounds, and water wells.^[256] Some of Teotihuacan's neighborhoods (for example, “Tlailotlacan”) were likely enclaves of foreign immigrants.^[257] Studies of neighborhoods have been slower to develop in the Mesoamerican lowlands due to a history of scholarly disagreement over whether low-density settlements such as the sprawling Maya polity centers actually represent urban landscapes. Recently, however, the term “neigh­bourhood” has been explicitly applied in the Maya Lowlands to discrete clusters of houses; Smith argues that this sociospatial concept is relevant for other low-density cities in the world as well.^[258] Stone and Zimansky proposed based on their surface survey at Mashkan-shapir that Mesopotamian cities were composed of functionally equivalent neighborhoods, each one of which had elite housing as well as evidence for local craft manufacture.^[259] In other periods of Mesopotamian history, residence may have been organ­ized by craft, with areas of the city of Uruk seemingly inhabited by different guilds.^[260]

There is evidence that the very existence of cities called a new form of identity into being - the “citizen.” In Mesopotamia of the third millennium bce, both members of the elite and workers named in institutional ration lists were known by their city of origin,^[261] rather than by the ethnic terms in which we more commonly think of these societies. Archaeological research points to a similar process in the emergence of Tiwanaku in the Andean high plateau, or altiplano. The city expanded enormously between 500 and 700 ce. Residential sectors expanded beyond its monumental core in a highly organized manner, and similar to Teotihuacan, following a master spatial plan grounded in visual orientations to key mountain peaks and celestial cycles.^[262] The basic unit of spatial organization was a walled compound, which incorporated several dwellings and their associated structures and outdoor spaces. Two or more contiguous compounds formed more encom­passing barrios. Spatially divided compounds and barrios provided residence for kin-based or otherwise intimately linked urban communities in Tiwanaku. Artifact styles, architecture, and residential practices varied significantly among compounds, indicating that resident groups derived from different places and continued to produce their distinctive identities within the urban center. Some barrio communities practiced specialized trades.^[263] Yet residents of Tiwanaku compounds and barrios all constructed their living spaces according to Tiwa- naku's long-term spatial canon, and all adopted diacritical Tiwanaku practices, such as using Tiwanaku-style ceramics for commensal activities and digging massive subterranean “ash pits” for multiple purposes. Tiwanaku urbanism involved the transformation of local communities into urban subjects and citizens of an emergent political and cultural order.

Built environment

If our discussion of cities has begun with the ongoing transformations within urban communities, it is the physical environment of early cities that both constructs and represents these new relationships. The symbolic authority of the city ruler is often marked by representational art and in less personal­ized form by monumental architecture - palaces, temples, and city walls - and planned public spaces like processional ways or plazas that were the site of daily performance or urban identities as well as broader public rituals and ceremonies. Mesopotamian texts note regular public festivals, processions of cult statues, and occasional feasts commemorating (for example) the inaug­uration of cities, like the feast of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal (ruled 883-859 bce) upon the completion of his new capital Kalhu.²¹ Visual repre­sentations suggest the salience of banqueting at multiple scales up to the entire urban population.

Temples were critical as built forms and as the focal point of a range of cultural practices that included public ritual as well as production of agricul­tural and craft goods. Rulers of cities had a variety of relationships to temples, but in most cultures maintenance of these relationships was considered to be of crucial importance. In Early Dynastic Mesopotamia (c. 2500 bce), temples owned fields and managed agricultural production, manufactured metals, textiles, and ceramic vessels, and organized long-distance trading expeditions to acquire valued raw materials. Kings took credit for the construction and maintenance of temples, making certain that both the gods and posterity knew of their role through foundation inscriptions and stamped bricks. Although ideologically it was kings who served temples, this relationship was increas­ingly reversed as the concentration of power in the hands of rulers grew.

Teotihuacan's built environment is extraordinarily monumental and pre­cisely ordered, its ultimate configuration culminating from early civic planning on a massive scale and subsequent enlargements and modifications made to its civic and residential architecture throughout the first half-millennium ce. The city has been aptly described as sacred,²² with the blending of polity and religion visually manifested in more than 100 temple structures lining its central processional way, the Avenue of the Dead. A canonical orientation of 15.5 degrees east of north pervades the layout of Teotihuacan's civic and many of its residential architectural features; this standard orientation is exhibited even among some contemporaneous rural settlements in the region.²³

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David Oates and Joan Oates, Nimrud: An Assyrian Imperial City Revealed (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 2001).

Rene Millon, “The Last Years of Teotihuacan Dominance,” in Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (eds.), The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), pp. 102-64.

Sarah C. Clayton, “Measuring the Long Arm of the State: Teotihuacan's Relations in the Basin of Mexico,” Ancient Mesoamerica 24 (2013), 87-105.

The north end of the Avenue of the Dead terminates at the Moon Pyramid complex, the pyramid itself loosely echoing the shape of a promin­ent mountain, Cerro Gordo, located north of the city. It is highly unlikely that this arrangement is accidental. As Cowgill points out, Cerro Gordo is understood in recent traditions as a sacred, water-filled mountain; further, a personified mountain depicted in the mural art of Teotihuacan, as in the Tepinantitla complex, may be a reference to Cerro Gordo.^[264] In addition to numerous architectural complexes, two other major pyramids mark Teotihuacan's sacred landscape. The Sun Pyramid, Teotihuacan's largest monument, is seated on the east side of the Avenue of the Dead, and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid is located inside the massive enclosure of the Ciudadela, a gathering space that would have accommodated 100,000 people. The environment that rulers created in the heart of this city was well suited to large-scale processions and public displays of sacred power and military might, including the practice of ritual human sacrifice in association with overt symbolic references to warfare.^[265]

Andean cities differed remarkably in built form and in the way they produced urban subjects. Located in the Andean high plateau, Tiwanaku is reminiscent of Teotihuacan. Its spatiality was highly ordered and it was dominated by a dual monumental core consisting of ensembles of temples, plazas, and sunken courts featuring carved anthropomorphic monoliths. The northeast monumental sector centered on the Akapana-Kalasasaya complexes and the southeast sector, the Pumapunku complex. Ritualized commensalism was central to the ceremonies that took place in Tiwanaku's monumental complexes and residential compounds. Stone portals, including the well-known Sun Portal (Gate of the Sun), directed officiants, pilgrims, and ritual participants in carefully orchestrated routes that traversed exten­sive plazas, raised temple platforms, and ultimately led toward intimate sunken courts and their imposing stone sculptures. Though monumental spaces were not uniformly available to all ritual participants, Tiwanaku was built to be experienced and its ideological messages internalized by many.

Andean cities such as Wari and Chan Chan were far more enclosed and were designed to emphasize the sociospatial distinctions of their urban subjects. At its peak, the Peruvian coastal city of Chan Chan comprised multiple palace enclosures, or ciudadelas, surrounded by increasingly larger swaths of lower-status and temporary urban housing. Some residential areas adjacent to enclosures housed palace retainers, while increasing portions of the south and west segments of the city incorporated differentiated urban barrios, many constituent communities conducting specialized trades such as metal, cloth, and ceramic vessel production.^[266] The construction of the Laberinto palace enclosure in the latter part of Early Chimu (1100-1200 ce) institutionalized two enduring ciudadela patterns. First, a tripartite division into a northern entry court with surrounding rooms, a central court with an adjacent royal burial platform, and a southern sector with domestic housing and walk-in wells. Second, the increasing organization of internal palace space via ranked audiencia courts and their dependent storeroom clusters, which together manifest an increasingly intricate administrative structure. Burial platforms likely housed the mummified remains of the deceased ruler who had built and once inhabited the enclosure.^[267] Intricate architectural annexes adjoined the outer edges of later enclosures, presumably housing later generations of family, retainers, or craft specialists who directly and officially tended a ciudadela's corporate community and ancestral mummy.

City walls have been the subject of a range of scholarly perspectives - were they for protection against enemies, to prevent citizens from leaving, to symbolize the power of rulers, to mark the city as a salient point in the landscape? It is of interest to note that the earliest Mesopotamian cities appear not to have been walled, and Egyptian city walls also developed centuries after the first cities were built.^[268] Though most Andean cities were not walled, at Tiwanaku a water-filled “moat” surrounded most of its northeast monu­mental complex, effectively distinguishing a massive portion of its urban core as ritually significant space.^[269] The moat was initiated very early in Tiwanaku's history and was expanded just as Tiwanaku developed into a sprawling urban center. Thus city walls and related boundaries manifest a further way in which urbanism is a process that develops and changes through time.

Time and scale

Childe's notion of the “Urban Revolution” suggests that the construction of cities and the associated changes in political authority, economic organiza­tion, and identities was a rapid if not instantaneous change.^[270] Yet clearly cities grew over time, and it is worth considering the length of time involved. For early Mesopotamia our best current information comes from Tell Brak in northeastern Syria, where the settled area expanded from 30 hectares to 130 hectares between about 3900 to 3500 bce.^[271] During those four centuries, several monumental structures that include an elite residence and a temple on a platform were built, and a feasting hall may represent the activities of an intermediate political elite, perhaps the leader of an extended kin group persisting from the pre-urban community.^[272] While our evidence for assemblies of elders in Mesopotamia is discontinuous, they persisted in recognizable form until at least the Neo- Babylonian period some 4,000 years later. Urban transformations, while wide reaching, are best seen not as moments in time, but ongoing processes.

Andean cities were always under construction. Tiwanaku's temples mani­fest sections that were clearly being constructed even as they were aban­doned, and the production of stone for monumental construction was an ongoing and eminently visible component of the urban landscape. Chan Chan expanded generationally with the establishment of each new ciudadela and its affiliated retainer and residential artisan sectors. Geoffrey Conrad draws on Inka historical accounts to argue that each new ruler had to establish a new palace and wealth-generating estate based on a royal kin­based principle of “split inheritance.”^[273] Cuzco expanded in this very manner. Located in the rugged central Andean sierra, the Inka capital was a relatively small city that, at the time of Spanish Conquest, housed a maximum of 20,000 persons.^[274] It housed the palaces, temples, council halls, and acllawasi - monumental homes for the “chosen” women who wove elaborate clothing for Inka elites and produced feasts for elite-sponsored ceremonies - dedicated to the noble factions that anchored political authority in the Cuzco heart­land. Cuzco housed more than ten royal factions, each centered on the kin-focused estate, or panaca, established by a new ruler, or Sapa (Unique) Inca, his primary wife (blood sister), and secondary wives and concubines. After a Sapa Inca's death, his panaca continued to thrive grounded in a core of his noble (capac) descendants as well as their affines, progeny, and retainers, all of whom collectively venerated his mummified remains and other sacred objects and places in Cuzco

Although the city of Teotihuacan certainly evolved through time, its early growth was remarkably rapid in terms of its expanding population and the sweeping changes in regional settlement that accompanied its development into the capital of an influential state. Teotihuacan was initially settled in the early centuries bce. By ι ce its population approached 20,000 and continued to expand, reaching a peak of 80,000 to 125,000 by 200 ce. A correspondingly precipitous decline in regional population numbers coincided with Teoti­huacan's explosive early growth. Sanders, Parsons, and Santley report a possible decrease of 80-90 percent of the population of the Basin of Mexico during the first century ce, presumably due to the movement, en masse, of regional populations into Teotihuacan.^[275]

Rural hinterlands

In Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, emergent urbanism gener­ated substantial transformations that transcended the production of urban cores. In each world region, urbanism simultaneously created particular forms of the rural hinterlands that were as much part of the process of emergent urbanization as cities themselves. Furthermore, the production of urban hinterlands was inextricably physical and symbolic. Examination of key elements of urban cores and hinterlands shows the preeminent role that productive concerns and hydrological engineering played in organizing urban space and linking urban core and hinterland.

Transformation of the rural landscape: production and ritual

The spatial order of cities and hinterlands is responsive to regional environ­mental conditions. In the Moche Valley of the northern Peruvian Pacific coast, Chan Chan coalesced and thrived as an autonomous city from 900 to 1450 ce, the Andean Late Intermediate period, as the political center of the expansive Chimu polity.

Located in extremely arid conditions, Chan Chan's urban growth was grounded in its regional hydrology. Chan Chan followed an oblique orien­tation aligned roughly perpendicular to the coast and parallel to the lower Moche River. Core elements of Chan Chan's hydrological regime included its canal systems, sunken gardens, and enclosed walk-in wells. Early urban growth depended on irrigating the vast, high plain of Pampa Esperanza that extended north of and above the city.^[276] Throughout the city's history, Chimu hydraulic engineers constructed a series of primary canals from the Moche River that fed the pampa's farming systems and artificially raised Chan Chan's water table. These irrigation canals, including an ambitious, 70- kilometer inter-valley canal planned to import excess water from the neigh­boring Chicama Valley,^[277] were successively stranded or extensively damaged by a massive El Nino event in 1100 ce and recurring tectonic uplift there­after. Ongoing contraction of irrigation to the Pampa Esperanza and the consequent lowering of Chan Chan's water table generated two inner-city shifts. These included the intensification of sunken-garden farming, a coastal urban farming regime that required excavating fields in alluvial seashore bluffs to levels at which combined water table and ground moisture sus­tained crop growth.^[278] These also included an increased reliance on deep wells for occupants of individual ciudadelas. In the late ciudadela Gran Chimu, such wells reached more than 15 meters deep.^[279]

Some cities' hinterlands were organized as much to support ritual com­mensalism as to support daily subsistence. Tiwanaku's expansion after 500 ce and its increasing social and ritual catchment demanded a diversified productive base to both support permanent residents and recurring ritual­ized events. Massive floodplains around Tiwanaku and nearby valleys were converted into intensive raised field farming systems - most notably, a massive expanse of the adjacent Katari Valley. Raised fields transformed low valley bottoms into productive field beds fed by the rise and fall of nearby Lake Titicaca and mountain-fed subterranean aquifers. Clusters of interlinked reservoirs - known as qocha systems - were excavated into higher, drier valley bottoms to facilitate local farming, pasturage, and small-scale lacustrine cultivation. Intensive raised field and qocha production came to coexist alongside more traditional rain-fed systems as innovative, high-stakes productive practices generated by and tending to Tiwanakufs urban expansion.

Tiwanaktfs very urban constitution collapses clear distinctions between “urban” and “rural” processes. Kolata noted that Tiwanakufs massive plat­forms embodied metaphors for massive mountains that were rendered sources of water and vitality for agropastoral systems and the humans they supported.⁴° Tiwanaku itself incorporated clusters of productive systems. The southeastern portion of the site consists of a cluster of large interlinked qochas, which likely served local agropastoral practices and to feed the large caravans of llamas and alpacas that periodically descended on the center. Clusters of raised fields occupied the low, northern edge of the site along the Tiwanaku River. In fact, these diverse systems were interlinked via a massive urban hydrological network. The qochas captured water from a subterranean aquifer and surface streams descending south from Mount Kimsachata. They helped to channel water into a massive “moat” or canal built around the monumental core, thereby directing water away from its susceptible floors and foundations. Water from the canal drained into the floodplain below the site that supported raised field systems.

Urban control of the hinterland

Both urban governments and elite extended families exerted control over rural spaces through a variety of political action, kin networks, and ritual practices. In Mesopotamia, this control focused on productive activities including notably the construction and maintenance of networks of canals that made agriculture possible - or intensified production, in the case of Assyria.^{[280] [281]} These canals also served to facilitate water-borne transportation of goods including grain from hinterlands to urban centers as well as among cities, and they could also be diverted in military operations to flood resistance from defense of rebellious cities. Ritual control over the landscape was relatively underdeveloped in Mesopotamia.

In the highlands of Mexico, several lines of evidence attest to Teotihua­can's political dominance over its regional hinterland, including rapid changes to regional settlement patterns that accompanied its growth and the concentration of the population and major politico-religious monuments in the capital. Unlike some other regional urban landscapes that were dotted with large cities, Teotihuacan stands out as a singular capital many times larger than any other contemporary settlement in the Basin of Mexico. Its urban expansion closely corresponded to the development of a ruralized hinterland, which was a major source of demographic growth as well as food and a variety of necessary raw materials. Regional settlement surveys by Sanders and colleagues placed Teotihuacan within a 30-kilometer radius of a range of resources (for example, salt, reeds, basalt, and construction materials) from distinct ecological zones.^[282] Teotihuacan exerted enduring and direct control beyond the Basin of Mexico into adjacent regions includ­ing parts of Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, and Morelos as well, which have been described as an “outer hinterland” from which particular resources were derived (for example, Pachuca obsidian from Hidalgo).^[283] At its height, Teotihuacan's political reach appears to have been imperialistic, extending to distant polities in the Gulf Coast, West Mexico, and the Maya region. The nature of Teotihuacan's relationships with particular polities, including the degree to which they were direct or indirect, lasting or fleeting, historically accurate or fabricated by local elites, is a perennial topic of debate among Mesoamericanists.

Data from within the Basin of Mexico and beyond undeniably support a view of the Teotihuacan polity, with the capital city at its heart, as a highly centralized, militarily powerful, and profoundly influential ideological force across the Mesoamerican world. It is increasingly clear, however, that its regional and interregional involvements were also highly heterogeneous in terms of strategy, duration, success, and with regard to the economic and social implications of these relationships for local populations. There is a need to delineate in finer detail the area that represented Teotihuacan's hinterland at different points in its dynamic history, and to understand the kinds of interactions through which it was constituted. Research focused within the Basin of Mexico, beyond the margins of the capital, is imperative for comprehending Teotihuacan's regional politics in fuller measure and for addressing basic questions concerning ancient cities in general, including how their institutions and populations were provisioned.^[284]

By contrast, Inka incorporation of the Cuzco Basin and surrounding regions occurred over multiple generations, as narrated in an “official” history that telescopes the Inka rise to fame and power in the deeds of eleven successive rulers.^[285] Early royal descent-groups (panacas) maintained lands and estates in the Cuzco Basin, while those of the ninth Sapa Inka, the “cosmic transformer” Pachacuti, and his imperializing successors established wealthy estates in the nearby Urubamba Valley and throughout the expanding empire. Pachacuti is credited with consolidating the Cuzco heartland and integrating it into an expanding urban core according to an innovative master plan that facilitated a flexible means of coordinating irrigation and production in the heartland.^[286] Cuzco and its hinterland was divided into four radial (pie-slice shaped) quadrants, giving rise to the native name of the Inka Empire as Tawantinsuyu, “four lands joined” (see Urton, Chapter 9, this volume). Quadripartition mapped seamlessly onto an ancient dual sociospatial division into upper (Hanan) and lower (Hurin) Cuzco. Pachacuti integrated these organizing principles with an intricate system of radiating ritual paths, or ceques. The ceque system formed a network of forty-one paths leading radially from the primary Inka temple of Coricancha across the upper Cuzco Basin. Each ceque linked together multiple sacred places (waq'a), well over 300 in total and nearly a third of which consisted of water sources.^[287] Ceques were grouped into clusters of three, and each ceque cluster integrated the lands and ancestral shrines of a particular panaca with one or more non-noble communities. Each ceque cluster also was associated with a particular time in the annual productive and ritual calendar. The ceque system wedded the spatial location of noble and non-noble commu­nities to a rotating system of ritual and productive obligations tied to the local shrines that afforded their ancestral legitimacy and vitality. It codified a sociospatial, temporal, and productive order. Though each panaca main­tained corporate ritual and political spaces in the urban center, and though all collectively worshipped at focal Inka shrines such as Coricancha, the gravity of panaca power, place, and activity resided outside of the city proper.

Limits of urban control

It is perhaps fitting to close with a note on the limits of the reach of cities and their transformations of landscapes. Certainly one limit of political control comes in the form of borderlands separating one city from the next, although arguably a landscape of cities is entirely transformed regardless of which city controls which plot of land. However, the margins of urban zones are often occupied by pastoral nomads - in the Zagros Mountains to the east of the Mesopotamian Plains, for example. Yet urban influence finally reaches even these regions, as the specialized production of pastoral­ists depends on urban markets, and the focus of their political resistance is essentially urban in origin. There is ultimately nearly no escape from the urban transformation.