The Archaeology of Wak'as

Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes

Tamara L. Bray

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781607327318, 9781607323174
• eBook ISBN: 9781607323181
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this edited volume, Andean wak'as—idols, statues, sacred places, images, and oratories—play a central role in understanding Andean social philosophies, cosmologies, materialities, temporalities, and constructions of personhood. Top Andean scholars from a variety of disciplines cross regional, theoretical, and material boundaries in their chapters, offering innovative methods and theoretical frameworks for interpreting the cultural particulars of Andean ontologies and notions of the sacred.

Wak'as were understood as agentive, nonhuman persons within many Andean communities and were fundamental to conceptions of place, alimentation, fertility, identity, and memory and the political construction of ecology and life cycles. The ethnohistoric record indicates that wak'as were thought to speak, hear, and communicate, both among themselves and with humans. In their capacity as nonhuman persons, they shared familial relations with members of the community, for instance, young women were wed to local wak'as made of stone and wak'as had sons and daughters who were identified as the mummified remains of the community's revered ancestors.

Integrating linguistic, ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archaeological data, The Archaeology of Wak'as advances our understanding of the nature and culture of wak'as and contributes to the larger theoretical discussions on the meaning and role of–"the sacred" in ancient contexts.

Part I

Introduction

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1

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Andean Wak’as and Alternative Configurations of Persons, Power, and Things

TAMARA L. BRAY

[Wak’as] are made of energized matter, like everything else, and they act within nature, not over and outside it as Western supernaturals do.

(Salomon 1991:19)

In contrast to the plethora of archaeological studies focused on presumably secular aspects of society like subsistence practices, the economy, and political organization, investigations into the realm of the sacred have been much less common. This is not to suggest that all peoples past and present compartmentalize the sacred and secular in the way we tend to do in the West (e.g., Brück 1999; Fowles 2013). Rather, it is acknowledgment of the fact that archaeologists have tended to steer clear of anything beyond the quotidian material concerns of human societies. Yet today, a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, it remains abundantly clear that much of the world’s population lead lives in which basic questions about diet, housing, education, social interaction, and so on are structured by the dictates of religion and spiritual devotion (see Hecht and Biondo 2010). As Insoll (2004) and others have argued, if we fail to consider and theorize the influence of the sacred (in a broad rather than restricted Judeo-Christian sense) on peoples in the past, then many of the questions we frame—as well as the answers we derive—are likely to be incomplete. This book on the archaeology of wak’as aligns with emerging theoretical interests in the role of the sacred in the past—and the insights such orientations may offer into alternative (e.g., nonwestern) ontologies and logics—within the specific context of the Andes.

Over the past twenty years, there has been a slow but steady resurgence of interest in what has generally been characterized as “the archaeology of religion” (Brown 1997; Carmichael et al. 1994; Fogelin 2008; Hall 1997; Hays-Gilpin and Whitley 2008; Hodder 2010; Insoll 2001, 2004; Lewis-Williams 2002; Renfrew 1994). During the mid- to late twentieth century, attention to the ideological realm of human experience was largely proscribed by the dictates of positivist science and processual archaeology, which emphasized the empirical, the techno-functional, and the economic. Within the dominant materialist framework of the time, religion and ideology were labeled “epiphenomenal” (Harris 1974, 1977) and essentially relegated to the status of the unknowable (Hawkes 1954). Given that archaeology inevitably responds to contemporary concerns, however, it is little surprise that research orientations have turned back to some of the more metaphysical interests that originally animated the discipline. As modern religious identities, politics and conflicts take center stage on an ever more frequent basis, it seems almost natural that archaeology would follow suit by developing parallel interests in past societies. Regardless of the ultimate reasons for the renewed interest, extending the reach of archaeological inquiry to acknowledge and encompass what we may consider nonsecular aspects of human existence adds a critical dimension to our narratives of the past that enriches and balances our understanding of pre-modern lifeways as well as our own.

In this book, Andean wak’as provide a point of entry for investigation of pre-Columbian notions of the sacred that lead, in turn, to considerations of the nature of beings and being. Wak’as, which may be glossed for the moment as “sacred things,” constitute a fascinating point of intersection with respect to notions of materiality, agency, and personhood—concepts at the forefront of current anthropological theorizing (e.g., Fowler 2004; Gell 1998; Hodder 2012; Keane 2003; Latour 1993; Miller 2005; Watts 2013). In recent archaeological discourse, these three conceptual strands are often closely intertwined and logically entrained. Materiality is understood as the productive entanglement between humans and the material world that constitutes the basis of social life, or sociality (Meskell 2005; Tilley 2007; Watts 2013). The notion that objects or things have agency—inclusively defined as “the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn 2001:110)—is a key aspect of theories of materiality (DeMarrais et al. 2004; Miller 2005; Tilley et al. 2006). Also emergent within the framework of materiality is the idea of personhood as a contingent, relational, and distributed phenomenon in which both human and nonhuman entities are implicated (Brück 2001; Fowler 2004; Knappett 2005; Strathern 1988). These theoretical concepts are further developed and illustrated in the discussion of wak’as that follows as well as in many of the papers included in this volume.

The Andean phenomena known by the Quechua (and Aymara) term wak’a (waqa; also written as huaca, guaca) are the focal point of the present work.¹ Recognizing the cultural and presumed religious significance of the term early on, the ecclesiastical writers of the early colonial period devoted considerable effort to apprehending what it meant—not for reasons of intellectual curiosity but for purposes of eradication (Acosta 1954 [1590]; Albornoz 1984 [1581–85]; Arriaga 1968 [1621]). Their writings form the point of departure for our understanding of the concept as well as one of the principal reasons why an “archaeology of wak’as” is so necessary.

In the earliest references, which date to the latter half of the sixteenth century, the notion of wak’a was typically construed in material terms (van...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Contemporary Orientations
• Part III. Wak’as in the Time of the Inkas
• Part IV. Deeper Histories of Wak’as in the Andean Past
• Part V. Concluding Thoughts
• List of Contributors
• Index