The Incas

Terence N. D'Altroy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118610596
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Incas is a captivating exploration of one of the greatest civilizations ever seen. Seamlessly drawing on history, archaeology, and ethnography, this thoroughly updated new edition integrates advances made in hundreds of new studies conducted over the last decade.

•Written by one of the world's leading experts on Inca civilization

•Covers Inca history, politics, economy, ideology, society, and military organization

•Explores advances in research that include pre-imperial Inca society; the royal capital of Cuzco; the sacred landscape; royal estates; Machu Picchu; provincial relations; the khipu information-recording technology; languages, time frames, gender relations, effects on human biology, and daily life

•Explicitly examines how the Inca world view and philosophy affected the character of the empire

•Illustrated with over 90 maps, figures, and photographs

Chapter One
Introduction

On Friday, November 15, 1532, Francisco Pizarro brazenly led a force of 168 frightened Spaniards into the maw of the most powerful empire ever seen in the Americas. Late that afternoon, the brigade entered the plaza at Cajamarca, an imperial Inca center in the Peruvian highlands. They had every reason to be dismayed by the sight that lay before them, since the Inca prince Atawallpa was savoring his recent victory in a dynastic war in the midst of an 80,000-man army camped just outside town. Because he was completing a fast at the hot springs of Kónoj, Atawallpa declined an invitation to disrupt his solemn duties. He would not meet his unwanted guests in the city that afternoon, but agreed to receive them after a night's rest. Astonishingly, he was Pizarro's prisoner by the next evening, captured during a surprise strike that was underpinned by equal parts of bravado, armaments, and faith.

Over the next eight months, the Spaniards extracted a ransom fit for an earthly deity in exchange for a promise of Atawallpa's freedom. An enormous amount of treasure was melted down from the empire's architectural dressings, personal jewelry, idols, and service ware hauled off from temples, aristocratic households, and perhaps even graves. By today's standards, the value would have been an astonishing US$335 million in gold and US$11 million in silver.¹ Once the ransom had been paid, Pizarro ordered Atawallpa to be tried and then executed on July 26, 1533, overriding the grave misgivings voiced by some members of his party. The power that the Inca had wielded over his vast domain even while captive had apparently convinced the Spaniard that decapitating the state was his best hope of staying alive and asserting his own control. In light of the divisions that had already riven the empire, his decision touched off the collapse of Tawantinsuyu, or “The Four Parts Together,” as the Incas called their realm.

Fittingly, the Incas already had a word for such a cataclysmic change. They called it a pachakuti, a “turning over/around of time/space”—a moment when history ended and then began again. In their eyes, it was not the first time that the world had been destroyed, nor might it be the last. The mestizo chronicler Guaman Poma (1980) explained that all of creation had been wiped out four times in the ancient past, each time after a cycle of a thousand years (Urton 1999: 41). The first age was a time of darkness when the world was inhabited by a race of wild men. In each successive epoch, humans progressed, as they learned to farm, to make crafts, and to organize themselves for war and peace. The fifth “sun” was the age of the Incas. In their self-promoted vision, it was a glorious era during which they brought civilization and enlightened rule to a chaotic world. And under the circumstances, it was only right that the man who had created the empire took Pachakuti as his title. After all, he was the son of the Sun, a living divinity who remade the world.

Less than a century after Pachakuti died and ascended to join his celestial father, Atawallpa's forces closed the war with his half-brother Waskhar. According to one native account, his generals declared that it was time for another pachakuti (Callapiña et al. 1974). To help move the process along, they massacred Waskhar's extensive family and several other royal kin groups who had cast their lot with him. They also killed all the historians they could find and destroyed the knot-records called khipu (see chapter 5) on which history was recorded, so that the era could begin unburdened by its past. But before he could properly launch the new epoch, Atawallpa fell into Spanish hands and a century of rule by gods on earth came to an end.

The Spanish encounter with the Incas, despite its impact, was not a complete surprise to either people. In 1519, Hernán Cortés had overthrown the Aztec empire of central Mexico through a similar attack on the ruler with the aid of allies made in the new land. The descriptions of Mexico's cities and riches that made their way back to Spain fired enthusiasm for more adventures in the Indies. Many of the men who accompanied Pizarro to the Andes had already seen action in Central America and the Caribbean, while others had just come over to seek their fortunes. Pizarro himself had been in the Americas for thirty years and was hungry to make his mark in an uncharted land called Pirú. In the 1520s, a few Spaniards or Portuguese had actually penetrated the Inca domain, but left no significant impression on the Andes or reported back to the Europeans. A tangible glimmer of what the Spaniards were to find reached them in 1527, when an expedition captured a boat off Ecuador filled with cloth, metal ornaments, and other riches. Even so, they were not prepared for the grandeur of Peru.

In 1532, Tawantinsuyu was the largest polity the native Americas had ever seen (figure 1.1). Its ruler was a hereditary king who the Incas claimed had descended in an unbroken string from a creation separate from the rest of humanity. Though a powerful monarch, the Sapa Inca (“Unique Lord”) did not rule alone. He was counseled by mummies of his immortal ancestors and their other descendants, who all joined him in Cuzco's most solemn ceremonies and drunken revelry. Totally unpersuaded by the Incas' assertions of divinity and appalled at their heresies, the Spaniards were still dazzled by the dynasty's riches and achievements. The early writers often drew on familiar referents to convey images of the realm for their countrymen, but some practices defied a search for analogy. Pedro Sancho and Pedro Pizarro, both members of the original expedition, have left us some impressions of the capital (plate 1.1):

There is a very beautiful fortress of earth and stone with big windows that look over the city [of Cuzco] and make it appear more beautiful…[The stones] are as big as pieces of mountains or crags…The Spaniards who see them say that neither the bridge of Segovia nor other constructions of Hercules or the Romans are as magnificent as this. (Sancho 1917: 193–4)

Most of the people [of Cuzco] served the dead, I have heard it said, who they daily brought out to the main square, setting them down in a ring, each one according to his age, and there the male and female attendants ate and drank. The attendants made fires for each of the dead in front of them…and lighting [them], burned everything they had put before them, so that the dead should eat of everything that the living ate. (P. Pizarro 1986: 89–90)

Everywhere they traveled, the invaders saw the imperial imprint, whether it was in Cuzco's spare but grand architecture, the roads that traversed 40,000 km of rugged terrain, thousands of provincial installations, stocks of every supply imaginable, works of artistry in precious metal, stone, and cloth, or the government designed to manage the whole affair. About twenty years after the conquest, the soldier Pedro Cieza de León (1967: 213–14; translation from Hyslop 1984: 343) expressed his admiration for the empire's order:

In human memory, I believe that there is no account of a road as great as this, running through deep valleys, high mountains, banks of snow, torrents of water, living rock, and wild rivers…In all places it was clean and swept free of refuse, with lodgings, storehouses, Sun temples, and posts along the route. Oh! Can anything similar be claimed for Alexander or any of the powerful kings who ruled the world?

The Incas' feats seemed all the more fabulous when the conquistadores heard that the realm was only about four generations old. As the Incas explained it, the empire was launched when Pachakuti usurped the throne from his father Wiraqocha Inka and began to annex the peoples around Cuzco. His successes and organizational genius were followed only by those of his son Thupa Inka Yupanki and grandson Wayna Qhapaq, and then by the final dynastic war (table 1.1).

Table 1.1 The conventional Inca king list.

	Name as ruler	Gloss	Given name
1	Manqo Qhapaq	Powerful [Ancestor]	–
2	Zinchi Roq'a	Warlord Roq'a	–
3	Lloq'e Yupanki	Honored Left-handed	–
4	Mayta Qhapaq	Royal Mayta	–
5	Qhapaq Yupanki	Powerful Honored	–
6	Inka Roq'a	Inka Roq'a	–
7	Yawar Waqaq	He Who Cries Bloody Tears	Inka Yupanki, Mayta Yupanki
8	Wiraqocha Inka	Creator God Inca	Hatun Thupa Inka
9	Pachakuti Inka Yupanki	Cataclysm Honored Inca	Inka Yupanki, Kusi Yupanki
10	Thupa Inka Yupanki	Royal Honored Inca	–
11	Wayna Qhapaq	Powerful Youth	Titu Kusi Wallpa
12	Waskhar Inka	Golden Chain Ruler	Thupa Kusi Wallpa
13	Atawallpa	–	–

Figure 1.1 The Inca road and provincial installation (tampu) system, after Hyslop (1984): frontispiece; the four parts of the Inca realm are shown in the inset map.

Plate 1.1 The Saqsawaman complex, on a rocky promontory above Cuzco.

For their part, the Incas were taken aback by the Spanish invasion, although they would later recount legends that had predicted the return of white, bearded strangers from the sea. Even so, their initial response was less one of awe than of anger and disbelief at the invaders' arrogance. Who were these men who dared to kill the Sapa Inca's subjects and seize the holy women for their carnal pleasures? Rather than wipe them out directly as they so richly deserved, the Incas let their curiosity get the better of them and allowed the interlopers to ascend the Andes to be examined first-hand. To Atawallpa's fatal regret, the Spanish incursion could not have been more propitiously timed. The prince, contemplating his recent victory and anticipating reunification of the empire, seemingly had nothing to fear from a small band of foreigners, as outrageous as their conduct may have been. He couldn't have been more wrong.

My goal in this book is to describe the Incas, their emergence as rulers of an empire, and the nature of their domain. That sounds straightforward enough, but the Incas have proved to be remarkably malleable in the hands of historians and archaeologists. Let a social theorist or two get involved and things become even more baffling. Depending on the author, Tawantinsuyu has been held up as an exemplar of almost every form of political society except representative democracy. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1966), son of an Inca princess, immortalized Tawantinsuyu in 1609 as a supremely well-run, homogeneous monarchy ruled by an omnipotent and benevolent king. Although he was writing to exalt the glories of his ancestors to a Spanish audience, Garcilaso's vision is still popular today. His efforts aside, other commentators have seen the realm in radically different lights—as a type of primitive communism, a feudal society, a despotic Asiatic state, and a territorial empire. Some modern scholars even doubt that an empire existed and instead see a patchwork of ethnic groups that were never truly unified.

How could one polity inspire such contradictory views? Part of the answer lies in the fact that no one who grew up in an independent Tawantinsuyu ever wrote about it.² Although they had the tools to record information precisely, the Incas had no writing system that we have been able to recognize and decipher. Instead, history was kept as oral tradition, supplemented by mnemonic registers. In Cuzco, poet-historians called amauta³ and knot-record masters called khipu kamayuq (figure 1.2) recited sagas of the royal past at the bidding of the court. The khipu themselves seem to have encoded information about the past in ways that had as much to do with cultural visions o...