Archaeology, Language, and the Andean Past: Principles, Methods, and the New "State of the Art"

Abstract

This book emerges from the conference Lenguas y sociedades en el antiguo Perú: hacia un enfoque interdisciplinario, a gathering of linguists, archaeologists and anthropologists at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in August 2009. This chapter sets out first the raison d’être of our enterprise: why it seemed so important to foster a meeting of minds between these disciplines, to converge their disparate but complementary perspectives into a more coherent Andean prehistory.Next, it is asked how linguistics can inform us about prehistory at all, exploring some general methodological principles and how they might be applied specifically in the case of the Andes. The ‘traditional model’ for associating the linguistic and archaeological records in the Andes is then reviewed — but pointing also to various inherent infelicities, which duly call for a far-reaching, interdisciplinary reconsideration of the Andean past.Therefore we attempt to sum up the new state of the cross-disciplinary art in Andean prehistory, as collectively represented by the papers that emerged both from the Lima conference and from the symposium that preceded it, held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge in September 2008. Progress and new perspectives are explored first on key individual questions. Who, for instance, were the Incas, and whence and when did they come to Cuzco? How and when did Quechua, too, reach Cuzco, as well as its furthest-flung outposts in north-west Argentina, Ecuador and northern Peru?Finally, the scope is broadened to overall scenarios for how the main Andean language families might correlate in time and space with the archaeological horizons that in principle might best account for their dispersals. Four basic hypotheses have emerged, whose respective strengths and weaknesses are assessed in turn: a traditional ‘Wari as Aymara’ model, revised and defended; alternative proposals of ‘Wari as both Aymara and Quechua’, a suggestion of ‘both Chavin and Wari as Quechua’; and the most radical new departure, ‘Wari as Quechua, Chavin as Aymara’.

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