The Inka Empire: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Abstract

Historians have lately troubled the idea of empire, provincializing and dislocating the concept of a hegemonic or contained network of economic, political, and cultural ties. Tawantinsuyu, or the realm of four parts, was understood not so much as a contained place as a set of directions from Cuzco, its center, toward the spaces that the Inca sought to dominate. They created physical signs—palaces, roads, bridges—that made claims on land and peoples and told a story about their conquests. Spanish colonizers brought the term imperio to these claims, and the concept of an Inca hegemony was embraced by Inca descendants as well as the Spaniards who sought to inherit such an ideal. Non-Inca elites pressed counternarratives of local autonomy, found in colonial administrative documents. These counternarratives have been supported by regional archaeological studies, which demonstrate the heterogeneity of relationships between Cuzco and its hinterlands.So it is somewhat unnerving to approach a large-format, glossy collection of scholarly essays titled The Inka Empire: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Laden with color photographs, maps, diagrams, and excellent bibliographies, the book, edited by the archaeologist Izumi Shimada, brings together many of the best scholars in archaeology, ethnohistory, linguistics, anthropology, and art history to present the Inca from a variety of perspectives, some of which subtly undermine the notion of an Andean empire while still embracing its rhetoric. Shimada has created a gorgeous and eminently useful volume, which despite its critical shortcomings focuses on multidisciplinarity as its contribution.In his introduction, Shimada argues that Inca studies have innovated rapidly since he conceived such a project in the 1970s, undermining Cuzco-centric normative analyses. He presents the current volume as a synthetic and interdisciplinary approach to the “unity and diversity” of the Inca empire, emphasizing the century before 1532 and the Chinchaysuyu and Collasuyu regions at the center of an empire stretching from “the northernmost region of the Ecuador-Colombia border to northwest Argentina” (p. 2). Yet Shimada's strategic essentialism produces a unified and somewhat conventional empire that drew upon its predecessors' statecraft in order to extend its reach, rather than the fragile and heterogeneous Tawantinsuyu sometimes revealed by provincial studies. That criticism aside, The Inka Empire largely does what it sets out to do. Each chapter is written by a key scholar and provides an evidence-based study of the topic while highlighting the direction for future research. Each contains a superb bibliography and numerous illustrations.There are five thematic sections. The first looks at sources and origin stories, and it includes a synthetic essay by Frank Salomon on textual sources for our knowledge of the Inca, a linguistic study of Quechua, Aymara, and Puquina by Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, an introduction to the use of DNA analysis to investigate migration patterns by Ken-Ichi Shinoda, and a probing of archaeological and textual evidence for Inca origins by Brian Bauer and Douglas Smit.The second section includes two essays that produce the Inca as empire: R. Alan Covey uses provincial archaeology to demonstrate the real limits on Inca power, and Terence D'Altroy surveys economic relations but ultimately repeats the standard story about bureaucracies, tax collection, relocation policies, and labor assignments. The third section, on Inca culture, brings John Earls and Gabriela Cervantes on cosmology, Gary Urton with an ethnographically rich assessment of how khipus functioned in provincial administration, Thomas Cummins with a holistic introduction to Inca arts, Elena Phipps, who compares Inca and colonial textile traditions, Stella Nair and Jean-Pierre Protzen on the Inca built environment, Susan Niles, who delightfully reads Inca royal estates as communications between the Inca and their provinces as well as among Inca elites, and Peter Kaulicke, who critically examines evidence in the Urubamba valley for Inca conceptions of life, death, and ancestor worship.The fourth section presents archaeology in the provinces, where the limits of empire are clearer. Martti Pärssinen presents an overview of Collasuyu (the southeastern direction from Cuzco), in which she argues that ceramic evidence for the Inca incursion is more convoluted than previously thought. Frances Hayashida and Natalia Guzmán likewise conclude that tracking Inca pottery style to show influence in the north coast is misleading. Inge Schjellerup tries to bring the selva peoples of the Chachapoyas region back into the Inca picture. Tamara Bray looks at late expansion in the Quito region, so central to Inca rule at the time of the Spanish conquest. The volume closes with Tetsuya Amino's analysis of changing interpretations of the Inca under Spanish rule.The Inka Empire will serve as a fine introduction to scholarship on the Inca and a guide for further reading on a multitude of topics, including comparative methods. An essay asking what is meant by empire, given the evidence of certain chapters, would have been welcome. But even with its more conventional packaging, this volume will give students and scholars a great deal to consider.

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