Inca (Other Keyword)
1-25 (36 Records)
This paper presents the results of recent research at the archaeological Inca site of Incahuasi located at the Cañete valley, Peru. Although Incahuasi is frequently mentioned in the archaeological literature and by spanish chronicles (it is considered a New Cusco) little research have been done at the site. New data from archaeological excavations allows to compare historical accounts about the nature of Inca's occupation of the site, showing significant differences between both; challenging the...
The Archaeology of Rebellion and Resistance: Archaeological Investigations of the Neo-Inca State of Vilcabamba, Peru (2015)
In 1536 Manco Inca, the ‘puppet’ ruler installed by Pizarro, threw off the shackles of colonial rule and led a rebellion against the Spanish. After failing to retake the former imperial capital of Cusco, Manco Inca and his followers established a Neo-Inca state in Vilcabamba, the remote region east of Cusco. Vilcabamba functioned as the seat of Inca resistance against the Spanish from A.D. 1536 to 1572. While the historic record from the 1600s and 1700s is rich, few records exist for the...
Archaeology, Identity and Art: The Caranqui Murals of Ibarra, Ecuador (2015)
The incorporation of signs and symbols derived from an ancient, indigenous past has a long and venerable history in the tradition of New World muralism. As an important form of public art, murals merit a more sustained consideration of content, context, and communicative intent. The use of specific, realistic archaeological content in contemporary works is an interesting phenomenon that underscores the relation between the politics of identity (re-)construction and historical...
Cheqoq Inka Imperial Workshop Ceramic Rims (Cusco, Peru) (2018)
Subset of ceramics recovered at the archaeological site of Cheqoq-Maras (Urubamba, Cusco, Peru) during excavations of a Cuzco-Inka (imperial-style) pottery workshop. These data include contextual attributes, as well as rim diameters, rim thickness, and body thickness for all Cuzco-Inka rim sherds identifiable to form type. These data have been published in Quave, Kylie E. 2017. "Imperial-style ceramic production on a royal estate in the Inka heartland (Cuzco, Peru)." Latin American Antiquity 28...
Chincha Farmers: Understanding Inca expansion, strategies, and motivations at Las Huacas, Chincha Valley (2016)
The Inca Empire was the largest empire in the New World and its ability to expand relied upon the flexibility and diversity of its methods. In some regions the Inca used force and installed their own loyal members imposing a direct rule; in other regions, local administrative structure and elite groups were kept largely intact. The Chincha Kingdom has often been cited as a prime example of Inca diplomacy and peaceful incorporation, whereby the Inca gained access to the Chincha Kingdom’s...
Colonial Practices in the Imperial Heartland: The Inca Conquest and Transformation of the Lucre Basin, Cuzco, Peru (2016)
This paper will present data from the author’s dissertation research at the site of Minaspata, located in the Lucre Basin at the eastern end of the Cuzco Valley, Peru. Minaspata has a long history of occupation, dating to the Early Horizon to the end of the Late Horizon, but was conquered as the final component of the Inca heartland immediately prior to the early imperial excursions by the Inca. The results of recent excavations at Minaspata and the different phases of occupation and material...
Constructing Social Memory: Inca Politics and Sacred Landscape in the Lurin Valley (2017)
We will discuss the characteristics and scope of Inca politics in the Lurin Valley by focusing on the results of excavations carried out by Makowski (2016) in Pachacamac with its famous Imperial Inca temple and oracle, as well as in the administrative center Pueblo Viejo – Pucara. The comparison of landscape transformed by Imperial infrastructure between the Highlands of Cuzco (Christie 2016) and the lower Lurin Valley allows to reconstruct the mechanisms through which social memory was...
Conveying Inka Ideology of Warfare for Establishing and Maintaining Political Control (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient empires relied on warfare to conquer other groups and incorporate them politically. However, they did not always resort to armed conquest and often annexed new territories through negotiation backed by the perception of the empire’s military strength, which also underpinned the consolidation and perpetuation of political control in...
(Cross-)Boundary Objects as Imperial Agents: Imagined Communities in the Late Precolumbian Andes (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper builds out from the community of practice literature, inflecting it with more emphasis on the agency of objects as active members of such constituencies, and expanding, as well, on Anderson’s notion of imagined communities. In it, I aim to...
Examining ethnohistory: Cranial modification and social status in pre-Hispanic Inca Peru (2015)
The social meaning of cranial modification in the Andes has long been debated. Ethnohistoric accounts recorded by Spanish priests and travelers after the conquest assert that within Inca Peru, the practice of cranial modification was related to social status. They claimed that the Inca royal family preferred a particular head shape, and only certain noble families were permitted to reproduce that shape. In contrast, non-elite Inca supposedly practiced strictly local traditions of cranial...
Excavations at Vilcabamba (2016)
After the Incas failed to regain control of their capital city from the Spaniards in 1536, many Inca loyalists withdrew into the Vilcabamba region. Over the next 40 years of organized indigenous resistance to Spanish rule, much of the Inca royal court was centered in the town of Vilcabamba and a host of critical events occurred in the region. Despite the important role that the city of Vilcabamba held in the final years of the Inca Empire, there have been few archaeological projects aimed at...
Goods that moved between the forest and the highland Andes in the Inca state.The eastern valleys of north Argentina (2015)
The eastern valleys of the Cordillera Oriental, in north Salta, Argentina, were a sector of the eastern frontier of Tawantinsuyu. We proposed that the Inca created a state enclave with mining-metallurgical goals in that sector. To accomplish this, populations (mitmaqkuna) were moved from other parts of the empire, which required the implementation of a significant agrarian system to support them. These valleys may have been producing goods of great value that might have comprised a single...
High C4 plants consumption from the Late Intermediate period in Cuzco region. (2017)
Maize was one of the important crops for Inca political economics as a ritual and a staple food. In previous study of sacrificed children mummies found at Mt. Llullaillaco, the individuals particularly consumed C4 resources (such as maize, amaranth and domestic animals raised with C4 plants) in ritual activities. Contrary, the dietary compositions of Machu Picchu skeletons have shown diversity. The individuals from Mt. Llullaillaco and Machu Picchu were most probably immigrated from different...
Identifying Possible Inca Census Records in Khipu from Pachacamac (2015)
One of the primary categories of data recorded by the Incas on their knotted string accounting devices (khipu) is detailed census numbers from different administrative units, yet no existing khipu has been identified as containing such population records. In this analysis, Inca concepts of age categories and hierarchical ranking are used to predict a number of different formats for recording census data. Existing data tables of khipu were examined to determine if any matched these expectations,...
Impact, Expansion and Heterogeneous Strategies of the Tawantinsuyu at its Borders: The Case of Santiago del Estero in the Eastern Lowlands of Argentina (2016)
In this presentation we discuss the particular situation of a set of archaeological sites located in a small area of Santiago del Estero’s lowland (central Argentina), outside the territory traditionally included in the Collasuyu. The area concentrates several sites where Inca and Andean artefacts were found at the beginning of the 20th century, along with Inca features incorporated to the archaeological pottery and to ethnographic textiles. Moreover, there are certain kind of archaeological...
The INAA Analysis of Pottery from Machu Picchu: An Initial Assessment (2016)
This paper presents the results of INAA analysis of pottery recovered at Machu Picchu by the 1912 Yale Peruvian Scientific Expedition directed by Hiram Bingham III. Samples of ceramics representing the full range of forms and from a diversity of sectors at the site were studied in the Archaeometry Lab at the Universty of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) and compared with coeval Inca pottery from other sites in the Urubamba Valley and from the Cuzco Basin. The study considers whether the Machu...
The Inca Incorporation of the Canete Valley, Part 1: Conquest or Incanization (2015)
Field research by the Canete Archaeological Project has begun to unveil rich data regarding the Inca incorporation of the Middle and Lower Canete Valley. Utilizing both systematic survey and excavations, our work suggests a complex and intensive interaction between the Inca and those who occupied the valley before them. In this paper, we begin to tease out the imperial strategies of incorporation and local responses to them. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for...
The Inca occupation at Pampa de Flores: Continuity, changes and abandonment of public architecture in the Lurin Valley during the Late Horizon (2015)
The Inca conquest of the Peruvian central coast brought a series of changes to the political and social landscape of the Lurin valley. At Pachacamac, the main religious center of this area, radical changes included, not only the resurgence of this sanctuary and expansion of its cult, but also a series of transformation in its architectural setting. In other settlements of the valley associated to the Ychsma polity, changes were less obvious, probably due to the different strategies followed by...
Inca Presence at Las Huacas, Chincha Valley (2017)
When the Spanish arrived to the coast of Peru they heard stories of the wealthy Chincha Kingdom and the privileged position that they enjoyed within the Inca Empire. Previous archaeological and ethnohistorical research has concluded that at the Chincha Kingdom’s capital of La Centinela, the Inca rulers set up their authority alongside the local lord, and that they left him in charge of ruling the rest of the valley. This poster will present recent research conducted at the site of Las Huacas, a...
Inca Road Emplacement: The case of Canturillas - Nieve-Nieve in the Lurin Valley, Huarochirí, Lima, Peru (2017)
The Qhapaq Ñan or Great Inca Road was declared World Heritage by UNESCO in June 2014. The section of the road located between Pachacamac Sanctuary and the Inca administrative center of Hatun Xauxa (central highlands of Peru), is one of the most important, and one of the segments considered for the UNESCO declaration. Within this portion, the stretch from Canturillas to Nieve-Nieve is located near to the modern town of Nieve Nieve in a desert area, right where the Andes start raising, and...
Killing Time, Becoming Inca: Subject Creation and Monument Construction in Ancient Cuzco (2015)
The Incas built the largest indigenous empire in the Americas, and though they lacked a written history, they were keen to tell Spanish scribes how they assembled their domain. Inca nobles explained that their ancestors vanquished anyone who dared challenge Inca claims to authority. Like the boasts of other conquerors, these stories cast only particular people as the subjects of history and the cultivators of "civilization." But they also conceal another side of Inca history: For, it was...
Lake Titicaca Underwater Offerings and the Ritualization of Bodies of Water during the Inca Period (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the Inca Empire expanded across the South American Andes during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE, Lake Titicaca became its mythical place of origin and a major pilgrimage complex was built on the Island of the Sun. Nevertheless, before the Inca conquest Lake Titicaca was an inland sea that offered enormous socio-economic opportunities for...
Local Effects of Imperial Craft Production in Highland and Coastal Peru (2015)
During the Late Intermediate Period (LIP, c. AD 1000-1400), longstanding traditions of specialized craft work and distribution of wealth goods on the north coast of Peru culminated under the rule of the Chimú Empire. In contrast, the same period in the highlands shows little evidence of specialization or large-scale access to wealth goods during the advent of the Inca Empire. This paper will compare the evidence for craft production and wealth consumption at sites located in valleys near the...
The Mineral Heart of Tawantinsuyo: Metal Production, Power and Religiosity in Qollasuyo (2016)
Expansion into the Andean highlands located to the south of Cuzco was a movement of capital importance in the consolidation of the Tawantinsuyu. This southward extension permitted the Incan annexation of important political and religious enclaves, like those located on the shores of Lake Titicaca. That region is identified by various colonial sources as the place of origin of the Incas themselves. However, beyond this, expansion of the empire to the south provided access to the gold, silver, and...
Multiscalar Analysis of an Early Rival to Inca Power (2016)
Systematic regional survey research identified Yunkaray as a town at the center of a hierarchical network of villages near Maras, approximately 20 km to the northwest of the Inca capital. A grid of more than 80 intensive collection units established Yunkaray to be larger than 20 hectares, almost all of which was occupied and abandoned during the Late Intermediate Period (c. AD 1000-1400). The scarcity of Inca imperial pottery in surface collections suggested that abandonment occurred during the...