Indigenous Stories of the Inka Empire: Local Experiences of Ancient Imperialism

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Indigenous Stories of the Inka Empire: Local Experiences of Ancient Imperialism" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The interdisciplinary study of the Inka Empire has a long history. However, this scholarship is heavily informed by a robust body of ethnohistoric research that relies on Spanish-era documents mediated through Inka-centric narratives of expansion that sought to portray the empire as a civilizatory mission that brought order and progress to previously chaotic lands. Currently, most studies that focus on provincial Inka archaeology tend to cast conquered societies as reactive to Inka policies rather than active agents with specific agendas. Furthermore, recent developments in historical archaeology show that local identities and practices outlived the Inka Empire. As such, in this session, we ask presenters to “flip the script” by focusing on how local communities resisted, accepted, and/or creatively appropriated “empire” into their historical trajectories. Specifically, presenters will focus on how local people actively engaged (or actively disengaged) with Inka imperial ideology, policies, and materials, rather than to detail how imperial demands changed local practice. By analyzing archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data from across the Andes, this session aims to complement and expand provincial scholarship by asking how non-Inka Andean communities experienced, performed, portrayed, and understood Inka expansion.