Killing Time, Becoming Inca: Subject Creation and Monument Construction in Ancient Cuzco

Summary

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 precisely during these violent encounters that the places and people of the Andes became Inca—essential members of an Inca polity.

This paper challenges Inca and archaeological tales of domination by focusing on the negotiated sites and violent practices that created Inca subjects and constructed official histories in Inca and Spanish Cuzco. It presents recent archaeological and ethnohistorical data to trace the social life of the Inca deity and shrine at Huanacauri, a contested monument that first served to support Inca absolute authority and later came to embody a generalized Andean identity. Over the past six centuries, Cuzco’s people have built, revered, and demolished this monument, thereby collapsing Inca myth and history while giving rise to different understandings of the concept "Inca."

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeological Approaches to Subjectification

Keywords

Spatial Coverage