Navigating Cusco: Pathways to History and Landscapes of Social Conflict in the Inca Imperial Capital

Summary

In creating Cusco, the Incas assembled a landscape of monuments and pathways that embodied a mythic vision of the past. But how did Cusco’s landscape, which was invested with pre-Inca meanings and memories, become Inca? In this paper, I present archaeological and ethnohistorical data from Cusco to explore how Cusco’s indigenous people constructed their past under Inca and early Spanish rule. I examine how pathways and landscapes in Cusco—the processions of the Capac Raymi and Situa ceremonies, the environs of the Inca mountain-deity Huanacauri, and the routes used to avoid or resist early Spanish governance—engendered multiple perspectives of Cusco’s past. My principal argument is that the indigenous inhabitants of Cusco both negotiated and bolstered their social positions when they walked the city’s pathways and participated in rituals that recalled key social conflicts with Incas or Spanish. In tracing these pathways, I move beyond archaeological accounts of “place” that focus only on bounded sites, to instead examine how movement manifests social memory. I also challenge top-down archaeological accounts of Inka origins and imperial history to explore what I term “cultures of articulation”—the ways that indigenous agendas, sites, and memories may obstruct or become entangled with a state’s pretensions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Powerful Places in the Ancient Andes

Keywords

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