Inka Colonialism without Inkas: Uncovering the Role of Lowland-Affiliated Populations in the Consolidation of the Eastern Andean Frontier

Summary

As the Inkas expanded their imperial hegemony over the valleys of the eastern Andes, their armies fought and then forged political and military alliances with the various cultural groups comprising the Charkas confederacy. While the Spanish chronicles and local ethnohistoric sources attest to these events and to the important role the local indigenous populations played in Inka colonization efforts along the eastern imperial frontier, they are all curiously silent on another important population which inhabited the eastern Andean valleys into the Inka period. Abundant archaeological evidence from the Inka site of Pulquina Arriba and surrounding settlements demonstrates that the earliest settlers of this region had arrived not from the altiplano, but instead from the eastern tropical lowlands. Further, instead of being administered by Inka elites, Pulquina Arriba seems to have been inhabited by a combination of Charkas- and lowland-affiliated peoples. As such, this seems to represent a case in which a historically unacknowledged indigenous population was nevertheless critical to the success of imperial activities and administration in a critical frontier region. At least within the loosely incorporated easternmost Andes, a strategy of "Inka colonialism without Inkas" seems to have represented a viable means of imperial expansion and colonization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22212