Comparative Analysis of Imperial Inca Pottery from Ecuador using INAA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Alfareros deste Inga: Pottery Production, Distribution and Exchange in the Tawantinsuyu" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

An enduring question in Inca archaeology concerns the issue of imperial pottery production. Inca ceramics, which are found across an enormous expanse of Andean South America, are known for their high degree of uniformity in vessel form, proportionality, and embellishment. How did the Inca manage the production of their signature style and achieve the level of standardization that they did? Early thinking assumed that imperial pottery was mass-produced in highly controlled workshops in the capital city of Cuzco and exported from there to points around the Empire. Subsequent studies at provincial Inca sites hinted that state pottery production and distribution was a more regionalized affair. Recent analyses of paste types and clay sources from various sectors now confirm that Inca pottery production was largely de-centralized and occurred at any number of locales throughout the Empire. The present study contributes to this picture by reporting on the compositional analysis of Inca ceramics from several key Late Horizon sites in Ecuador. Our findings indicate that imperial style wares in the northern Andes were manufactured locally in different regions. Further, within each region, these wares were produced in multiple paste recipes, implying a lack of centralized control of the manufacturing process.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Alfareros deste Inga: Pottery Production, Distribution and Exchange in the Tawantinsuyu

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24143