Provisioning an Embattled Frontier: The Role of the Inka Settlement of Pulquina Arriba within an Imperial Defensive Network in the Southeastern Bolivian Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Navigating Imperialism: Negotiated Communities and Landscapes of the Inka Provinces" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In certain loosely incorporated territories of the Inka Empire, privileged non-Inka colonial populations were granted considerable autonomy and entrusted with the maintenance of local imperial settlements and infrastructure. Such was the case across much of the southeastern Bolivian Andes, in which peoples transposed from highland valleys to the west were installed as retainers and protectors of a network of fortresses, roads, and way stations that lay along a frontier region with significant connections to the neighboring tropical lowlands. By the final decades of the empire, hostilities between the Inkas and the Guaraní-Chiriguanos had transformed the region known as the *valles cruceños from a promising nexus of trade and exchange into an embattled, fortified conflict zone. In this presentation, I will (1) discuss the settlement structure and sociopolitical organization of the Pulquina Arriba valley during the Late Horizon, highlighting the local distribution and functions of Inka-style material culture and architecture; (2) compare salient features of the local imperial landscape to those observed elsewhere in the southeastern Bolivian Andes; and (3) consider the spatial patterning of Late Horizon settlements at a regional scale with respect to the changing motivations of the Inkas and their allies in this violently contested borderland.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Navigating Imperialism: Negotiated Communities and Landscapes of the Inka Provinces

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33415