Materializing Inka-Colla Interaction in the Colonial Viceroyalty of Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper engages as its central problematic a recurrent iconographic motif—identified by scholars as depicting a ritualized drinking encounter between the Sapa Inka and his Colla (an ethnic polity of the Late Intermediate Period Lake Titicaca basin) counterpart—painted on keros (Andean ceremonial drinking vessels) produced in the colonial Viceroyalty of Peru during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This depiction of a peaceful interaction between the Inka sovereign and an evidently analogously powerful Colla monarch contrasts with historical accounts of Inka military conquests of a resistant altiplano; and archaeological evidence suggesting that the political landscape of the late pre-Inka Collao was characterized by fragmentation rather than by unification under a Colla state. Integrating iconographic analysis, ethnohistorical data from sixteenth and seventeenth century crónicos and visitas, and a synthesis of previous archaeological data from the historic Colla heartland, this paper interrogates the implications of such a depiction of Inka-Colla interaction in the early to mid-colonial Andes. Ultimately, it proposes that the iconographic motif served a performative function, alternately (and perhaps simultaneously) insisting upon the equivalence of the historic Colla señoríos to the Inka in terms of sociopolitical sophistication complexity and asserting the essential benevolence of Inka rule and imperial expansion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40226.0