The Complex Politics of Political Complexity, an Andean Example

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In recent years, archaeologists have noted an oscillation between more pluralistic and more autocratic forms of governance in the same societies. This paper argues that our understanding of these transitions has been hampered by oversimplified models of political complexity. Decision-making today is often confusing: ad-hoc and routinized, despotic and democratic, top-down, bottom-up, and sideways. Shifts in process can lead to shifts in power, sometimes in unexpected ways. Through the rules of the game would be different, past politics were also complicated. Understanding shifts in earlier forms of governance therefore requires a better feel for the many institutions at play in a society and the ways that these institutions were interconnected. As a case study, I look at the rise of the Inca Empire in the central Andes in relationships to house societies that for centuries inhibited political centralization. Inca politics worked not by dismantling these houses but by incorporating them into a spatially and temporally based ranking system that maintained autonomy. Then, they pushed outwards to conquer millions. The resulting organization, in a word, was "despotic," but this easy labeling obscures the dynamic complexities of how an Inca emperor could arise from a long-standing system dead-set against anyone seizing power.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51063