Identity and Territory in the Sacred Valley During Inka State Formation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Advances in Cusco Archaeology: From the Formative to the Late Horizon" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Late Intermediate Period (LIP, ca. 1000–1400 CE) was a time of accelerated sociopolitical change. In the Cusco region, culturally diverse populations engaged in dynamic interaction networks and were implicated in macro-level processes of political centralization. Over recent decades, scholars have reframed the dominant top-down model of Inka state formation and territorial consolidation to account for the agency of local and non-elite actors. This paper builds on these advances by evaluating community aggregation, geopolitics, and strategies of survivance among autochthonous populations in the Sacred Valley. How did groups embrace or reject emergent practices of aggrandizement? And how did local geopolitics condition or hinder the Inkas’ eventual efforts at establishing hegemony in the imperial heartland? To address these questions, this paper compares the development of 11 late pre-contact villages between the towns of Yanahuara and Pisac in the Sacred Valley. Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, I map out regional patterns in production and subsistence practices to discuss social boundaries, land claims, and collective identity. Specifically, variation in construction technology, placemaking, and the distribution of material culture provide a starting point for analyzing relationships between villages. Contemporary oral traditions offer complementary insight into the maintenance and contestation of territorial boundaries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• New Advances in Cusco Archaeology: From the Formative to the Late Horizon

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50626