A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock

Abstract

Any traveler to Cuzco has experienced the basic tour on the first day (when they should be resting and adjusting before boarding the train to Machu Picchu) that takes one above the city to the ruins of Saqsaywaman and then to other mysterious rock formations. The guides have wonderful tales to appeal to the curious soul expecting New Age energy vibrations and landing towers for aliens. Those tales are also infuriating to serious visitors and scholars, who often feel compelled to confront the guides and ask how they can be so disrespectful to their heritage as to imply that the Inka were incapable of building such amazing constructions and that there is nothing but mystery associated with their presence. Frequent visitors, especially research scholars immersed in the city and its extraordinary history, often do exactly as Carolyn Dean does and find new trails to explore the environs on those sleepy days when things are closed or a festival interrupts study. One can never get enough of the Inka. Over many years such treks inspired Dean to take a break from her highly respected art history research focusing on Corpus Christi processions and the visual culture of Cuzco and tackle the story of the rocks that are so much a part of Inka history and ubiquitous in the city, its buildings, throughout the landscape, and in the ruins that stretch for miles in every direction. She was also prompted to respond to those contemporary interpretations by taking a critical reflexive approach to the non-Andean descriptions that have revolved around the rocks since the time of Spanish colonization and have perpetuated themselves into the present.Dean has written a multidisciplinary book that spans the ages and places the rocks within their natural, historical, architectural, and ritual context, while never losing sight of the Andean message told over many generations that offers a valuable perspective on what the rocks meant to the people, and still do today. It is possible to present new understandings about the rocks and their role in Inka society, coupled with judicious accounts from the colonial period, as well as new methods to consider their significance beyond the merely representational interpretations that abound among those determined to find images in their surfaces — the easy Western thing to do. By “understanding stone within Inka cultural matrices” (p. 176), Dean says, a new approach emerges focused on Inka ways of interpretation that are as much about their relationship with nature as about ritual construction. Dean carefully considers the significance of the rocks’ aniconic, non-resemblant meanings, which seem to have produced difficulty in interpretation since the arrival of the Spanish. For over 500 years, people have tried to perform acts of conversion at all Inka sites to fit them into a particular comfort zone of understanding. As Dean has presented in her story, it does not have to be that way. That same curious traveler should be able to rise above the familiar and venture into this story with new eyes and let the rocks, long the silent witnesses to the past, speak in their own language and not be eclipsed by the cultural and visual language of the West.In the Andes, “the Inka framed, carved, sat on, built with, revered, fed, clothed, and talked to certain rocks” (p. 1). The book follows these categories and what they meant to the people of yesterday and many of today, who still have respectful and personal relationships with the rocks. Andean people saw rocks as animate, transmutable, powerful, and sentient. Inka rocks formed terraces, temples, houses, and marked ritual spaces. Natural rock outcrops were “integrated into walls and married the natural environment to the built environment and so symbolized the union between the earth and the Inka” (p. 21). Each chapter reflects upon these relationships and places them within a historical context based on substantial research and the author’s familiarity with Inka visual culture. Dean focuses on the veneration of the rocks and the nature of the sacred and the animate that assisted the Inka in retaining their own history and conceiving of the untouched natural environment as complementary to their built environment. Then the story is brought to the present, to the ruins that resulted from the destruction by the Spanish and still mark destruction conceptually and physically, in a continuation of Western arrogance and imposition.This book is not a travelogue or guidebook. It has as many notes as it does text, but it also has wide appeal beyond the community of Inka aficionados and scholars. The serious traveler would benefit from this revealing story, which gives voice to the silent stones that are encountered at every crossroads, near and far into the distance of the mountains.