Abstract
Societies of the late prehispanic Andes—the Inkas principal among them—have long figured as “exceptions to the rule” in social evolutionary schemata, in large measure because they seemingly lacked key technological hallmarks of complex societies found in other world regions, despite their observed large scale and complex, hierarchical political and economic formations. Such presumed absences are encoded in the Seshat Global History Databank, a large global comparative diachronic database recording many dimensions of human societies. Analyses derived from the current version of the Seshat database necessarily reproduce these supposed absences, as they inhere in its data ontology, structure, and registry. Nonetheless, patterns observed in the dataset provide a means for identifying processes acting on and through Andean peoples and the complex political formations they elaborated. Specifically, this paper evaluates a proposed information processing threshold model of social evolution, which suggests that social dynamics are driven first by processes related to social scale, and then by a phase of dynamics in which further scalar increases are only possible through innovations in information processing. The Andean region appears to violate this model because the Seshat database records writing and other information processing technologies as absent in the case of the Inka empire. The author argues that the dynamics of the Andean region are actually consistent with the information threshold model, but the data as constituted do not capture the relevant variables. The Inkas elaborated sophisticated information processing on par with counterparts in other world regions, but through radically distinct forms and pathways, including the Andean khipu (knotted string registries), decimal administration, and a colossal logistical and administrative infrastructural apparatus. This interwoven bundle of technologies and institutions constituted an information revolution that surpassed the information threshold and enabled explosive Inka imperial expansion, even as it produced certain vulnerabilities and fragile sovereignty.
Highlights
The Inkas and their ancestors in the Andean region of South America have long vexed post-Enlightenment western sensibilities and theories concerning the features and dynamics of complex societies
The distinctive cultural forms, practices, and trajectories of the peoples of the Andes present challenges to any systematic comparative project attempting to infer global trends in past social dynamics. These challenges are in evidence in the Seshat Global History Databank, a massive comparative database that encodes over 1500 variables on 414 societies from 35 world regions (Natural Geographic Areas, hereafter NGAs) over the last 10 000 years[1]
My focus here is dual, the first a narrower consideration of the categories and coding in the Seshat database as they relate to a number of features in Andean societies, and the second a broader consideration of the framing of social evolution and its often teleological emphasis on variables accounting for increasing hierarchization and centralization, rather than a more holistic approach to consider factors that might account for observed oscillations in centralization and hierarchy through time
Summary
The Inkas and their ancestors in the Andean region of South America have long vexed post-Enlightenment western sensibilities and theories concerning the features and dynamics of complex societies. The data categories themselves encode a normative hierarchy, as the “written records” variable here encodes phonographic notation, “script” here records modes for encoding lexigraphic signs, while functionally analogous, though radically distinct information technologies as developed in the Americas are not presented as possibilities for achievement in information processing in the Old World Such biased asymmetries could be identified and mitigated throughout the database, admitting to a greater global sociotechnical diversity than is currently encoded in it. My focus here is dual, the first a narrower consideration of the categories and coding in the Seshat database as they relate to a number of features in Andean societies, and the second a broader consideration of the framing of social evolution and its often teleological emphasis on variables accounting for increasing hierarchization and centralization, rather than a more holistic approach to consider factors that might account for observed oscillations in centralization and hierarchy through time. Even as I argue that the Inka did surpass scalar and information thresholds, contra the Seshat dataset as currently conceived and registered, I seek to balance this perspective with an eye to the vulnerabilities and fragilities of their sovereignty[14]
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