Inka settlement planning

Abstract

prehistory and noted many of the problems that still confront us (Shimada 1990). I would like to extend his comments by focusing on the state of research on Inca culture, using two recent books as examples of the progress we are making in understanding this contact-period culture. Research on Inca culture has been grounded in the perspectives of several disciplines, most notably archaeology, ethnohistory, and the history of art and architecture. Such interdisciplinary examination is essential to the study of an expansionist culture that left abundant material remains, but no written record, and whose expansion was cut short by an encounter with a European culture that successfully enforced its own imperial agenda. The close ties between archaeology and ethnohistory are perhaps most graphically noted by the observation that the first archaeological reports that we have for several important Inca sites were written early in the 17th century by the Jesuit, Bernabe Cobo, and are incorporated in an account that constitutes one of our most important ethnohistorical sources on the Incas (see Rowe, in Cobo 1990: viii). Ethnohistorical documents--contact-period histories, early eyewitness accounts, and Colonial legal documentshave been fundamental to archaeologists' attempts to put flesh on old bones. Historians with the requisite paleographic skills and access to archival materials have transcribed and evaluated a number of important documents; among them are Maria Rostworowski (1962, 1977, 1988), Waldemar Espinoza Soriano (1974, 1987; Didz de San Miguel 1964), Horacio Villanueva Urteaga (1970), and Maria del Carmen Martin Rubio (Betanzos 1987). The work of these and other historians has made it