The Domestic Economy, Households, and Imperial Transformation

Abstract

In 1532, when the Spanish conquistadores ascended the Peruvian Andes from coastal Tumbes, they entered a part of the world that seemed utterly foreign to them. Although many of the venturers had participated in the conquest of Mexico, the Andean environment, cultures, languages, and social formations presented a marvelous new set of curiosities and, more to the point, untold wealth and souls to save. The more perceptive Spaniards soon began to grasp that the land that they had invaded had been undergoing profound changes, as the lnkas of Peru’s southern highlands had created the largest empire in the prehistoric Americas in the preceding century. It was not clear at the time, however, how much of what the Europeans encountered was a product of long-established tradition and how much was radically new. Almost five centuries later, explaining the development of indigenous social and economic formations and the impacts of the lnka conquest remains a challenging topic of research. This volume addresses that issue by studying continuity and change in the domestic economy of one Andean society—the Xauxa populace of the Upper Mantaro Valley, in the central Peruvian highlands. Our goal is to assess the nature of economics at the household level, as the region’s populace shifted from a series of independent polities to part of an imperial state. We know that during the first period we investigate (ca. A.D. 1300–1450), the Xauxa were becoming increasingly complex politically and economically, largely as a result of local interactions. In the second period (A.D. 1450–1533), the Xauxa and their neighbors were forcibly incorporated into the Inka empire. As a consequence, political power became markedly more centralized and the political economy more extractive. In analyzing both the pre-Inka and imperial situations, the authors focus on the internal dynamics and the external links of production, distribution, and consumption. Although the book’s orientation toward the domestic world of these people is an economic, material view of daily life, we hope to gain a broader cultural perspective by weaving together many cultural strands arising from diverse behaviors. We also hope to advance new perspectives on the study of the household and the domestic economy in archaeology. We chose to focus on this subset of society because it is the smallest social unit that we can see