The Emergence of Complex Society in the Titicaca Basin: The View from the North

Abstract

The Titicaca Basin straddles the modern countries of Peru and Bolivia and represents one of the great areas of prehistoric cultural evolution on the globe. While it is common to view the Andes as a culturally-unified whole, the reality is that there were three very distinct cultural, geographical, and linguistic regions in the Andes in the 16th century where these state societies developed (Figures 9.1, 9.2). These regions corresponded to the general areas of Wari, Moche, and Tiwanaku state expansion in the late Early Intermediate Period and Middle Horizon where proto-Quechua, Mochic, and Jaqi languages dominated respectively (Browman 1994; Mannheim 1991; Stanish 2001). In short, the Titicaca Basin, where Jaqi or proto-Aymara was dominant and was most likely the language of the Tiwanaku state (see Janusek 2004 for a fuller discussion), represents one of the great areas of first-generation state development in world. In areas where first-generation states developed without much influence from neighboring areas, such as the Titicaca Basin, we can study the processes by which complex society develops. The term “complex society” is of course controversial. We reject totalizing notions of cultural evolution and instead see the evolution of complex society as confined to political and economic organization. Cultural complexity is defined as a process of increasing heterogeneity in economic and political organization with craft specialization, proliferation of political and social statuses, creation of economies of scale and so forth as the key indices of complexity. Evolution is likewise not stepwise nor unidirectional. Political and economic organizations become increasingly more heterogeneous as well as becoming more homogenous with some frequency (see Marcus 1992 for a discussion of cycling complex societies). It is critical to note that other aspects of human culture do not evolve in this way. The evolution of complex society can therefore be measured by the increase or decrease in the differentiation and heterogeneity of political and economic lifeways (Plourde 2005; Stanish 2004). In this paper we examine this critical question in anthropological archaeology— the emergence of the first politically and economically complex societies—with information from the Titicaca Basin. We will show that while our knowledge of this