Inka state expansion and maintenance were underwritten by a wide range of revenues generated through the labor services of conquered populations. This paper uses sixteenth-century documents to investigate how labor service and production for the state functioned in one region of the central Andean highlands. The Inka decimal system divided regional populations into census units under a hierarchy of low-level officials. Data suggest that this was also a device for allocating quotas for labor service and production for which the entire population was responsible during their productive lives. Hamlet or village officials administered bulk staples, and officials in charge of one thousand households controlled specialized craft production and special resource acquisition. Production of wealth goods was more directly supervised at large state centers or at the central capital. One of the crucial factors facilitating the successful maintenance and expansion of archaic empires was the organization of economic mechanisms used to create the revenues which financed early states.' Preindustrial expansionist states used a variety of revenue raising methods: they taxed directly by requiring a proportion of production; they demanded payment of preestablished tribute levies; and they employed a system of corvee labor service. In the Inka empire, labor service is generally considered to be the critical means by which the state funded its activities. This contrasts with other early states, such as eighteenth-century African Dahomey and the sixteenth-century Aztec Triple Alliance, which depended much more heavily on tribute levies, on direct taxation of a proportion of production, and on the regulation of simple monetary systems. Although control of labor was the key element in the Inka economy, we still know surprisingly little about how labor taxes were implemented. A number of studies of labor service have analyzed what proportion of the population the state mobilized, the extent of labor obligations the state required, and how the state forcibly resettled populations to meet state manEthnohistory 34:1 (Winter I987). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooi4-I8oi/87/$I.50. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.128 on Tue, 06 Sep 2016 05:05:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms