Bauer’s book is an up-to-date consideration of the history of the Andean region surrounding the oldest ceremonial center of the Inca elite, now known to the world as the city of Cuzco. The 13 chapters cover an immense temporal range, from 10,000 BC to the 1530s, from the Archaic Period and the peopling of the region, through the Formative, Qotakalli, Wari, and Inca periods. In this synthesis, Bauer and his coauthors deal with climate change, settlement, and successive conquests. Toward the end of the book, he describes the Inca religion, specifically the Temple of the Sun, Inca mummification, and the worship of dead kings. His main aim is to present the evolution of social complexity, based on both archaeological data (including excavations and analyses of pottery, ice cores, and lake sediment cores) and published historical documents. Bauer has conducted archaeological investigations on all of these ancient societies for many years; his own major focus is the late pre-Hispanic period corresponding to the immediate antecedents of the Incas and the Inca Empire itself.There is a lot to like in this volume. The author moves beyond the “great man” paradigm of Inca history. In his overview he instead takes on a more processual approach. He cautiously uses his primary sources: questioning them at times and accepting them at others (regarding the traditional Inca genealogy, for example). He thoughtfully includes the historiography of certain issues, makes his assumptions explicit, and delineates areas needing further research.But, his (and he is not alone in this) too Western interpretation of the data clouds his conclusions. The use of European categories to describe a non-Western culture and civilization explains some problems with his interpretation. For instance, he identifies administrative centers and cities without defining the latter concept (pp. 61, 64) and limits the discussion to managerial perspectives, despite the fact that native society did not itself distinguish between the religious and the political (or the religious, political, social, and economic, for that matter). Thus, he misses the connection between the political and religious, despite chapters on Andean religion. Similarly, this mindset leads him and many of his peers to describe Sacsayhuaman as a “fortress,” at the same time that he acknowledges its role as a ceremonial center and as a storage site. Similarly, he overlooks the fact that provincial “administrative” centers (for example, Huanuco Viejo) certainly served ceremonial purposes, as well argued by the site’s excavator, Craig Morris of the American Museum of Natural History, in several important publications.European cultural filters also encourage him to accept that succession normally passed to the eldest son (p. 162), overlooking the fact that in some documented cases, brother succeeded brother, and that claimants were almost always held up to a criterion of aptitude, regardless of kinship relation. Similarly, he writes of imported ceramics (p. 92), glossing over the fact that the Inca often imported or moved about skilled workers, such as ceramicists and silversmiths, and thus not considering the possibility that some exotic goods could have been manufactured within the realm by foreign artisans. Finally, he privileges “trade” and markets (p. 115), when alternative means of exchange such as gifting were probably as, if not more, important. I also wonder if “verticality” played a role in provisioning (pp. 37, 41, 60, 66).Another problem affecting most of the field is the territorial interpretation of the Inca Empire. The author employs the traditional definition of suyu as a geopolitical district. Recent research, however, shows that suyus were demographic units, sometimes called “nations.” Note that the drawings of native chronicler and artist Guaman Poma show four distinct types of natives, as in the four nations that made up the Tawantinsuyu. The text mentions boundaries (p. 15) and frontiers (p. 187), and some of these are illustrated in maps. Such terminology and figures leave no room to consider evidence of scattered site occupations (ocupación salpicada), the multiple residences of the elite and commoners, seasonal and temporary transhumanance of “sedentary” populations, and the fact that private ownership of land (in the European sense) was not a precolonial native concept. His analyses ignore the demographic organization of empire and the fact that the Inca kings, by taking multiple wives, were trying to create a mega lineage: of one birth, under one law. He also uses the European definition of wealth as accumulated property in contrast to the native definition of wealth as the number of a person’s followers or adherents.Bauer and all those studying native societies need to divorce themselves from Western notions and categorization, so as to better understand the data from the native point of view. Despite my several criticisms, Bauer is to be congratulated on his interdisciplinary approach and detailed reporting of data. These constitute a major contribution to the archaeological literature on the Incas.
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Dec 1, 2015
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