South American Archaeology: Late Horizon

LATE HORIZON: INCA EMPIRE, 1430s-1532;
REST OF CONTINENT

Lesson objectives: understand the foundations of Iatest, largest empire and statecraft, and where it did not reach on the continent.

What are the dates and history of the Inca empire? Most texts give 1470 (or 1438) to 1532 (when Pizarro arrives). There have been lots of Inca studies lately (e.g., Bauer 1992; D'Altroy 1992, 2002; Hyslop 1990; Isbell 1997; Malpass 1993; Rostworowski and Morris 1999, Raffino and Stehberg 1999), possibly because violence in Peru has prevented archaeological fieldwork so people are staying in the U.S. and working more with existing data, but also because people realize we need syntheses and interpretations. Of course, again, these are English sources, with all the attendant biases. Emphases lately have been upon the effects of the Inca upon local societies, and there is work on specific items such as their road and storage systems, settlement planning and frontier strategy, metalwork, gender issues, and government bureaucracy and statecraft. The Inca are enormously important to study by political scientists, international specialists, and others who examine how governments take charge and run efficiently, because they are an example (probably not the first on the continent) of a totally different, totally foreign form of socialist state from any we know of in today's world. They are one of the few known examples of conquest and empire effected entirely on foot, with only small beasts of burden that did not carry people, and dominating in a short time a huge expanse of extreme mountain and desert and other environments.

Until the middle 20 th century, most of the discussion of Inca was based on history, on Spanish accounts, with dates taken literally. Now we have a rich archaeological record specifically being used to examine the veracity of that history and those calendrical dates, as well as to fill it out far beyond its limited confines. Hence Moseley's book and many others now begin with an examination of Inca traditions, so the student will see what they are and be able to recognize evidence of them far earlier in the archaeological record.

Excavations at the Inca capital, Cuzco (or Qusqu or Cusco), allowed John Rowe to establish a chronology based on ceramics, with the earliest Killke ceramics emerging by A.D. 100 and the consolidation of the Inca state by 1400. There may have been effects (which we do not yet know) of a 60-year drought around 1250-1310, and a general medieval warm period around 1000-1400, during which temperatures were about 2 degrees higher. The latest empire stretched from central Chile to Colombia (see maps in texts). A previously insignificant chiefdom, a kin group of not too many thousand people, based in the Cuzco basin became an empire in 100 years, ruling territory 3500 miles long, with 12 million people. This was 1000 km (over 600 miles) longer in extent than Rome at its height. There were temples covered in gold, expanded maritime trade over long distances, and expansion of terracing to allow agriculture on the most precipitous slopes. It was all run not by a welfare state but a communal political system curiously organized into a centralized empire.

Recount the history of the Inca. The Spanish wrote what was told to them by native informants about the 13 kings in the Inca dynasty, as well as several after the Spanish arrived and began manipulating things. There are of course problems with taking the history literally, when everyone has a political orientation. The Inca are saying everyone else before them and conquered by them is barbarian, and the Spaniards were unfamiliar with the Inca concepts of cyclical time. Most of the conquistadores were illiterates, as well! Rowe thought the first 4 kings were myths, the next 3 were undated, and the last 6 recorded by Cabello de Balboa were accepted as real. We can begin in the time of conflicting city states and chiefdoms. The Inca were farmers with warlike chiefs who began a program of conquest down the Urubamba Valley. Read carefully the fascinating history and names of the important figures and emergence of hereditary chiefs and problems with leadership. With just a few highlights of the story, we begin with Viracocha, the creator deity , making the sun emerge from Lake Titicaca to fashion of clay the different animals and peoples. On these models Viracocha painted clothing and features distinguishing them as ethnic groups and instructed them in languages and customs. The Inca royal family's founder, Manco Capac , with his 3 brothers and 4 sisters, either came out Lake Titicaca or emerged from a sacred cave and set out on a journey, with many adventures, during which the other siblings are lost in various colorful ways, except for his sister/wife Mama Oqlyo, with whom he settles at Coricancha/Cuzco (driving out the previous residents!). They had a family then turned to stone and became the most sacred huaca. And yes, royal incest (which we also see in Egypt, other places in the world), was apparently no problem and certainly helped to consolidate wealth and power. Because we note that later, inheritance becomes a big problem in keeping the empire together in the face of invasion by outsiders.

Cuzco stayed a rather simple village through 8 successive leaders, then things started happening when the warlike Chanca people who came from the west attacked in 1438, and the old king Viracocha (or Wiracocha) Inca and his heir Inca Urcon retreated to a fortress. They had already been moving in on neighbors in what Bruhns (p.331) labels the typical pushing and shoving of Andean politics that had earlier probably led to formation of the Wari state. Another son of Viracocha Inca, a secondary prince named Kusi Yupanqui , along with his generals and others, stayed to defend Cuzco. They were unexpectedly successful, and Yupanqui had religious visions and declared himself the new heir. In reality he was a usurper, setting an interesting precedent. As king he took the name Pachacuti (or Pacha Kutiq; Earthshaker or Earthquake) and became (or already was) a great military strategist (worthy of study in those military classes that compare battle strategy in ancient Rome and other past successful cultures ö but they always ignore indigenous New World folks!).

Pachacuti probably also rewrote history, justifying and legitimizing his rule, setting up the empire as the land of the 4 quarters, Tawantinsuyu (Tahuantinsuyu ö see maps of extent and divisions). At this time we see a sudden change in Inca fortunes, as he directed military expansion, subjugating the Lupaka, Colla, and other kingdoms around Lake Titicaca that were just beginning to grow again after the Tiwanaku crash. He developed a huge power base then left further conquest to his son Topa Inca while he returned to Cuzco and apparently was equally successful at organizing the institutions and practices of empire management. He developed the taxation system, expanded roads and storage facilities, and elevated the religious cult of the sun god Inti. He apparently tried to fix weaknesses in the inheritance system originating in the ancestral social organization, based on a non-hereditary village headman. With a double descent inheritance and no primogeniture, a leader chose his heir from among his multiple sons of his polygynous marriage (in which his sister was the coya or principal wife). So many contested for the position of heir. Furthermore, a ruler did not let a little thing like death remove his wealth and estate, which was maintained by his family in the service of his sacred mummy. But this meant that each new ruler had to start over and acquire enough wealth and property to keep up his own cult and to give to followers supporting him. The inheritance conflicts were never resolved, and indeed the continual conquest may have resulted from new leaders trying to acquire their own power base, since they did not have access to that of their predecessors. We think also that some of Pachacuti's big ideas, including maintaining royal estates for the cults of mummified past rulers, forced relocation of conquered peoples, and the vast taxation and warehousing systems, may have originally come from subjugated peoples, especially the kingdom of Chimor.

Pachacuti redid Cuzco as an impressive capital, with Coricancha , the house of the sun, as the main temple, partially covered in gold. Meanwhile, in 1463, Topa Inca, the ãAlexander the Greatœ of the Andes, pushed the empire north to Quito. One of his generals, Capac Ypanqui, who was also a brother of Pachacuti, was sent north to explore with a bunch of the recently conquered Chanca troops and others, and lost the Chanca when they deserted. The general was embarrassed and contradicted orders to quit and drove north to attack the Cajamarca state, 500 miles from Cuzco, who were allies of the coastal Chimu. General Capac left a garrison in Cajamarca and returned to Cuzco, where he was executed for disobeying orders and probably also for being a threat to the emperor, both for his popularity and for his possible claim to the throne. Not wanting to leave the garrison stranded meanwhile, Topa Inca took his army north and conquered the intervening region, rescued the garrison, pushed north and then south and conquered the rich kingdom of Chimor by 1470. Subjugating this powerful earlier empire establish the Inca as the powerful empire. The Chan Chan workshops and storehouses were looted, the gold and silver melted down for Inca statues and gold ribbon to surround Coricancha. The Chimu king Minchançaman and his workers (especially goldsmiths) were taken to Cuzco and the king's son set up as a puppet ruler. Bruhns mentions (p.333) that most of the gold and treasure stolen from Cuzco by Pizarro had likely been taken by the Inca from Chan Chan some 90 years earlier.

The next leader, Topa Inca's son Huayna (Wayna) Capac pushed farther north to southern Colombia and east to northeastern Peru, to the selva/monta Z a, the heavily forested eastern slopes of the Andes. This may have been in response to cooler climates and environmental stress, as agricultural production clearly dropped at this time. It may have been the reason for more and more terracing along higher slopes. Wayna Capac was the last prehistoric emperor, from 1493-1528 in our time system. During his reign most of Tahuantinsuyu was controlled by the estates of his predecessor, so their may have been sociopolitical stress also influencing his expansions. He was marching north of Quito and died suddenly in 1526 ö of smallpox or measles, European epidemics. His quickly designated heir also died of the plague too, and two other sons then fought for the throne in the midst of the invading Spaniards. We return to the historical story in the next segment, after first exploring the Inca's prehistoric accomplishments.

Describe the workings of Inca statecraft . They were indeed organizational geniuses, but remember it followed centuries, millennia of previous states doing often similar things. Maybe the Inca were not creative but followed directions well? They integrated hundreds of very diverse ethnic groups, states, chiefdoms, and tribal peoples into empire (compare the British empire, upon which the sun never set). They called these segments se Z oríos and parcialidades. Moseley notes how the ethnic separations in rugged mountain lands made conquest easy but consolidation difficult. They did have 40,000 km ( 25,000 miles) of roads , administrative storage centers and garrisons, and they set it up amazingly quickly. Messengers called chasquis conveyed information by the relay system, exchanging one runner for the next at waystations called tambos , which were about 20 km (12 miles) apart and often built at springs. It took only 3 days for a message to go from Cuzco to Lima, and only 5 from Cuzco to Quito (look at these distances on map). The Inca imposed the state language (their own) called Quechua , still the most widely known native tongue in South America.

How did the population resettlement system work? Communities called mitamacs from loyal provinces were resettled in hostile territory and vice versa. Children of local rulers were brought to Cuzco (just like in ancient Rome) for education to prepare them to take over their own lands in the name of the Inca. The important centers of previous cultures were taken over, and sites in ruins, such as Pikillacta of the Wari, Tiwanaku, and Pachacamac, became royal Inca pilgrimage centers (which Inca only much later admitted to the Spanish that they had taken away from other peoples). The economy had huge elements of reciprocity, with obligations of groups to the state and of nobles to the people. Taxes and tribute were not in money but paid by the community as a group, in labor and goods. The community, not individuals, owned the land. Goods produced by the labor of men and women were stored in vast warehouses. In addition men had to do their labor tax, the mit'a, and textiles made by both women and men at home were also paid as taxes. The government gave them the fiber, and men often made rope while women wove elaborate cloths. All women wove, even queens. By the time of the last great emperor, Huayna Capac, the boundary lines of Tawantinsuyu were traced from downtown in the capital at Cuzco to extend out and encompass a huge amount of territory. The largest was the south quarter (they were not equal quarters), encompassing most of the old Tiwanaku empire. The eastern quarter was called Antisuyu, west, Cuntisuyu, north, Chinchasuyu. This land of empire included the desert, Andes, tropical forest to the Amazon.

Describe the Inca government system . The empire had 80 provinces, usually correlated with conquered polities, organized into decimal units of households from 10 to 10,000 each with it own leader in hierarchical fashion. The emperor, was divine, descended from Inti the sun god, and worshiped at Coricancha, the most sacred temple. This divine ruler was called the Sapa (highest) Inca, and his ruling class comprised all the nobles related to him by blood or else by being born to ethnic groups in the Cuzco valley that all spoke Quechua and went back the farthest together with the Inca group ö just like the new president bringing into the Whitehouse all the folks he trusts from his past and his family origins. The ruling class, apus , were close relatives each in charge of one of the 4 quarters. Below them were governors of provincial capitals, then the karakas or curakas, who were the hereditary local rulers in charge of from 100 to 10,000 people. Sometimes karakas could be women, and women rulers, with female secondary assistants, were more common on the north coast of Peru (Rostworowski and Morris 1999:811-812) Thousands of karakas were needed for the bureaucracy. Karakas appointed camayocs (foremen) over some 10 to 50 citizens, to collect taxes. Karakas governed the allyus , which were patrilineal (and matrilineal) corporate kin groups that held the land. The allyu still functions in traditional native communities, doing water management and cooperative labor, exchanging labor and goods. Each allyu had founding ancestors and lineages divided into moieties (that dual division that seems to be so ancient) which controlled territory and water rights. Work was subdivided into task modules, and repayment carefully calculated in amounts of food, textiles, and the like. All this was controlled communally, though all were not equals in inheritance. There were religious and civil bureaucrats within each moiety, and people rotated in these offices within a hierarchy of rotating offices. Anthropologists sometimes call this a cargo system . Positions were probably held by women too prehistorically, though not today after Europeanization and different kinds of sexist systems are in place.

Two karakas, one from each moiety, a principal and a segundo (some of whom were female), were mediators, managers of the allyu's resources, and so were fed by the community. They therefore had to be generous, especially with maize beer, chicha, for ceremonies and ritual intoxication. Kurakas became more elite with the Inca rulership. Ten allyus in Cuzco ruled and maybe the Inca ruler list in reality compressed common ancestors and gave the allyu its identity. Each had special relics which had power ö stones, corpses, etc. The conquered territory of the Inca was divided into 3 parts, those for the state, the temple, and some for use by individuals. Peasants worked the land and agricultural and pastoral produce was stored in huge warehouses for the state. Commoners paid the mit'a, the labor tax, being drafted into the army or to work on public constructions or in the mines. People could have their own individual plots of land too.

Describe the capital at Cuzco. At an altitude of 3400 meters (11,000 feet or over 2 miles high!), Cuzco had been a small village until Pachacuti expanded it possibly to form the shape of a feline, with the head at Sacsayhuaman , a huge fortress, religious and storage complex, and state center. This site has 3 tiers of zigzag walls, circular towers, big storage buildings, religious buildings. Most of it was removed by the Spanish to build their own city, but digs are still going on to learn more of it. Four of 7 temple buildings are now restored. The Spanish church on top obliterated a lot, but an earthquake pushed some out again. There were finely cut stone drains suggesting ritual manipulation of water. Only royalty could go into this place, said Garcilaso de la Vega (El Inca). The site supposedly took 30,000 workers several generations to build. The head temple at Coricancha, in the feline's tail, was like St. Peter's in Rome, the seat of wealth in the name of religion. It was encircled with sheets of gold to shine in the sun, to whom it was dedicated. Other areas were dedicated to the moon, thunder, rainbows, other deities. The gold was stripped in 1533 as part of the ransom for the last emperor, Atahualpa, held prisoner by the head conquistador Pizarro. Inside the temple, hidden from the Spanish, was a gold, bejeweled disc image of the sun and other images of deities of the moon, thunder, the sky, the earth, the sea. This treasure was never found, though some Spaniards apparently bragged about gambling it away in Cajamarca. Cieza de León, the chronicler, said Coricancha had a garden in which the soil was gold, the cornstalks were gold, the sheep (llamas) and lambs and shepherds were all of gold, and tubs of gold, silver, emeralds, beautiful pots, cups, and goblets were of gold. All were sacred objects, huacas, stored inside after the Inca obtained them from conquered peoples, possibly promoting a symbolic integration of empire.

Coricancha was the center of religious power from which the 4 quarters, the suyus, extended. There were 42 imaginary lines called ceques or zeques, which were sacred paths, as recorded by the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo in 1653. These paths were associated with 328 shrines and they marked the 4 quarters and subdivided them into smaller units. They were not radiating lines but zigzags from shrine to shrine. Each shrine was a constructed or natural place such as a canal, fountain, royal house, cave, spring, important rock. Stone pillars were set up also to track the heavens and sight survey points for construction. The 328 shrines or stations reflected the days in the 12 lunar months. Ceques were important for the water and calendrical systems and the sacred symbolism of the religion. They defined the responsibilities and daily schedules of the peoples grouped into the 4 quarters. Central Cuzco had 400 buildings in a grid bordered by canals, and a population of 20,000, with some 125,000 more on the outskirts. The city was divided into subsectors according to royal allyus or kin groups. Only royalty could hang out in the sacred areas of temple and palace. There were sectors of the city for groups from other geographic areas, set in the point of the city layout corresponding to the location of their home area. The great plaza of Cuzco, called Huacaypata, contained the ushnu or usnu, the Sapa Inca's platform to speak to the people. A version of the usnu was in all provincial capitals for local lords to do the same. Other buildings in the city included acllahuasi, the house of the mamacuna or chosen women who wove fine clothes and made chicha for the sun; a wall of this building is still standing. Cuzco became a big pilgrimage center.

How did Inca religion work within the bureaucracy? Ancestor veneration was extremely important, and there was no sharp division between the living and the dead. After all there had been this tradition of mummification for some 6000 years. Inca burials were sometimes in caves, but imperial folks were dressed and kept in their houses and treated as if they were still alive, being consulted in ceremonies, given offerings, and paraded around for rituals. These mummies were quasi-alive, but most were burned by the horrified Spaniards. the religion was animistic , including the dynamic landscape of the spirits. There was worship of Pacha Mama , the mother earth, which continues today as people offer coca leaves, chicha, and prayer. There was strong worship of mountains and of water, sacred springs. They watched the Milky Way to predict water cycles and know when to plant, and divided the sky into 4 quarters like the land.

Truly stupefying amounts of alcohol were consumed ritually (not for casual entertainment!). This also horrified the Spaniards, as did other religious rituals. For example, child sacrifice was practiced in elaborate rituals linking mountains, shrines, and temples. Kids of ages 6-10 were obtained from the provinces and very honored. Boys and girls were symbolically married them, sent them back home where they were sacrificed on the ushnu or taken to the mountaintops or to other sacred places such as the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, Pachacamac on the coast, La Plata Island in southern Ecuador. The most famous of these are known from high altitude kid burials, in which everything is preserved because it is frozen ö textiles, offerings, hair, featherwork, gold, silver, skin, entire bodies. Physical anthropology done on the children tells us they were given chicha to get drunk (they often vomited on their clothes) and then maybe bashed in the head or otherwise sacrificed. Often they are found by climbers with no anthropological training, but recently there has been better work done. There was lots of general female sacrifice too; Bruhns mentions a dwarf woman at Cuenca with miniature pots, gold and silver figurines of humans and llamas. The sacrifices were for the well-being of the Sapa Inca and the empire.

Whether sacrifices or regular burials, frozen and dried Inca mummies gain enormous publicity because they can tell us so much. There is less concern in Peru than in the U.S. for disrespect to native peoples by unwrapping mummies and examining bodies . In fact, there are millions more native Americans in South American countries than in the U.S., where so few are left, but there is no equivalent of NAGPRA (the U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), or laws requiring descendants of the humans whose remains are excavated to have any say in how they are treated (but of course this is an important part of archaeological ethics, whether it is the law or not). In a sense, all the people are seen as descendants, and most want to learn of the past. Perhaps also mummies are so common that it is no big deal. A result is the bounty of popular articles about especially high-altitude frozen Inca mummies, with gorgeous illustrations of accompanying artifacts in their bundles. There has been lots of publicity about/by Johan Reinhard, declared a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, a climber and archaeologist, most famous for the discovery of the child sacrifice mummies on the Peruvian peak of Ampato that made such headlines in the 90s (Reinhard 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999; Gorman 1995). It is good drama to read of the explorers braving the cold, freezing streams, altitude sickness, to bring back real bodies with gold and silver figurines, feather headdresses, wrapped in exquisite textiles. One article shows present-day Cuzco Indian festivals for the mountain deities (Reinhard 1992). Another area with recent mummies is Chachapoyas, on the rough eastern jungle slopes of the Andes. Here there is great drama too as the mausoleums and sarcophagi were built on sheer cliffs (Lerche 2000, Von Hagen and Guillén 1998). There are always new movies and tv specials on such mummies as well.

Inca dealings with death indicate they saw it as ever-present (unlike in our society where we really don't like to talk about it much). Of course we can see the antecedents of all this in previous prehistoric cultures. Death is portrayed as a skeleton, playing musical instruments or having sex on Moche pots. People were sacrificed at the death of the emperor, his body was mummified and kept in a palace to be honored by his descendants and used as an oracle and brought out for public ceremonies (we can see this type of thing among many New World cultures). The Inca ruler himself, as we noted, personified one of the biggest problems for the empire, since he kept everything after death and the position of his heir was not only contested, but also required the winner to start all over again acquiring land, resources, and power. The religious purpose of the allyu was to maintain the ancestors; remember the first Inca Manco Capac was a stone. Probably many of these ideas came from Chimor, Huari, and other previous civilizations. The Sapa Inca had an interesting life. He owned lots of royal estates and country palaces outside the city, of which one was the famous Machu Picchu, somehow not destroyed by the Spanish and rapidly becoming disneyfied as a tourist center in the mountains of Peru. The Sapa Inca enjoyed the benefits of sumptuary laws that allowed only him to wear certain rich clothing. Deeds of the Sapa Incas were recorded by the Spanish from native oral histories which may have been partially constructed by the original characters. For example, Pachacuti talked to the creator Viracocha, who revealed things to him. All this interpretation of the ideological system provides great material for debates among archaeologists of different theoretical perspectives. Some might say that ideology was the driving force behind Inca expansion and empire management, while others (e.g., D'Altroy 1992) suggest a materialist, processual approach that attributes greater importance to economic systems and sees ideology's role as legitimizing the state.

Describe Inca material culture. There is so much impressive architecture and spectacular stuff that it is hard to see the everyday lifeways. Plus, not as much is preserved in the highlands. But frozen and dried things, especially make this the best-preserved and elaborate of native American civilizations. Artifacts were very distinctive in style and very standardized, and therefore easy to recognize, even in local indigenous cultures ö which is of course the way the Inca wanted it. They coopted shrines and oracles already being used, such as Pachacamac, where the god spoke through wooden statues, and tied in their own ideologies with older religions. So much has been lost to looting ö actually mining of Inca sites, that we have major gaps. Architecture is characterized by the ãcyclopeanœ walls of cut, dressed pillow stones that fitted together so well. When you see them at Sacsayhuaman or Olantaytambo (northwest of Cuzco) or even as far as Ingapirra (in southern Ecuador) you note these polygonal stones are held together well without mortar. Every tour or local guide usually shows this by whipping out a pocket knife and demonstrating that it cannot even be slid between stones, they fit so well. Other buildings are of rougher stone and adobe with plaster often painted red or yellow, such as at Pachacamac. There are niches and distinctive trapezoidal doors. The state architects and engineers built roads, buildings, tambos or waystations and enlarged terraces to intensify maize production for the incessant demand for chicha to drink and coca leaves to chew. Stone buildings usually had thatched, gabled roofs. You can still see these architectural styles in use today. How did they move the stone? Very slowly and carefully, along roads, ramps, with levers. The Spanish said the storehouses contained piles of thick ropes.

Describe Inca craftwork. Ceramics included the aryballo, a tall-necked jar with a pointed base. Often it has this Inca shape but local designs. The keros beakers or cups were of wood and later ceramics, for drinking. Sculpture was fairly simple relief on stone, small carved llamas, painted geometric patterns. There were few representations of humans or animals, and no flowers until the Spanish came. Textiles were crucially important. There were many laws concerning who could wear what, by class and ethnicity. The warp-patterned weaves were the most common because the Inca forbade the use of weft-faced tapestry by anyone except royals. Weavers often forgot how to do the fancier techniques, such that this knowledge is often lost today. Cloth clearly identified as Inca was usually very uniform, woven by the chosen women, and distributed as military and bureaucratic pay. The uncu was a rectangular tunic reaching below the knees of men. The quipu or khipu was the mysterious system of knotted cords used for keeping records, which must have been so enormously extensive for this empire. Since Wari times we have seen these for recording census data, inventories of herds and other stores. they were kept by professional bureaucrats, quipucamayocs (khipukamayuqs), who were also state oral historians. The last one died early in the colonial period, and with him the knowledge of how to read these things. The cord colors, knots, lengths, locations and types of knots, apparently all had importance; they are very beautiful too. Many are working on trying to read these ancient, non-language records (Ascher and Ascher 1981, Quilter and Urton 2002, Urton 2003). Some 600 quipu have survived, and some think they represent a 3-dimensional writing system or a structured, binary coding system expressing the ancient dualities. Our ethnocentrism in considering any civilization without writing to be a lesser phenomenon is unwarranted. Scholars meanwhile are searching for a Rosetta stone-type document that might have recorded what the code of the quipu meant (Mann 2003)

Inca metalwork included unremarkable tin and bronze weapons and tools as well as gold and silver. Many local metal traditions continued, on the coast, in Ecuador and Colombia. Only royals could even have gold or silver. Artisans were important to the state. In Chimor, they could wear wooden earspools like the Inca wore gold ones. They served the state and corporate groups, the larger empire and the local community. The styles of empire were most dramatically seen at new settlements organized in places where previously there was no such tradition ö such as at Tumi Bamba, Huayna Capac's possible Ecuadorian new capital, where he tried to clone Cuzco but with local materials and craftworkers.

What is going on around the rest of the continent during the Late Horizon? The Bruhns text is very good on this, showing who got included and who didn't within the empire. Villamarín and Villamarín (1999) also describe many chiefdoms that persisted until contact. The Inca tried to make it to the south and central Ecuadorian coast perhaps to control the Spondylus trade. They aimed for the Mante Zo-Huancavilca kingdom, which resisted, and then the Spanish just happened to walk in at that time. There were small chiefdoms in Colombia always at war, sometimes known from much earlier names that were later misapplied to continuous metal traditions such as Quimbaya and Calima. The Sinú kingdom on the Magdalena River had large ridged fields and lots of gold. They were mining with slaves and spread manufacturing techniques as far as Mexico. The large amounts of gold and forest cover and wet environments which rot things have prevented us from appreciating much of this region, often known as the ãIntermediate Areaœ because it was between Andean empire and Mesoamerica. But one reason we fail to see the great sociopolitical complexity here is the perishability of the material record. There are historic records from as late as the seventeenth century of wooden idols covered with gold, chiefs covered with gold, women chiefs in total control. In the Santa Marta-Tairona area there were large towns with stone construction and lots of gold.

The Chibcha or Muisca are really famous for their goldwork, in the Bogota highlands. They had matrilineal villages of round houses organized in chiefdoms, with palisade walls, temples, storage houses, a hereditary priesthood and a sacred system based on the number 6. Offerings were often made at sacred waters such as lakes. The most famous is Lake Guatavita, where gold and emeralds from a raft were thrown into the lake, with music, incense, feathered clothes, and a chief covered in powdered gold that he washed off in the lake ö little of this leaves much archaeological record. Small, distinctive figures of animals and people called tunjos of gold or cast bronze (see picture in Bruhns p. 346-7) were offerings (similar to small Mediterranean bronze figures cast into streams as offerings). The Muisca had burials in the ground and in caves, in cloth or in clay. The people used high and low zones to grow different crops and obtain other resources. Distinct pottery and painted cotton textiles and figurines characterize this culture. Bruhns shows on p. 350 a figurine of a possible warrior from a Muisca vessel, wearing a typical bib-shaped necklace and holding possible trophy heads which may be shrunken. The process of shrinking heads was known until the 20 th century among Ecuadorians farther south, and may have been practiced here. This culture had at least ranked chiefs, and may have been at a state-level organization. All the evidence ö elaborate wooden houses, slaves ö is hard to preserve.

In the Amazon we have the fewest historic records because, of course, it was much harder for Europeans to explore. There were chiefdoms with hereditary rulers, especially among the Tupinamba. Along the Brazilian coast from the Amazon to the area of Sao Paolo were other Tupian speakers in the interior and Guaraní. A German lived among them and recorded some interesting ethnography. They had warring patrilineal villages, bride service, burials in urns, lots of drugs and beer. They fished, used domesticated ducks and dogs, had some clay pottery and spindle whorls but used more gourds for vessels. Their drawings show naked people with tattoos, feathers, labrets. Cannibalism was important and ritualized; slaves and captives were treated well but ultimately eaten. After the rituals, trophy heads and genitals were displayed, or old ones dug up and displayed. They loved fat flesh, and these people do not really fit the established reasons for cannibalism, such as a protein shortage ö they had tons of fish, ducks, dogs ö so it is hard to explain. Probably the Europeans reporting this all exaggerated it so they could enslave the Indians. None of this is preserved in the archaeological record so far. The hottest new work (e.g., Erickson 2000, Mann 2000, Heckenberger et al. 2003, Roosevelt 1991) in the Amazon is demonstrating the enormous manipulation of the landscape by late prehistoric intensive farmers who had very complex societies and built mounds, canals, and raised fields, planted orchards, and may even have been responsible for some of the species diversity of the rainforest.

In southern Brazil the archaeology is characterized by the Una phase, from 1000-1800, with diagnostic large stone tools on big flakes ö hoes and axes. They were agricultural, grew maize, squash, peanuts, and had rock shelters for hunting while the crops grew. They made bone and wood points and baskets, though apparently little or no pottery, and they continued the millennia-old practices of rock painting. These people apparently gave way during the Tupi-Guaraní expansion that continued all through historic times. At the southern end of the continent, hunter-gatherer-fishers were less bothered by the Inca, though in northwestern Argentina and Chile there were some Inca forts and tambos. The Mapuche were the last group in Chile to be conquered by Europeans, in the 19 th century, in the Araucanian area. They made a living from the sea and mountains and lakes, with agriculture, fishing, hunting, llama and alpaca herding, with no dichotomy among these practices. Burials were in canoes or stone or earth graves (no urns). They were untouched by the Inca and took a long time to get conquered by the Spanish because of good guerilla warfare practices.

Another area undergoing much recent research is Chachapoyas, which we discussed previously. Here the site of Laguna de los Cóndores (lake of the condors) has chullpas full of mummy bundles facing out to the world. The Chachapoyas people were organized into a loose confederation that controlled some 25,000 square miles between the Mara Z on and Huallaga rivers (find on map) in the very uppermost Amazon drainage. They lived on high ridges and mountains in circular stone houses and their name means ãcloud people.œ They resisted the Inca but were finally conquered in 1470 (Von Hagen and Guillén 1998, Muscutt 1998, Lerche 2000). But it was hard for the conquerors, used to desert, barren sierra, to negotiate the rough mountain jungles of the eastern Andes slopes, not to mention the jungle lowlands and eastern/northern continental coasts, where they did not go at all.