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chapter 2 Landscape of Power a network of palaces in middle horizon peru William H. Isbell Archaeologists know little about political power and kingship in pre-Inka Andean societies. In significant part this is because we have ignored the principal engine of regal power, the royal palace. In fact, many archaeologists avoid identifying palaces and kings in the Andean past, preferring to classify monumental buildings as temples and paramount individuals as priests. I suspect that the reluctance to recognize royal palaces in the Andean archaeological record springs from a couple of prejudices. First, archaeologists tend to exaggerate the difference between secular and sacred domains. Kings are secular, and priests are sacred. Wherever the material record reveals signi ficant evidence for ceremony, Andean archaeologists imagine priests. Of course, this is contradicted by descriptions of elaborate ceremonies that surrounded Inka rulers and other archaic kings. Second is a commitment to processual archaeology, the adaptive nature of culture, and cooperation theories of state origins. Economic relations, not power, are assumed to explain the past. Many Andean archaeologists assume that pre-Hispanic rulers were servants of the community; benevolent organizers of redistribution; philanthropic managers of land, water, and labor; and the first to die in military defense. ‘‘King’’ emphasizes power and politics, so ‘‘lord’’ or ‘‘warrior-priest’’ are preferred classifications. But surely, the ‘‘Lord of Sipán’’ (Alva 1988, 1990; Alva and Donnan 1993; Donnan 1988; Donnan and Castillo 1992), the principal individual buried in a spectacular tomb from Peru’s pre-Inka Moche culture, should be recognized as a king who ruled from a royal palace. One of the ‘‘temple platforms’’ at monumental Sipán must have been capped by a royal palace, not a temple. A royal palace is a tool for constructing regal power. Just as the nature, quality, and quantity of royal power differ from one kingdom to another, so do the nature, size, and distribution of royal palaces. In significant part, power to rule is produced by and in palaces.The palace of one polity may be a center for storage and redistribution, where a king promotes himself by managing the pooled wealth of the community, part of which he appropriates for personal aggrandizement (Thomas and Conant 1999:9–15). Another palace landscape of power 45 may be a cosmological model proclaiming the king and his court to be the center of the universe. In ‘‘theatre states,’’ the palace community sponsors recurrent rituals that present an ideal model for the real world (Geertz 1980). Of course, all palaces must accommodate multiple strategies for producing power, and the palace was never the only tool of empowerment. Power is constructed in the spatial relations of people in their households and communities , in relations of production, and through the control of force. But palaces are dedicated engines of royal power, and their archaeological remains document the nature, quality, and extent of power a monarch could produce, at least under most conditions. An example of a minimal palace is the residence of the Great Sun of the Natchez. He lived in a log house about 12 × 16 m (Neitzel 1965:19) that was similar to ordinary Natchez cabins except for being two or three times as large, and raised on an earthen mound about 4 m high. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Great Sun was a paramount who commanded some eight lesser chiefs along the lower Mississippi River (Brown 1990; Neitzel 1965; Swanton 1911). His polity totaled about 3,500 persons residing in about 400 cabins widely dispersed around a ceremonial center. The chief’s palace was in the central settlement, preferentially located relative to a great plaza and its important temple areas. Clifford Geertz (1980) developed a model of the Negara, or traditional Balinese state. As part of his analysis he presents a drawing of the palace of the Klungkung polity at the turn of the nineteenth century. At that moment the king of Klungkung was the paramount monarch of southern Bali, with perhaps as many as 1.5 million subjects. An illustration of the palace (Geertz 1980:Figure 11) was drawn from memory by an informant who lived there as a child, so its size is only approximate—a square about 150 m on each side. But the informant’s drawing is replete with knowledge and experience of the royal residence. Ceremonial rooms, funerary spaces, compartments for sacred heirlooms, counsel chambers, stairways, and portals were placed to emphasize more- and less-public...

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