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The great early Spanish historian Pedro de Cieza de León wrote that the Inca province of the south-central Andes, known as the Collao, was one of the richest and most densely populated provinces in all of Peru. The heartland of the Collao is the Titicaca Basin. During the sixteenth century, the early Spanish historians referred to a number of peoples and languages in the region, the most notable being the Aymara, Pukina, Quechua, and Uruquilla. In this chapter, I discuss the ethnography of the Titicaca region and describe the most important aspects of political , social, and economic organization and lifeways as they relate to archaeological interpretation. This chapter also reviews the extensive knowledge of the protohistoric and historic Aymara “kingdoms” that scholars have assembled over the last five hundred years. Finally, I examine the linguistic, historical , and ethnographic evidence surrounding the 4 4 other, less extensive languages or ethnic groups relevant to understanding the region’s prehistoric past. Scholars who have worked among the Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Titicaca Basin are continually confronted with the richness of their extraordinary cultures, which would be impossible to convey in one book, let alone a single chapter. In this section, I therefore confine the discussion to those features of Aymara and Quechua culture (focusing largely on the former) that are relevant to helping us understand and interpret the prehistoric political economy of the basin’s cultures. This direct historical approach has its dangers, of course, and must be used with caution. However, an examination of the archaeological record as well as the contemporary and historical past indicates that much can be learned by combining both sources of information (Marcus and Flannery 1994). C H A P T E R 4 The Ethnography and Ethnohistory of the Titicaca Basin Another focus of the chapter is the historical linguistic work that has been conducted in the region over the past several generations. This rich body of linguistic data and theory, of which archaeologists have failed to take full advantage, is an invaluable resource for archaeological model building for the period from at least a.d. 1100 onward, and possibly before . As I will demonstrate below, although some historical linguistic reconstructions of the protohistoric past differ sharply from archaeological ones, these data sets are inherently compatible and should be combined to produce better models. Historical Documents for the Titicaca Basin Several sixteenth-century documents provide important information on the economy, society, political structure, language, and culture of the Titicaca region immediately after the Spanish Conquest. Of course, the general histories of Bernabé Cobo, Cieza, Guamán Poma, and others are invaluable when we control for and understand the effect of Inca and Spanish biases. Other documents include the official inspections, or visitas, conducted by the Spanish Crown. Two of these are particularly useful: the Diez de San Miguel Visita and the Francisco Toledo Tasa.1 Another document, Historia del Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana by Ramos Gavilán, written in 1621, also provides important data from the Copacabana Peninsula region. The official report of a royal inspection of the Lupaqa province made by Garci Diez de San Miguel, an official of the Spanish Crown, represents one of the finest Spanish Colonial–period documents of the Andes. In many ways, this Visita represents the first comprehensive ethnography of a major ethnic group in the Titicaca Basin. Arriving in the basin in 1566– 1567, Diez de San Miguel sought to document the status of the people in one of the principal señoríos, or principalities, of the region. E T H N O G R A P H Y A N D E T H N O H I S T O R Y 4 5 The Lupaqa were one of the few ethnic groups in the Andes not granted to individual Spaniards in encomienda (Murra 1964). This rich and powerful indigenous polity was maintained as a Crown holding directly under royal control and protection. Unlike other native populations under the encomienda system , the Lupaqa paid taxes directly to the Spanish Crown and therefore maintained a relatively high degree of autonomy (Stanish 2000). This economic fact underlies the purpose of the Visita: Garci Diez de San Miguel was sent to record the population of ablebodied tributaries and determine earnings from herding , farming, and other economic activities in order to assess their capacity to pay taxes (Diez de San Miguel 1964 [1567]: x, 5, 10). Pertinent information in...

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