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Chapter 13: Agency, Identity, and Control: Understanding Wari Space and Power
- University of New Mexico Press
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233 Chapter 13 o Agency, Identity, and Control Understanding Wari Space and Power William H. Isbell W hat is the best archaeological understanding of the great spread of Wari ceramic styles, architectural forms, mortuary practices, and luxury objects during the central Andean Middle Horizon?1 Beyond Wari Walls brings together a collection of papers, each one examining the archaeological record of a lower-order place with a special history of social processes in which Wari participated in some greater or lesser manner. What have we learned about Wari and the Middle Horizon in noncentral contexts over the last decade to add to older knowledge? Early investigations of Wari—from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1980s—had to determine what cultural remains really belonged to Wari and gain very general information about Peru’s Middle Horizon. Nuanced understandings in that era included differentiating Wari from Tiwanaku. Ceramics, and especially fancy Wari ceramics, were a prime subject of investigation as archaeologists demonstrated which styles characterized Tiwanaku, which were actually Wari, which were Wari influenced, and how the complex profusion of styles related to one another in time and space (Isbell 1971, 1977; Larco 1948; Lumbreras 1959, 1960a, 1960b, 1974;Menzel1964,1968,1977;Rowe1956;Schaedel1951, 1966; Stumer 1957). The city of Huari was investigated (Benavides 1984, 1991; Bennett 1953; Bragayrac 1991; González and Bragayrac 1986; Isbell 1984, 1997; Isbell et al. 1991; Lumbreras 1974), as were secondary centers with monumental remains thought to represent the Wari architectural style (Isbell and McEwan, eds. 1991; Schreiber 1992).2 Eventually archaeologists distinguished a hierarchy of Wari centers, Wari’s “orthogonal cellular architecture,” and a horizon defined by its diffusion (Isbell 1991a). These early investigations of Wari and the Middle Horizon revealed a complex network of interaction with Wari displaying many characteristics of state organization and practices consistent with imperial expansion (Isbell and Schreiber 1978; Lumbreras 1960b, 1969; McEwan 1987; Schreiber 1992). The interpretive models that informed these studies were those popular during the 1960s through 1980s: stages of culture evolution presented very much as ideal types (Flannery 2002). Sometimes comparing Wari with the Inca Empire (Schreiber 1987), advocates imagined a Wari Empire in core-periphery terms, with a developed capital and heartland imposing control on less-developed, ethnically distinct peripheries through colonization, military force, and administration of annexed territories. CriticspressedWariproponentstoconvincinglydisclose 234 W ILLI A M H. ISBELL administered provinces with imperial subjects, keeping research focus on dominance rather than bottom-up provincial perspectives. Since the 1970s and 1980s archaeologists have presented incontrovertible evidence that during the Middle Horizon, Wari exercised unrivaled power through much of Peru. At the same time processual archaeology has at least partially reconciled with its principal critic, postprocessual approaches to the past, producing a prehistory less focused on ideal societal types and top-down conceptions of power. Many archaeologists, and most of the contributors to this volume, are now more enthusiastic about bottom-up perspectives, agency, resistance, and the negotiation of social relations in contexts of increasing social inequality. Most contributors deliberately selected research sites far from large Wari centers, where bottom-up dynamics should be especially obvious. The authorsseekmorenuancedunderstandings—employing theory that strives to comprehend the people formerly conceptualized as subjects of the Wari Empire. This new research adds an exciting dimension to the study of Wari and the Middle Horizon, vastly expanding our awareness of the past. However, some chapter authors imagine that emphasis on local agents must be an alternative to core-periphery understandings of Wari. Apparently they have fallen victim to much-repeated criticisms of core-periphery approaches, accepting that top-down approaches not only conceptualize subjects as unidimensionalbeingsacteduponbycorepower ,butthatimperial subjects were unidimensional and incapable of agency. However, central control always coexists with factions, interests, and agents in local contexts. This dichotomous thinking wrongly assumes that self-interested agents exist only in social contexts free of overarching political entailments. But Spanish men who married Native American women at St. Augustine did not escape controls of Spain’s government just because they were negotiating innovative ethnogenesis (Deagan 1983, 1998). Aleut men and Pomo women who married at Fort Ross were still subject to Russian controls (Lightfoot et al. 1998). Stein has correctly affirmed that “we cannot understand interaction unless we look at it from two perspectives: (1) the ‘top-down’ perspective of the network itself and the polities participating in it, and (2) the ‘bottom-up’ perspective of the diverse households and larger-scale social groups that make up each polity” (2002:907; emphasis in...