Ancient Cuzco: Heartland of the Inca (review)

This book is the first general treatment of the human occupation of the Cuzco Valley since John H. Rowe's An Introduction to the Archaeology of Cuzco (1944). Bauer, with various collaborators, carried out areal surface survey and excavation in the Cuzco Valley and the Pacaritambo region to the South, reported on in more detail elsewhere (Fieldiana between 1990 and 2003). The present book synthesizes this work and the work of numerous other researchers in a single chronological narrative, covering the period from approximately 9500 BCE to the Spanish arrival in 1533 CE. Three of the thirteen chapters are co-authored.

Cuzco was the Inca capital. Written sources tell us that the Incas, about a century before the Spanish arrival, rebuilt an older town on the same site to reflect their status as an imperial elite. An underlying theme of the book (and the name of a chapter) is "The Development of the Inca State." Using increasing site size as one measure, Bauer makes an evolutionary argument for the development of a "state." For example, there are sites of one to five hectares beginning in the Late Formative Period (500 BCE - CE 200), and from five to ten hectares beginning in the Kilke Period (CE 1000-1400). The "state" did not appear overnight, but developed gradually in the Cuzco Valley.

Since the Cuzco valley had some sort of subordinate relation to Wari in neighboring Ayacucho, the center of an earlier empire (CE 500-700), state development in the sense Bauer means it, had already occurred in the same region, well ahead of the time of the Inca empire. The evolutionary model of "state formation" which underlies Bauer's work is really only a means of demonstrating gradual change toward complexity. Perhaps certain conditions are met prior to the rise of a particular state (in the sense historians usually understand the term), but just what these conditions are, beyond increasing "complexity"—a condition met, un-met, re-met and met in other places besides the place where a particular state developed—are unclear or unconvincingly argued. The evolutionary argument does not explain why a particular "state" or "empire" developed when or where it did. Hence, the book does not explain "the development of the Inca state."

Bauer and other Inca archaeologists perceive the principal explanation offered by those who work with written materials as a "great man" theory, centered on the Inca Pachacuti, the ninth Inca: "many scholars have concentrated on reconstructing and analyzing the individual actions of this heroic leader rather than trying to understand the broader social contexts in which those actions took place" (p. 72). Spanish narratives of the Inca past credit Pachacuti with launching the Inca empire single-handedly, developing its institutions, rituals and material symbols. There is a "great man" in the sources, because this man was involved in creating and preserving a heroic memory of the Inca past, beginning with himself. This is not all that historians have found in what was written about the Incas, so in this book Pachacuti serves more in the guise of a "straw man."

To be fair, Bauer makes more use of written materials than any other archaeologist working on the Incas at present, but he uses them largely as a mine of information about archaeological sites or the remains of the Inca rulers. The one departure is the ethnic composition of the Cuzco region, reconstructed from lists of named groups compiled by various authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The territory so defined serves to delimit the larger Cuzco region, a larger framework for his discussion of the archaeology of the Cuzco Valley in the following chapters. These groups reappear in the chapter on "The Development of the Inca State" (co-authored with R. Alan Covey), where references to these peoples in the documents are briefly weighed against available archaeological knowledge. Bauer and Covey also insert the story of marriage alliances that...