At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero by Stella Nair (review)

This important book offers a superb study of Topa Inca's palace complex at Chinchero, Peru, organizing its analysis around Inca concepts and architectural features, and through the spatial progression through which the site would have been experienced. Nair foregrounds how Inca architecture delineated and sacralized space while producing stages for performance, and she provides an excellent reading of the politics of place and movement. The son and successor of the great Inca imperialist Pachacutic, Topa Inca built Chinchero when he himself was ruler and extended the empire. He died there late in the fifteenth century; the unsuccessful claimant to his throne was then imprisoned in his father's palace at the order of his brother and rival. The great terraces and plaza of Topa Inca's compound formed the heart of the colonial reducción of Chinchero and dominate the modern town.

The reader starts with the roads leading to Chinchero from Cusco and the Urubamba Valley, moving through the Inca heartland where Topa Inca built this great compound in the midst of other noble Inca estates and the ancestral lands of the Ayarmaca. Focusing on the materiality of Inca construction and locating it within Quechua conceptions of pacha (space-time), Nair, like Carolyn Dean, emphasizes the Inca reworking of landscape as the production of memoryscape. These tangible structures imbued the day-long walk from the great Inca city with political and spiritual meaning, as it took the pilgrim past huaca shrines and through a landscape alive with camay, the vital force that permeated all in the Inca Andes.

Through a carefully controlled road, one reaches the great ceremonial space of the pampa, where tributaries and petitioners from around the empire, and Inca allies and rivals, gathered and were received by the Inca from a series of viewing structures on an upper terrace. Demonstrating that the Incas inhabited outdoor space as fully as interior, Nair points out the juxtaposition of open places and sweeping vistas with carefully constricted movements between places and levels. Access and sight lines, stonework, and architectural composition together produced spaces that created and reinforced social hierarchies and the authority of the Sapa Inca. An interplay of fracture and fenestration produced hierarchical spaces to organize the imperial court: the rock outcropping incorporated into Topa Inca's viewing stand was visible only to the Inca and his immediate retinue, and the people moved from the public plaza up to the platform and private compound through much narrow spaces.

Secluded from the public space by a winding route and restricted entrances, the private space of Topa Inca was arranged around a second large plaza. The buildings of this compound were destroyed in warfare and then covered over by the colonial Church, leaving far less physical evidence than that found in the more public space of the pampa. In this accounting, the author makes excellent use of Guaman Poma, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Múrua, Zárate, and other chroniclers to speculate about the site and also to offer a robust discussion of the types of Inca buildings and the ordering of the royal compound. The private space included storehouses for the prestige gifting at the heart of Andean political relations, and the corn wine that accompanied it; bedhouses for the emperor and his principal wives; and latrines. These features both bespoke and upheld the relations of the Inca imperial elite. The author correctly emphasizes Chinchero's role as the center of a complex of many interrelated estates held by Topa Inca and his wives.

Topa Inca's fame and his panaca, or descent group, suffered after his death. His successor, Huayna Cápac, never forgave his father's preference for a rival heir, and after Huayna Cápac's death in the succession war between Atahuallpa and Huascar in the early 1530s, Chinchero and Topa Inca's panaca...