Distant Provinces in the Inka Empire: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Inka Imperialism

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments The 1993 publication of Provincial Inca: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Assessment of the Impact of the Inca State was a step forward in our understanding of how the Inkas interacted with the people of their conquered provinces. The book’s main focus was on comparing the two forms of informationandsynthesizingtheresultstoprovideamorecompletepicture oftheInkaEmpireandthevariabilityinInkarule.Thebook’sconclusion, one that was widely being realized at that time and earlier, was that the Inka Empire was less a homogenous monolithic entity than it was a series of broadly similar yet distinctive sets of provinces governed in a variety of ways. Theseresultswerebased onbothethnohistoricalaccountsandarchaeology , but the latter was largely restricted to survey work with some limitedexcavationsofsites .Theinformationwasthusgeneralandtheconclusions broad. In addition, the coverage of the book was uneven, with one chapter from northern Chile, four from Peru, and one covering broader aspects of the empire. Significantly, there were no chapters from the extreme ends of the empire, from south-central Chile or Ecuador, or from the Bolivian/Argentinean area. Thus, the regions where one could expect that Inka imperial rule might take on different forms due to the recency of conquest or the importance of maintaining a border to the empire were largely underrepresented. To review the state of research on Inka imperial strategies of control in the far reaches of their empire, the two authors organized a symposium at the 2004 Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Montreal. The goals of the symposium were to gauge the advances in Inka studies and to look at the information from regions not covered in the first book. Toward that end, investigators from the extremes of the empire were recruited as well as others from the coast of Peru. After the authors decided to publish the results, the essay by Rossen et al. (chapter 2) was added to have data from the southern extreme of the empire. The distribution of theresearch included in this volumecan beseeninfigure1.1,whichshows the locations of the investigations from this volume. x Preface and Acknowledgments In addition to the complementary coverage, the papers presented in Montreal indicated that recent investigations had gone well beyond the survey and testing of earlier research to include excavations reflecting much more fine-grained studies of Inka control, and local resistance to or compliance with it. Excavations at Inka and local sites showed the range of variation in adoption and rejection of Inka material culture and architecture much more clearly than earlier. As a result, the investigations here have deepened our understanding of Inka imperialism and the way that local people confronted the empire. The authors have chosen to follow the Quechua spelling of terms, especially Inka names, rather than the hispanicized versions. This reflects a shift in the field away from the latter toward the former. Most readers of this volume are already accustomed to the terms, and the non-Andean reader should have few difficulties in translating them. As any editor of a contributed volume can testify, getting the authors to complete their chapters in a timely fashion can be a difficult and timeconsuming task. We are fortunate that we had no such problems with the authors here. Our first acknowledgment therefore goes to the contributors for the quick and thorough completion of their chapters and the subsequent requested revisions. Even more, they provided their figures and tables in like fashion, expediting the completion of the final volume. The authors would also like to thank Holly Carver, Karen Copp, and the staff at the University of Iowa Press for the ease with which negotiations about the volume were completed and the final version published. Theseniorauthor wants to thank theProvost’sOfficeatIthacaCollege for the teaching reduction that allowed him to have the time for completing his part of the final drafts. He also owes a large debt of gratitude to his wife, Susanne Kessemeier, and son, Soren, for bearing with him during the never-ending completion of the work. The second author thanks her colleagues and friends at the University of Texas at San Antonio for their support in this endeavor. She especially wants to thank her family, Vince and Anna Wara McElhinny, for their invaluable support. Distant Provinces in the Inka Empire Figure 1.1. Location of the different investigation areas presented in the book. Map based on Hyslop 1984 and D’Altroy 1992. ...