Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies

9: Labor Taxes, Market Systems, and Urbanization in the Prehispanic Andes: A Comparative Perspective

185 The Inca empire represents one of the greatest political achievements in human history .Bytheend of thesixteenthcenturyAD,itstretchedover1 millionkm2 and maintained at least nominal control over several million people (Figure 9.1). These subject populations were members of dozens of ethnic groups organized into a complex and heterogeneousstate.TheIncaestablishedprovincesindeserts,mountains,high-altitude plains, and forests. Their road system stretched over thousands of kilometers, and their engineers built bridges, fortresses, storehouses, and even entire towns for strategic purposes . Their priests climbed mountain peaks for elaborate rituals, feats unimaginable a few generations earlier. Their armies marched for weeks and months in campaigns across the Andes. The organizational genius of the Inca state, known by its inhabitants as “Tawantinsuyu,” was unmatched in ancient South America and rivals the great empires of the premodern world in Asia, northern Africa, and Mesopotamia. In spite of the huge size and power of Tawantinsuyu, estimates of the size and population of the capital city of Cusco are small compared with the capitals of polities of similar size and complexity. The core of Cusco itself was perhaps no more than a few square kilometers in size. Within a 100-km2 area around the city, there were no more than 100,000 or so people at the height of empire; the core of the urban architectural zone was probably half that size (Agurto Calvo 1980; Hyslop 1984, 1990:64–65). A significant proportion of the people located away from the city center were likely fulltime farmers, an observation based on the absence of major secondary urban centers near the capital. Charles Stanish Chapter Nine Labor Taxes, Market Systems, and Urbanization in the Prehispanic Andes: A Comparative Perspective ChArLeS STAniSh 186 Analysis of demographic and geographic data from premodern cities around the world suggests that this difference is valid—Andean cities are smaller—an effect not caused by different archaeological methods or exogenous factors such as geography or ecology. I propose that the primary reason for this difference centers on the nature of the prehispanic Andean political economy—that is, how material wealth was produced, exchanged, consumed, and controlled. The economic basis of urbanism depends on the provisioning of nonagriculturists who can aggregate into a relatively 9.1. The Andes showing Inca provinces and names mentioned in the text. LAbor TAxeS, MArkeT SySTeMS, And UrbAnizATion 187 small zone and draw from the agricultural sustaining area. This relationship is essential for successful urbanism, consistently and reliably transporting resources—particularly basic foodstuffs—from the sustaining area and beyond to a nonagricultural core. How this provisioning is accomplished is a function of the political-economic organization of the society. Marketplaces and fairs existed in the central Andes, but there is a noticeable lack of price-fixing markets in the Inca state. Instead, Andean political economies were generally based on elaborate redistributive, tribute, reciprocal, and administered trade systems understood within the broad theoretical traditions of economic anthropology and economic history. Local fairs flourished, and there was a brisk trade in many goods. Long-distance interregional exchange of many kinds of items was also robust and historically deep. María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco (1970, 1975) has demonstrated that substantial quantities of goods traveled up and down the Pacific Coast, produced by full- and part-time craft specialists. There is some evidence for pricefixing market exchange on the periphery of the empire, but the bulk of production and exchange in the state and imperial economies of the Andes did not rely on such exchange. It was within this cultural context that the Inca built their empire. Unlike their counterparts in Central Mexico, the people of the Andes created imperial systems based on an elaborate corvée labor–tax system, avoiding or possibly suppressing market trade. The Inca were unusual in the history of premodern empires in eschewing market systems for corvée mechanisms, but they were successful nonetheless in conquering their known world in just over a century. This system was a brilliant solution in this context, and it was better than market and tribute systems for many tasks— most notably, raising troops for the military. But such a system had costs as well. In this chapter I argue that the lack of extensive price-fixing market systems in the Inca state precluded the concentration of large numbers of peoples in urban areas, a direct result of the relatively large transaction costs in operating their imperial economy (e.g., North 1981, 1990; Williamson...