Provincial inka studies in the twenty-first century

This book began as a symposium at the 2004 Society for American Archaeology meetings in Montreal. The purpose of the symposium was to bring together researchers who had advanced our ideas about the nature of the Inka Empire, both geographically and in the details of the processes involved. Geographically, the research presented focused on provinces of the empire that were far from the capital of Cuzco. The volume here includes six chapters that cover the southern part of Tawantinsuyu and three that cover the central or northern part. Particularly exciting are the two chapters dealing with the Central and North coasts of Peru, areas where little previous research has been reported. This additional coverage adds more support to the conclusions that have emerged in the past two decades that Inka strategies of control were flexible and tailored to the particular situations faced in different regions. Another focus of the symposium was to report on studies that added more details about the specific nature of Inka control of their conquered provinces. Four chapters in the current volume report on specific excavations and studies of local and Inka sites that give a more nuanced view of the complex interrelationships that occurred when the Inkas incorporated conquered groups into their empire. The archaeological research shows how the particulars of Inka control were manifested in ways that ethnohistorical documents do not, and perhaps cannot, address. Five issues emerged from the original symposium as points of discussion about the Inkas: (1) the various forms of Inka imperial control exercised in the provinces as seen through a range of archaeological indicators (that is, settlement patterns, household analysis, cultural material, architecture, bioarchaeology, and so forth); (2) the nature of the interaction of archaeological and ethnohistorical research seeking to understand the various manifestations of Inka imperialism and provincialism; (3) local reactions to imperial control and institutions, including resistance, colonization, and negotiation of power as seen through archaeology and ethnohistory; (4) the scales of analysis and archaeological correlates used to understand the various forms of Inka provincialism and imperial control (that is, regional-level versus household approaches); and (5) the reevaluation of marginality and marginal provinces in the Inka Empire, or how archaeologists understand and measure imperial marginality, Inka imperialism, and Inka provincialism. From these five themes, a salient issue addressed by the different contributors to this book involves imperial strategies of domination exerted by the Inkas across their provinces. In order to provide a theoretical framework for such discussion, we first provide a brief overview of the history of studies involving Inka imperialism and forms of Inka imperial control. © 2010 by the University of Iowa Press. All rights reserved.

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