Inca Ceremonial Sites in the Southwest Titicaca Basin (Puno, Peru)

Description

TAWANTINSUYU, as the Incas called their empire, grew in perhaps a hundred years (ca. AD 1430- 1532) to encompass a huge territory of numerous ecological zones and peoples with diverse customs, languages, economies, and political institutions. The Incas relied on religious ideology as one important element of imperial control over this vast and varied area. Ethnohistoric documents describe a concerted Inca policy of religious incorporation of the provinces (e.g., Cobo 1979:191 [1653: Bk. 12 Ch. 231, 1990 [1653]; MacCormack 1991:98-118; Rowe 1946:293-314, 1982; Valera 1950:145). The subject people's local divinities, or huacas, were assimilated into Inca state control, and subjects were gathered to engage in Inca rituals at pilgrimage centers or state festivals at Cuzco. Inca state ritual was also brought to the provinces and was performed in sun temples built at provincial centers, at local festivals, and at special state ceremonies (such as the capacocha, or sacrifice ceremony) that were performed away from the center. Nevertheless, the ethnohistoric record gives us an incomplete and Cuzco-centric view of the way religion worked on the ground in the empire. A close examination of the archaeological record can illuminate the ways in which religious ideology in Tawantinsuyu interacted with, rather than supplanted or ignored, the preexisting cosmologies, ritual practices, and shrines of its new provinces. This chapter looks at the archaeological manifestations of religion, ideology, and ritual in an Inca province by compiling the results of surface survey and incorporating previous research on Inca period ceremonial sites in the southwestern Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru. This region was important to the Incas, both politically as the home of the rich, populous, and powerful Lupaca and Colla ethnic groups, and religiously, because it was the doorway to the famous Inca pilgrimage center on the Islands of the Sun and Moon. Analysis of the style, size, and placement of ceremonial sites in the Lupaca region suggests that Inca administrators did not mandate ceremonial site construction merely as a wholesale imposition of Inca ideology, but took many other factors into account, including previous nonInca traditions of worship. Furthermore, it is likely that some sites were constructed and modified at least partly by local workers without Inca supervision. This general picture of inclusion and accommodation contrasts with more rigid class exclusion at the sanctuary on the Island of the Sun itself. These little-known sites and their relation to the Island of the Sun sanctuary give us a window into the inner mechanisms of outwardly monolithic, legitimizing ideologies. In practice, in the Titicaca Basin, as perhaps everywhere, ideology was shaped and contested by countless agents of greater and lesser power. .