How the Incas Built Their Heartland: State Formation and the Innovation of Imperial Strategies in the Sacred Valley, Peru

by R. Alan Covey

Inca archaeology has traditionally been intimately tied to the study of the Spanish chronicles, but archaeologists are often asked to explain how Inca civilization relates to earlier states and empires in the Andean highlands--a time period with little coinciding documentary record. Until recently, few archaeologists working in and around the Inca heartland conducted archaeological research into the period between AD 1000 and AD 1400, leaving a great divide between pre-Inca archaeology and Inca studies.

In How the Incas Built Their Heartland R. Alan Covey supplements an archaeological approach with the tools of a historian, forming an interdisciplinary study of how the Incas became sufficiently powerful to embark on an unprecedented campaign of territorial expansion and how such developments related to earlier patterns of Andean statecraft. In roughly a hundred years of military campaigns, Inca dominion spread like wildfire across the Andes, a process traditionally thought to have been set in motion by a single charismatic ruler, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. Taking nearly a century of archaeological research in the region around the Inca capital as his point of departure, Covey offers an alternative description of Inca society in the centuries leading up to imperial expansion. To do so, Covey proposes a new reading of the Spanish chronicles, one that focuses on processes, rather than singular events, occurring throughout the region surrounding Cusco, the Inca capital. His focus on long-term regional changes, rather than heroic actions of Inca kings, allows the historical and archaeological evidence to be placed on equal interpretive footing. The result is a narrative of Inca political origins linking Inca statecraft to traditions of Andean power structures, long-term ecological changes, and internal social transformations. By reading the Inca histories in a compatible way, Covey shows that it is possible to construct a unified theory of how the Inca heartland was transformed after AD 1000.


R. Alan Covey is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published April 24, 2006

About the author

A specialist in the development and organization of ancient empires with particular focus on the Incas of Andean South America, R. Alan Covey is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Covey earned his A.B. in Anthropology and Classical Archaeology from Dartmouth College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Reviews

[Robert Jeens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covey marries archaeology to history to provide an account of the rise of the Inca Empire. The book is important, because the Inca Empire was the largest indigenous American polity at the time of Spanish conquest, and so the question has implications for not only the indigenous history of the Americas, but also larger questions of imperial history worldwide.
To begin with the negatives, it is as if Covey tried very hard to write the most boring, dry book possible on his subject. This was a great empire, with large people, extravagant displays of wealth and power, a system of writing that consisted of a series of knots, and a religion in which mummies were put on public display. There is none of that. What you get is the driest language possible, with boring descriptions of archaeological sites and their implications. I understand that archaeology tries to be a science, but it is not necessary to write in this manner to be scientific. Please see Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking. Also, there are many pictures in the book, but they are of extremely low quality and almost impossible to interpret. So you need to be fairly committed to get to the end. The author does not help you along.
On the other hand, Covey proves his point. In his telling, the traditional historical narratives were distorted by the needs of the Spanish and Inca chroniclers, and generally followed a great man narrative. There were a series of Inca kings, and the greatest of them was Pachacutic, who created the empire. Rather, Covey takes a process driven approach to look at how the Inca subordinated “neighbouring groups in a region of considerable ethnic, political, and economic diversity.”
And what he sees is that the Incas spent about 200 years first consolidating their rule in the Cuzco basin, near their capital, before they expanded outward. He never talks about causes and effects, but I think we can use the principle of emergence here well. The state and then empire emerged out of a situation and a series of events. The Inca used a variety of methods to bring other polities under them. They used marriage alliances to bring peace with other groups. It is worth noting that the women involved in these were not political pawns, but brought wealth and power and connections to their marriages. This was often not enough to subordinate these groups, but the Inca would try to use gifts and promises to the elites before they resorted to war as a last resort. Those in their vicinity were treated as honorary Incas and allowed subordinate positions in the administration, while those who resisted were divided up and resettled.
At the same time, the Inca religion developed into the worship of the sun, in which the emperor was a descendant of the sun god and could have no equals. The sun was important because the sun grew the maize upon which the Empire subsisted. Prior to the Inca conquests, most agriculture in their immediate area was done on the upper valley slopes and consisted of kinds of potatoes farming and camelid herding. With peace and the labour of their neighbours, however, the Inca developed extensively irrigated maize agriculture on the valley bottoms and boosted agricultural production. They built a series of roads that could move produce and armies around. Monumental architecture was erected in other towns to provide sun and emperor worship, forts were constructed to guard the empire and keep the peace, and storage facilities for the agricultural products were constructed to guard against famine. A hierarchical state structure consisting of various bureaucrats subsumed local politics. The army was regularly organized based on the decimal system. All of that was done before the empire expanded outwards, so that, when the time came, it was accomplished quickly.
Covey explicitly compares the Inca Empire with other rapidly expanding ancient empires such as Rome, and I think this is a very useful comparison. His point is that those polities spent time on state-building locally before they were able to expand, and so did the Inca. Bruce Trigger said that the most important question in the social sciences is to what extent human behaviour is driven by nature or nurture. I think that is true, too. This book shows that the drive for empire is actually a human universal, under certain conditions. Just what those conditions are is a matter of debate, Azar Gat and Yuval Harari point out that empire probably did not exist before agriculture, and Harari claims that their study is beyond good and evil. His point is elaborated by Ian Morris, who writes of the paradox of war. War is a terrible process but empire-building can be a positive development for those who survive. The Inca developed farmlands that couldn’t be developed previously because smaller polities could not keep the peace, and it required an empire to enforce peace so that those bottom maize lands could be developed. They built roads that allowed commerce and a greater variety of goods, thus making food acquisition more secure. All was not good. Nobody would volunteer to be those who were killed or dispersed to the jungle to fight the cannibals. Nobody would volunteer to have their children sacrificed to the sun god. However, there were rewards for those who cooperated, and the general level of wealth was dramatically increased.