Kylie Quave

The Inkas developed the largest native empire in the Americas (ca. 14th-16th c. CE) and transformed much of their heartland region into productive royal estates. Noble factions built palaces, intensified agricultural resources, and re-settled provincial and local populations as estate retainers. While Inka researchers enjoy a vast historical background relevant to these processes, archaeologists have not yet sought the material evidence for the royal estate economy’s operation and organization. Such an undertaking is vital to modeling the role of factionalism in imperial development and consolidation, especially in empires where noble economies claimed significant portions of resources and labor.
In order to assess the role of the royal estate within the Inka political economy, this dissertation evaluates two aspects of the estate: 1) the organization of production of subsistence and craft goods on estate lands and 2) the domestic economies of non-elite laborers and intermediate elite administrators living on the estate. This evaluation is contextualized by a wealth of recent regional survey and archival research. While previous archaeological, ethnohistorical, and architectural investigations of the estate have limited their approaches to just the palace complex and monumental sites, this project takes a new perspective by examining a production enclave and retainer settlement located seven kilometers from the nearest palace complex.
Research on estate labor and administration was conducted via archaeological excavation at the site of Cheqoq in Maras, Cuzco, Peru and contextualized within recent regional studies. Through horizontal excavation of six laborer households, a storehouse, and pottery workshop, I analyzed domestic economy and production to reconstruct the royal estate economy and its relation to the larger imperial political economy. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of artifacts provided a database for assessing production and consumption by household and as a site on the whole.
These comparisons indicate production and consumption patterns similar to some of those laid out through chronicle and archival documents in the early Colonial period (16th to 17th c. CE). However, I find that laborers and administrators negotiated status and identity relative to each other and to their noble patrons in complex and heterogeneous ways. While estate laborers had no status in the empire beyond their attachment to a noble faction, they had access to some goods beyond their station due to their proximity to and participation in estate wealth production. As producers of imperial style pottery and administrators of stored crop surpluses, these non-elites found ways to assimilate Cuzco-Inka material culture into their daily lives.
Data on domestic economy and estate production at Cheqoq contribute to developing a baseline for evaluating the role of royal and noble estates within imperial economies. The methods and results from this study may be applied to other cases within the Inka empire and in other early states and empires. This study can thus increase our understanding of how factionalism promoted imperial growth and how laborer and administrator households participated in the transformation.

The structure of the Inka khipu follows a set of rules that are dictated by the state need for uniform record keeping, but also by a "technological style" that Ascher and Ascher refer to as "Inca insistence." Applying Andean textile primacy to the khipu is useful for understanding the mental map used by the khipukamayuq, thereby giving access to principles of status, symbolic meaning, and the use of anomaly in cloth that may be transferred to khipu. In addition to binary switches in directionality and material, it is also important to identify the forms and purposes of anomalies found in certain samples. Analysis of the construction sequence from two museum collections provides a look at deviation and the intentionality of the khipukamayuq.

In 2018 we taught a pair of linked, three-week courses in and around Cusco, Peru. One was a creative writing course and the other was a writing-intensive anthropology course. The shared learning objectives included situating our experiences in relation to the region's history, critically analyzing travel and tourism today, and developing deeper understanding of the similarities/differences between various modes of inquiry and representation. The courses were predicated on immersive experiential learning, yet students were outsiders in a place where they did not speak either of the two principal languages (Spanish and Quechua). We posit that multimodal composition in multilingual contexts is one way to help students understand their experiences of cultural immersion and participant observation. This teaching artifact includes sample assignments that combine text, photography, and other media, along with sample student work. In exploring these assessments and outcomes, we demonstrate how our approach offers principles and practices that can inform how students reflect on multimodality as both a practical tool and a productive trope for critical reflection and navigation of the classroom as (what Mary Louise Pratt coined as) a “contact zone.”

Abstract: Teaching introductory archaeology courses in US higher education typically falls short in two important ways: the courses do not represent the full picture of who contributes to reconstructing the past and do not portray the contemporary and future relevance of the archaeological past. In this paper, we use anti-colonial and decolonial theories to explain the urgency of revising the introductory archaeology curriculum for promoting equity in the discipline and beyond. We detail the pedagogical theories we employed in revising an introductory archaeology course at a small liberal arts college in the US and the specific changes we made to course structure, content, and teaching strategies. To examine the impacts on enrolled students and on who chose to enroll in the revised archaeology curriculum, we analyze student reflection essays and enrollment demographics. We find that students developed more complex understandings of the benefits and harms of archaeological knowledge production and could articulate how to address archaeology’s inequities. We also found that enrollment in archaeology courses at the college shifted to include greater proportions of students of color. These results support the notion that introductory archaeology courses should be substantially and continually revised.

Resumen: Típicamente la docencia de los cursos arqueológicos de universidades de los Estados Unidos se queda corta de dos maneras: no presentan la imagen completa de quiénes contribuyen a la reconstrucción del pasado y no retratan la relevancia actual y futura del pasado. Aquí usamos teorías anti-coloniales y descolonizadas para explicar la urgencia con que hay que modificar el currículo arqueológico para promover equidad social en la disciplina y más allá de la disciplina. Detallamos las teorías pedagógicas que utilizamos en la revisión de nuestro curso en una universidad de artes liberales en EEUU. Especificamos los cambios que hicimos con la estructura del curso, el contenido y estrategias de instrucción.  Para examinar el impacto a los alumnos y averiguar quiénes tomaban interés en el curso, analizamos ensayos reflexivos y cambios demográficos de inscripción. Vemos que los alumnos desarrollaron conocimientos más complejos sobre los beneficios y daños de la producción del conocimiento arqueológico y que podrían indicar como abordar las desigualdades de la arqueología. También encontramos que las inscripciones en los cursos de arqueología de la universidad cambiaron para incluir proporciones mayores de estudiantes de color. Estos resultados soportan la idea que los cursos de arqueología deberían ser revisados substancialmente y continuamente.

By the end of the 13th century CE, campaigns to extend the power of the Inca state began to target local communities outside of the Cuzco Valley. A century or so of state conquests and administrative intensification in the Cuzco region set the stage for generations of rapid imperial growth that commenced around 1400 CE. The subordination of neighboring populations reduced external military threats to the Inca state while simultaneously concentrating more productive land and labor tribute in the hands of the Inca elite. Royal Inca control over rural landscapes in the Cuzco region intensified during the imperial period, but the ways that this affected local societies varied from place to place. By the time of the Spanish conquest (1530s CE), some parts of the Cuzco region had undergone significant changes in their settlement patterns and subsistence economies, whereas others experienced a less transformative relationship with the Inca state and its ruling elite. In this paper, we use regional archaeological data from survey projects as a context for comparing our archaeological excavations from three sites near Cuzco (Ak’awillay, Cheqoq, and Pukara Pantillijlla) to discuss the impact of Inca empire-building on the everyday lives of local farmers and herders. Our results speak to the variability found within the Inca heartland and the uneven distribution of Inca material culture that is found at the level of communities and households. Our excavations at sites with both pre-Inca and Inca occupations permit us to develop long-term perspectives on local populations and their interactions with and responses to the growing Inca state.

This paper uses documents generated by the 1594–1595 composiciones de tierras in Cuzco, Peru, to discuss the economic transformation of the former heartland of the Inca Empire and the impact of Spanish administrative policies implemented in the early 1570s. The diverse social and environmental landscapes of rural areas lying to the west of Cuzco provide a range of local case studies that reveal how settlement and tribute policies of the viceroy Francisco de Toledo failed to produce sustainable colonial towns of Christian Indians.
Detailed records of indigenous land repartition in the area show gender- and status-based patterns of individual allocations, as well as ecological differences in landholding between communities. The local records indicate the continuing importance of Inca-era community identities and local leadership for maintaining possession of community lands. By contrast, documents related to the composiciones among private landowners reveal vast inequalities in land access, as well as the rapid growth in the demand for indigenous labor to produce important agrarian commodities. We argue that Spanish administrative policies accelerated the transformation of the means of production in rural Cuzco, creating peasants instead of Christian Indian subjects.

Horizontal excavations at the large Inka heartland village of Cheqoq (Maras, Cuzco, Peru) revealed the remains of a ceramic workshop where imperial-style vessels were produced (AD 1400–1530s). Cheqoq was a multiethnic settlement of forcibly migrated retainer laborers working for the noble lineage of the Inka ruler, Wayna Qhapaq. Production of  imperial-style pottery in a small workshop associated with a royal lineage indicates that the heartland craft economy was not centralized
in the urban Cuzco capital. The material remains of in situ production—raw materials, manufacturing facilities, tools, and by-products—provide a baseline for comparing other Inka pottery assemblages to this production locus.

Excavaciones horizontales en el sitio de Cheqoq (Maras, Cuzco, Perú) —un pueblo grande en el centro del territorio imperial Inka— revelaron los restos arqueológicos de un taller alfarero donde se producían vasijas del estilo imperial Cuzco-Inka (datado entre 1400 y la década de 1530 dC). Cheqoq era un asentamiento de yanakuna, obreros de varias etnias quienes fueron re-asentados obligatoriamente por el Sapa Inka, y allí se ubicaban grandes depósitos de productos agrícolas del Inka. Según las fuentes etnohistóricas, el pueblo estaba asociado con el linaje del Inka Wayna Qhapaq. La producción de alfarería de estilo imperial en un pequeño taller asociado con un linaje real indica que la economía alfarera no estaba centralizada en la capital urbana del Cuzco. El análisis de los restos de producción —incluyendo materias primas, instalaciones de fábrica, herramientas y derivados—provee una base de comparación con otros conjuntos de cerámica Inka.