Inca Architecture

358 Pages·1980·204.51 MB·English

by  Graziano Gasparini

INCA ARCHITECTURE
Graziano Gasparini & Luise Margolies
Translated by Patricia J. Lyon
INCA ARCHITECTURE
INSIDE
By Graziano Gasparini and Luise Margolies
COVER
Translated by Patricia J. Lyon
FOREWORD BY JOHN V. MURRA
Inca Architecture is the first book devoted entirely to
the remarkable buildings of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca
state. Most treatments of Andean technology have
either entirely ignored the architectural dimension
or addressed it superficially. Since the authors of this
volume are an archaeological historian and a cul­
tural anthropologist, they bring unique and neces­
sary perspectives to the study of pre-Columbian
monumental architecture and its sociocultural com­
ponents.
Gasparini and Margolies note distinctive features
GRAZIANO GASPARINI, Director of the Centro de Inves­
and prevalent patterns in the architecture, analyze tigaciones Históricas y Estéticas, Universidad Central de
the probable function of various structures, discuss Venezuela, is an architectural restoration consultant for
materials and technology, and show how the build­ UNESCO. He is author of La Arquitectura Colonial en
Venezuela and Muros de Mexico.
ings reflected the Inca way of life. By making use of
sixteenth-century chroniclers’ accounts as well as
their own hypotheses based on extant ruins, they
attempt to reconstruct exactly how the buildings
looked. Their descriptions are enhanced by draw­
ings, photographs, and detailed plans with precise
measurements.
Separate chapters are devoted to technical and
formal antecedents, urban settlements, domestic
structures (generally ignored in architectural
analyses), the architecture of power (constructions
built for collective, administrative, military, and re­
ligious purposes), and technical and aesthetic prob­
lems. Beginning with the structures of Tiwanaku,
the authors place the achievements of the Incas in
the context of the Andean building tradition that
preceded them, as well as in the context of contem­
poraneous societies. In addition to such well-known LUISE MARGOLIES, Director of Ediciones Venezolanas de
sites as Cuzco and Machu Picchu, Gasparini and Antropología, is author of Princes of the Earth: Subcul­
tural Diversity in a Mexican Municipality.
Margolies highlight other important but less famous
settlements: Pikillaqta, Ollantaytambo, Huánuco
PATRICIA J. LYON is a Research Associate of the Department
Pampa, Willka Waman, and Tambo Colorado.
of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, and of
“. . . Professor Gasparini and Dr. Margolies . . . know the Institute of Andean Studies, Berkeley. She has devoted
every Incan ruin, not just those on the tourist beat. The many years to archaeological and ethnological studies in
fine black-and-white pictures precisely illustrate every Peru.
aspect of Inca architecture, and they are supplemented by
admirable diagrams and accurate plans. . . . The writing
is elegant and lucid; no jargon here, but rather an
authoritative and often original interpretation of most
aspects of Inca architecture. This is an entirely admirable
book . . . essential for anyone interested in Inca society or
archaeology.”—The Geographic Journal INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Land of Tawantinsuyu.
INCA
ARCHITECTURE
BY
Graziano Gasparini & Luise Margolies
Translated by Patricia J. Lyon
Indiana University Press • Bloomington
and London
Copyright © 1980 by Gráziano Gasparini and Luise Margolies
all rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on
Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
Manufactured in the United States of America
library of congress cataloging in publication data
Gasparini, Graziano.
Inca Architecture.
Translation of Arquitectura Inka.
Includes bibliographical references and index,
1. Incas—Architecture. 2. Indians of South
America—Architecture. 1. Margolies, Luise, joint
author. II. Title.
F3429.3.A65G3713 722' .91 79-3005
ISBN 0-253-30443-1 12345 84 83 82 81 80
To Abraham Guillén,
whose extraordinary photographic activity
has enriched our understanding of pre-Columbian
and colonial Peru during the last fifty years.
Contents
Foreword by John V. Murra ix
preface xiii
1: Technical and Formal Antecedents 3
2: Urban Settlements 35
3: Domestic Architecture 129
4: The Architecture of Power 195
5: Technical and Aesthetic Problems 305
notes 333
references 337
glossary 342
credits for photographs and plans 344
index 345
FOREWORD
There is no end to books about the Incas–what does sur-
prise and even exasperate the student of that remarkable Andean
state is how little each new title contributes to what we already
know. If we compare Prescott’s readable account of the conquest
of Peru, which he wrote some 140 years ago, with what can be
asserted with some confidence today, the revelations are few.
What has been accomplished in the study of Tawantinsuyu,
the Inca state, has followed three approaches:
1. Surveys of the administrative and storage centers, of the
roads, agricultural terraces, and temples, whose incredible size,
beauty, and efficiency, and the architectural skill involved, have
attracted the admiration of outsiders ever since 1532. Not only
the adventurers who witnessed their destruction but also the
nineteenth-century scholars who were the first to measure, draw,
photograph, and even excavate the monuments agreed that in the
Andes we confront a human achievement that requires fresh
scrutiny.
2. Utilization of the dynastic oral tradition, which stored the
deeds of legendary, but also historical, kings, and which in passing
described some of the Inca institutions. This was collected within
the first two or three decades after the invasion by European
writers like Betanzos, Polo, or Cieza. While fragmentary, the in-
formation provided by such primary sources about the economic,
social, and political organization is frequently useful as we strive
to understand the meaning of the public works and monuments
of this civilization.
3. Utilization of Andean and Inca data for comparative
interpretations. In the eighteenth century the comparisons stressed
what seemed to be the utopian, welfare features of Andean social
organization. In recent decades, fashion has shifted rapidly: a
“slave society” or a “feudal” one, a “totalitarian state,” an “Asiatic
mode of production,” or a “socialist empire”–each of these labels
has had its partisans, searching in other latitudes when not in
outer space, for models to explain the extraordinary phenomena
documented for us by architectural or ethnohistoric details.
In ideal circumstances, each of these three approaches could
make a contribution: each one and the three in interaction could
sponsor the search for new information and its prompt verifica-
ix
tion. Alas, in practice, each has fallen into the hands of specialists
who do not always value, nor always know how to utilize, infor-
mation provided by the other two.
One of the assets of Gasparini and Margolies’s work is their
consistent attention to two of these tactics in their study of
Tawantinsuyu: they pool and contrast the information emerging
from sixteenth-century eyewitness accounts with what their own
observations and measurements in the field have told them and
what little can be learned from the excavations of Inca settlements
and administrative centers. If Garcilaso de la Vega offers a de-
scription of the shrine at Cacha, allegedly dedicated to Wira-
qocha, Gasparini and Margolies visit the site, measuring, survey-
ing, and photographing what is supposed to be that very
monument. A newcomer to Andean studies may think it an
obvious step: as early at the nineteenth century, some of our
forerunners like Squier or Bandelier had taken it. In our time,
Luis E. Valcárcel and John H. Rowe have followed this “method”
in Cuzco. But in most cases, coordination of the several tactics and
their verification through excavation run into stubborn and mani-
fold obstacles.
A good example of the inadequacy of single-tactic attempts
to answer some of the better questions in the study of Tawantin-
suyu will be found in Gasparini and Margolies’s third chapter,
where they deal with domestic architecture. Household and vil-
lage matters, away from Cuzco and far from the qhapaq-ñan, the
royal road, still await archaeological attention. As knowledgeable
an archaeologist as Wendell C. Bennett mused that in much of
the territory reported by oral tradition as incorporated into the
Inca realm, one was unable to find any physical trace of such an
occupation.
The research conducted in the Huallaga Valley of Huánuco
by the Institute of Andean Research (1963–65), based on six-
tenth-century written sources, told us that the valley’s inhabi-
tants had served their mit’a turns at such nearby state installations
as Huánuco Pampa or Pumpu but also in faraway Cuzco. At the
first survey, no Inca remains could be identified in the valley.
When the archaeological data was confronted with the house-by-
house survey of a 1562 inspection and with information provided
x
by the present-day inhabitants interviewed by the Institute’s eth-
nologists, we learned that:
1. The present-day “ruin” at Ichu was in ceremonial use
as recently as 1950. It had once been the seat of power for the
whole valley, but nothing about its exterior condition would
have suggested it. Once it was identified by the ethnologists, the
archaeological determination of the most complex domestic com-
pound allowed the location of a unique, if small, assemblage of
Cuzco pottery–thus confirming and extending archaeologically
what had been claimed by the sixteenth-century text.
2. It was possible to locate Inca state installations in the
Huallaga Valley, away from the royal road. Among them were
such diverse occupations as a shrine of the Cuzco solar cult and
the hamlets where the Incas had relocated the households of the
“thirty couples” sent into this territory to man the “fortresses”
deemed necessary by the state. We still do not know who the
enemies were; unfortunately, such provincial state installations,
as well as others described by Gasparini and Margolies, remain
unexcavated.
Another contribution of the present work is its participation
in an effort that in recent years has attempted to understand
Andean civilization through minute research into particular
human activities, in this case building and architectural tech-
nology.
It is not a matter simply of providing better catalogues of
the materials resulting from metallurgical, textile, ceramic, and
agricultural technologies, or inventories of the ways used to
preserve and store, although such compilations would be very
useful. What is being reached for is a perception of the whole of
Andean technology–the result of thousands of years of a local
praxis, obviously successful under extremely difficult environ-
mental circumstances, without parallel on other continents. If
we seriously aim to fathom this achievement, in ways to allow
comparison with, let us say, the one recorded by Joseph Needham
for China, we will have to go beyond the data provided by pollen
analysis or thermoluminescence. We will require parallel efforts
to understand the economic, social, and political formations that
allowed the efficient use of human energy in the Andes.
xi