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358 Pages·1980·204.51 MB·English
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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

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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 histor
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