2. Study of the Andean past is similar in important ways to that of other areas of the world but also includes emphases that are more specific to the Andes.
3. As always the study of the past in the present involves making a number of arbitrary organizational decisions and conceptual assumptions. In the Andean case, as generally in archaeology, the challenge is to recreate a time frame for past culture, achieving this at a major distance in time and cultural affinity.
4. Time and its relationship to Culture is conceptualized in three complementary, but distinct ways in the Andes:
- Archaeology
- Ethnohistory
- Ethnology
1. Uses material remains to recreate the past as a succession of identifiable cultural periods within which change does not appear to occur. In this approach change occurs through sudden transformations of the otherwise static situation and is often explained in cataclysmic terms (conquest, migration, environmental disaster). This enables construction of the long-term process, but not necessarily precise historic development or events.
2. A century of Andean archaeology since Max Uhle, followed by a succession of “culture historians” has focused for much of the time on the study of the distinctive ceramic styles (with decorative and narrative/ideological content) that are abundant in both coast and highlands. Only in the last 20 years has there been sustained attempts to use architecture as the principal vehicle for addressing issues of demography, social organization and political construction.
3. This has led to the construction of often-precise ceramic sequences, especially for the Andean coastal cultures. While these are extremely useful for chronological construction their use for social analysis has been limited. Thus the organizational framework for Andean archaeology comprises a number of elaborate “Culture Chronologies” that equate ceramic styles with “Archaeological Cultures” and assume that they reflect real cultural entities whose time and space existence is denoted by the distribution of the specific associated style. This is a questionable assumption.
4. The best known sequences are from the north and south-central coasts where scholars like Uhle, Kroeber, Willey, Ford, Strong, Evans, Larco Hoyle, and Rowe worked in the first half of the 20th century. John Rowe elaborated the south-central sequence into a general organizational framework for the entire central Andes with his Horizon-Intermediate Period scheme that saw a series of static periods of widespread contact separated by longer periods of region development. This attempt to construct a “neutral and objective” chronological scheme replaced a number of more interpretational schemes based on older views of the evolution and progress of civilization (“formative-florescent-decadent”) or cultural achievement (“village-city builder-empire”) and is still in general use today. However, it is purely ceramic-based and comes from the extreme “culture-historical” concept of the past, downplaying social analysis.
5. More recently settlement pattern studies and specific large-site excavation has widened the scope of Andean archaeology to include demographic, economic, social, and political issues. Again this commenced on the north coast with the Virú Valley Project and continued through a series of follow-up settlement pattern studies and large site excavations (Chanchan, Moche, Pampa Grande, Galindo, San Jose, Huaca el Brujo, Sipan, Huaca de la Luna).
6. The later architectural center studies are combined with iconographic analysis (especially Donnan) to examine the nature of Andean ideology and statecraft. This has been focused on the abundant North Coast and South Central Highland inventories with their wealth of religious-ideological narrative art and great political centers.
1. Ethnohistory in the Andes concerns the study of a past people through the use of information written about them by their European conquerors or related to these newcomers by the indigenous people themselves.
2. The challenge for users of this material is to read through the various forms of bias and cultural-distinct meaning and finds “real” information about the past.
a. Time
1. Western conception of time is unilinear from Creation (or Big Bang) to the indefinite future. Time progresses inevitably and unvaryingly along this linear path along which historic events are distributed and organized by their historic position. However, Andean time is cyclical. Great cycles of time recur and events with them. Thus the inevitable sequence of Western history may not always be valid for interpreting Andean narratives of history literally.
2. Western Positivist history sees the historian as able to overcome any limitations set by other cultural conception – this is questionable. On the other hand Realist history accepts that it cannot always “recreate” the past as it really was. However, by understanding the conceptual structures by which different people view time and history the historian can achieve a general sense of their experience – in cyclical terms consciousness of the directionality in itself provides the means of decoding testimony about the events.
3. Andean people use myth to a greater extent than modern Western scholars to understand their cosmos and their past. Myths are the unchanging stories that explain human relationship with the cosmos. These include the origins and history of human groups, their relationship with their sacred places, their internal group organization, and their “fate.” Such sacred stories transcend time and can be reprised through ritual as part of the regular renewal of the community. Such myths were sometimes misunderstood by the Spanish as historic events.
4. The myths are “historic” in the Andean sense in that they interpret the situations, events and change related in the myth as manifestations of fixed structural relationships which exist beyond time and behind all experienced realities.
b. The Chronicles
1. The Spanish descriptions of Andean history and peoples – the so-called Chronicles were written by conquering soldiers or by intense Roman Catholic priests, determined to extirpate idolatry and heathenism and replace it with the only true religion. Two of their goals were to destroy indigenous governing structure and eliminate local religion. Such writers were not naturally inclined to have interest in the past of their subjects. Consequently they either omitted large themes of Andean society or misunderstood the narratives that they did record.
2. Thus Chronicles record Inca history as a series of inter-community political clashes and down play wider issues of economic structure, except as it could be useful for establishing their own land claims, social organization because they did not understand the indigenous moiety system with its emphasis on reciprocity and balance, and ideological/religious themes except to assert their pagan aspects.
3. The Chronicles largely interpret Andean society in Western terms as a highly stratified society headed by a central imperial government. There is little understanding of the very distinct social structure with the Andean ideological dynamics of social integration and change, which shaped very different economic, social and administrative systems.
4. Given the belief that Andean religion was idolatrous and to be destroyed, there was no attempt to understand this crucial element that influenced every aspect of Andean social existence.
5. Inca apologists were equally biased, depicting indigenous society and history in idealized terms of the “Golden Age,” thus eliminating critical analysis and much important historical and integrative information with it.
6. However, the Chronicles with all of their bias, are important in providing a cultural and historic context within which to approach a study of the late pre-European period and to project its structural attributes back into earlier times. They are at their best when describing the geography and physical appearance of the Andes and its settlements at the point of contact. This directly augments the archaeological (descriptive) record.
c.
Bureaucratic Documents
1. There is a vast body of administrative and judicial records from the early Colonial period that provide good objective information of the period and indigenous people’s land-ownership, community membership etc.
2. As court and administrative documents, with the needs of such documents for accuracy and factual information, these record are much more objective and factual than the Chronicles.
3. Thus the need for the Crown officials to understand the social organization of Andean communities for labor and goods taxation, for family size and constitution (census), and “legal” land ownership settlement and expropriation, led to the production of much objective data on these important topics.
4. Consequently we have lists of entire communities and the familial and systemic relationships between their members, their land holdings and authority structure.
1. Ethnology examines existing traditional groups to try to understand their cultures and the past experiential process that must have produced them in their present-day aspects.
2. Such attributes as kinship, religious belief and economy can be studied in this way and the results projected into the past as a guide to examining historic and archaeological evidence of the ancestors of the same groups.
3. Ideally this approach permits the scholar to know the worldviews, and distinctive strategies of everyday life employed by the subject societies.
4. The danger in applying this approach too simplistically is that it may not take into account either cultural discontinuity in the past, or the considerable and ongoing change that effects all communities through time. Although culture is very tenacious, it does change according to the active intervention of social players.