The Inca Empire was the last and largest of a long sequence of Andean civilisations stretching back to the third millennium BC. The standard mistake of casual history is to treat the Inca as the indigenous Andean civilisation of which all the other archaeological cultures are forerunners. The Inca themselves did not see it that way. They were a small Quechua-speaking polity in the southern Peruvian highlands who, within a century, conquered and absorbed a number of older and (in many respects) more sophisticated cultures, took over their administrative practices and engineering technologies, and built an empire on the foundation of what they had inherited. The chapter that follows briefly sketches that inheritance, because the Inca state cannot be understood without it.
The early urban cultures
The earliest substantial urban site in the Americas is Caral, in the Supe Valley about 200 km north of Lima on the Peruvian Pacific coast. Caral is contemporary with the early Mesopotamian cities — the principal occupation dates between 2600 and 2000 BC — and the site contains monumental architecture (six platform mounds, including the Great Pyramid that rises 28 metres above the valley floor), a central plaza, residential terraces, and a system of irrigation canals fed from the Supe river. Caral and the related Norte Chico sites have been the principal evidence, since their excavation by Ruth Shady from the 1990s, for the independent emergence of urban civilisation in the Andes — a process that began approximately contemporaneously with comparable developments in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and substantially earlier than the urban cultures of Mesoamerica.
The Andean civilisations that followed (the so-called Initial Period, c. 1800–900 BC, and the Early Horizon, c. 900–200 BC) shared a number of distinctive features that would persist through the Inca period and beyond: an agricultural base in maize, potatoes, quinoa, beans, cotton, and (on the coast) substantial marine resources; the use of llamas and alpacas as pack animals and wool sources; substantial irrigation engineering on the coast and terracing in the highlands; a religious and political organisation centred on monumental ceremonial complexes; and a textile tradition that, in the absence of writing, served as the principal medium for the transmission of cultural and religious information.
Chavín
The first culture to spread its religious and artistic style over a substantial portion of the central Andes was Chavín, centred on the highland temple complex of Chavín de Huántar at about 3,200 metres in the north-central Peruvian highlands. The principal occupation runs from about 900 to 200 BC, with the major monumental construction of the temple and the Lanzón stone monolith dating to the period 750-500 BC. The Chavín style — with its characteristic feline, serpent, and condor iconography rendered in symmetrically reversible forms — is found in pottery, textiles, and stone carving across a region from Lambayeque in the north to Ayacucho in the south. The mechanism of Chavín cultural spread is debated; the most widely accepted current interpretation is that Chavín de Huántar functioned as a regional pilgrimage centre rather than as the capital of a political state.
The Moche
The Moche civilisation of the north Peruvian coast (roughly 100–800 AD) is one of the best-documented pre-Inca Andean cultures, both because of its sophisticated portrait pottery (the so-called Moche stirrup-spout vessels, with realistic individual portrait heads that constitute the most extensive surviving body of pre-Columbian portraiture in the Americas) and because of the spectacular royal burials excavated by Walter Alva from 1987 at Sipán. The Sipán tombs of the so-called Lords of Sipán — undisturbed by looters, fully assembled in 1987-1995 — contain gold, silver, copper, turquoise, and shell artefacts of extraordinary technical sophistication, and have transformed the historical understanding of Moche political organisation. The Moche state (or, more accurately, the network of Moche-style polities in the coastal valleys) declined in the late seventh and eighth centuries, probably under a combination of severe El Niño events that disrupted the irrigation agriculture and pressure from the highland Wari state to the south.
Tiwanaku and Wari
The two great Andean states of the so-called Middle Horizon (c. 600–1000 AD) were Tiwanaku (centred on the highland site of the same name at 3,850 metres on the Bolivian altiplano, near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca) and Wari (centred near modern Ayacucho in the central Peruvian highlands). The two cultures were related but distinct, and the relationship between them is one of the most-debated questions in Andean archaeology. Both states exercised extensive territorial control through a combination of military, religious, and administrative means. Both developed substantial monumental architecture (the Akapana pyramid at Tiwanaku; the storage-and-administration complex at Pikillaqta near Cuzco). Both established systems of regional governance that the Inca would later inherit.
The Wari state, in particular, developed two specific institutional features that the Inca would adopt directly: the network of state-controlled storehouses (the Inca would call them qollqas) for tax-in-kind agricultural products, and the system of state-organised forced labour service (the Inca would call it mita), in which subject populations owed periods of labour to the state rather than monetary tribute. Both states collapsed in the period 900-1100 AD for reasons that are still debated; the standard interpretation involves a combination of regional drought and political fragmentation.
The Chimú
The largest pre-Inca state in the Andes was the Chimú Empire, with its capital at Chan Chan on the north coast of Peru (near modern Trujillo). Chimú flourished from about 900 to 1470 AD and at its height controlled the entire north Peruvian coast from Tumbes to Lima — a strip about 1,000 kilometres long. Chan Chan itself, with its nine great compound walls and an estimated population of perhaps 30,000-60,000, was the largest pre-Columbian city in South America. The Chimú were skilled metallurgists, irrigation engineers, and administrators. The cultural relationship of the Chimú to the older Moche is direct (the Chimú were, in many respects, the institutional successors of the late Moche polities).
The Chimú state was the principal rival of the early Inca Empire. It was conquered by the Inca prince Topa Inca in approximately 1470 — a campaign that involved the diversion of the Chimú's irrigation canals to break the agricultural base of the coastal civilisation. The Chimú ruling class was deported to Cuzco, where their craftsmen were assigned to the Inca court. Chan Chan was systematically depopulated. The institutional memory of the Chimú, however, was substantial; many Chimú administrative practices were directly absorbed by the Inca state.
The cultural background of the Inca
The small Quechua-speaking polity that emerged in the Cuzco valley in the early fifteenth century was, in this context, a latecomer to Andean civilisation. The Inca did not invent monumental stone architecture (they inherited the Tiwanaku tradition through the Lake Titicaca region). They did not invent the road network (they inherited and expanded a system whose Wari and Chimú origins are now archaeologically clear). They did not invent the mita labour service (the Wari system was its direct precursor). They did not invent the textile-based information system (it was an Andean cultural feature from the Initial Period onward). What the Inca did invent was the political and military system by which all of these inherited technologies were combined into a single state of unprecedented territorial scale.
The story of how that combination happened — the rise of the Cuzco kingdom under Pachacuti in the 1430s and 1440s — is the subject of the next chapter.
End of Chapter I