The Inca

At the start of The Inca, archaeologist Kevin Lane questions whether his subject should be included in a book series on lost civilizations given that the “descendents of the original communities are still with us today, separated by only a meagre five hundred . . . years from their ancestors” (p. 16). It is a smart nod. This is not simply because, as historians know, Inca nobles and subjects were hardly lost—their descendants reinvented their rights and traditions to survive the assault on their sovereignty by the Spanish. But it also allows the reader to exhale and appreciate that this taut eight-chapter book is among the best overviews of pre-1532 Inca archaeology and ethnohistory in recent years.Such a synthesis is welcome. As Lane explains in a good second chapter on the timing of Inca expansion, archaeologists and ethnohistorians must engage in what we could call the epistemology of Inca empire: how we know what we know about what any individual Inca leader did before 1532, what his royal house and rivals claimed he did or didn't do, and what Spanish chroniclers misattributed in their attempt to conform Andean history to European narratives of Christian sovereigns and pagan tyrants. These are challenges relevant to most colonial histories, but the particularities of Inca modes of conveying the past—inscribing and embodying royal narratives in knotted records (khipus) and preserved ancestors (yllapas) reanimated with speech and song—are so intellectually compelling that their foregrounding can sometimes block out the wider imperial terrain of which they were a part. The attraction of Lane's book, then, to expert and general reader alike, is his grounding presentation of the cultural, pastoral, and technological resources of Inca rule, as well as the ideology that illuminated them.Its first six chapters are well structured to that end. A first chapter on the geography and pre-Inca history of the Andes is strong, as is the next chapter's review of the evidence (both recent and nearly a century old) for an empire already expanding well before 1438, the date proposed by archaeologist John Rowe. The next four chapters are the gems of the book: “Authority, Religion and Ideology,” “Technology and Architecture,” “Feeding an Empire,” and “Inca Political Power.” These excellent summations, informed by Lane's own expertise in pastoralism and political ecology, show how the Inca empire refashioned millennia of Andean ecological innovation into a powerful political and religious tool. Lane shows how the Inca “over-engineered” their carrying capacity (p. 81), both literally and figuratively: how they entwined biotechnologies of llama caravanning, road-building and storage infrastructure, and the husbandry of water, labor, and sacred products so as to sustain their claim to be empire-wide fertilizers, solar activators, and redistributors.To be clear, Lane has no interest in reviving narratives of an Inca utopia. Yet The Inca is at heart interested in why theirs was, for a time, one of the world's largest empires, before regional resistance, wars of succession, the decay of infrastructures owing to population collapse, and the invasion of Europeans and alien historical modes made that “why” easier to disbelieve. Lane's answers only add depth to the momentous nature of the post-1532 decision of jaded subjects to bargain with those invaders—whose own initial awe cannot be taught to our students solely as a rhetorical device.The Inca has other strengths. It attends to the pre-Hispanic role of Inca women and siblings, keeping alive important structuralist debates over the multiplicity of Inca rule. Lane contrasts US researchers' tendency to found “hegemonic interpretative schools and narratives” of the Inca with those of researchers outside North America, whose methodological diversity can offer far more “radical” and creative scholarship (pp. 184–85). But if this historian has a critique—beyond an unease with invocations of “civilization” and “Bronze Age” prehistory—it is that resort to similarly creative and methodologically diverse work by scholars of history, art, and literature like Alberto Flores Galindo, Kathryn Burns, Gonzalo Lamana, José Carlos de la Puente, Sara Vicuña Guengerich, Jeremy Mikecz, and Carolyn Dean might have improved the book's final two chapters, “Crisis, Pandemic and Collapse” and “The Past in the Present.” These chapters do not lose the Incas, but their occasional post-1532 portrayal as noble but “effectively paralysed” or as quixotic if not “feckless” (pp. 158, 171) is belied by these other scholars' efforts to explain how a diversity of Inca and non-Inca actors attempted to remake the Spanish empire in their own image and thereby survived. That scholarship, for example, keeps Inca women visible and makes clear the problem with accepting Spanish claims that “Inca princesses” were simply “mistresses” or informants (p. 44); both sexual violence and struggles against it need to be named.Still, that they can be named in part by referring to Lane's excellent review of Inca structures speaks to this book's usefulness. Lane's closing acknowledgments to this very good book invoke British archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume's self-effacing framing of archaeology as “Handmaiden to History” (p. 197). It's not too much to think toward another metaphor—one less modest but also less hierarchical, where each is illuminated by the other

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnohistory · Foregrounding · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Subject (documents) · Classics · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

• New Book Chronicle

  Open Access•Claire Nesbitt•Antiquity•2022

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