Cusco

Urbanism and Archaeology in the Inka World

Bibliographic Data

ID2808170
AuthorsPatricia Morgado (0000-0001-7461-2745, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume94
Issue2
Pages311-313
Publication date2014-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2641343
OpenAlexW2313909231
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Unlike most of its contemporary cities in the Western world, Cuzco, the capital of Tawantinsuyu (the Inca Empire), was carefully designed as the seat of the government and residence for the Inca elite. From ca. 1438, when Inca Pachacutec began planning the city, to 1533, when the first Spaniards visited the area, the site was transformed into a grid city featuring plazas, palaces, temples, and over 4,000 residential units. While the city's scale and design, as well as the quality of its constructions, astonished its conquerors, by the 1590s Cuzco had been stripped and remodeled into a Spanish city to accommodate the spatial needs of its new inhabitants. Only a number of walls survived, making the reconstruction of its original physiognomy virtually impossible. Despite its archaeological relevance, research on Inca Cuzco has been customarily embedded in academic texts, such as Graziano Gasparini and Luise Margolies's Inca Architecture (1980), or in UNESCO-sponsored reports regarding the city's conservation, such as Santiago Agurto Calvo's Cusco: La traza urbana de la ciudad inca (1980). Thanks to the various archaeological excavations that since the late 1980s began uncovering building foundations, it is now possible for scholars to envision the spatial organization of the Inca capital. In this context, Ian Farrington's Cusco: Urbanism and Archaeology in the Inka World is the first comprehensive scholarly text that uses archaeological data and historical descriptions to analyze the making, development, and urban life of Cuzco during the Inca period (AD 1000–1534). Additionally, it is an excellent complement to Brian Bauer's Ancient Cuzco: Heartland of the Inca (2004), a text that studies the city within a broader area (the Cuzco Valley) and a larger historical period (10,000 BC–AD 1880).Farrington begins by introducing the readers to Cuzco's physical and historical context (pre-Inca and Inca urban precedents, and Inca urban architecture) and to the methodology he will deploy (chapters 1–4). Following this introduction, chapter 5 is dedicated to the analysis of Cuzco's urban historical topography from its origins to the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the urban historical topography specific to the Inca period is absent, while Farrington's interesting account of the city's planning — a task that required canalizing rivers, terracing land, and identifying qualified labor and sources for building material — is introduced earlier, in chapter 3. Chapters 6–8 are dedicated to the study of the city's form and address aspects that range from the general (the plan, the size and orientation of streets, and the arrangement of public spaces) to the specific (for example, the use of Inca urban components, particularly the kancha — a walled compound of units organized around a courtyard — and the Inca linear measuring system of waska, rikra, and sikya). By classifying excavation finds into three groups — domestic, craft, and funerary artifacts — Farrington proposes a hypothesis of urban (and suburban) life in chapters 9–11. The urban symbolism of Cuzco, an important topic when discussing Inca culture, is discussed in chapter 12. Finally, the author offers his conclusions in chapter 13.While the book provides the general reader interested in Inca culture a comprehensive and well-organized study, it lacks basic general references (i.e., a list of the Inca rulers and a timeline of the Inca period) that could be very useful, particularly to those less familiar with pre-Hispanic Peru. More worrisome is the inconsistency between the author's claim to have applied “town plan analysis” — a methodology that uses cartography to understand the changes of a city over time as well as the impact on (and from) social forms — and the cartography included in the book. There is no doubt that the city's urban historical topography is presented in textual form, but the incompleteness and irregularity of the maps and building plans make it difficult to visualize for Cuzco connoisseurs and nonexperts alike. In most of, if not all, the maps, several streets, block numbers, buildings, and neighborhoods referenced in the text are not labeled. Additionally, these maps do not include hydrographic and topographic information that can help the reader understand the dramatic landscape surrounding the city. This becomes particularly critical due to the fact that the author frequently alludes to structures by their address, block number, or current business or institutional name. Consequently, to complete the missing information, the reader is obliged to resort to other sources that range from city maps to academic texts such as those previously mentioned by Gasparini and Margolies and by Bauer. As for building plans, architectural conventions are improperly applied, creating a discrepancy between images and texts. Such is the case in chapter 10, where Farrington discusses the trapezoidal fenestration to the south of the main structure in the neighborhood of Qolqampata and the plan conveys a solid wall (p. 256). Correcting these observations in a revised edition of the book would help the quality of the text even further.While Farrington might not demonstrate the use of the methodology he claims, the rich analysis presented in this first edition will reward those readers interested in Inca Cuzco

Archaeology · Capital (architecture) · Capital city · Context (archaeology) · Elite · Excavation · Geography · Political science · Politics · Residence · Sociology · Urbanism · Architecture · History · Latin American history and culture

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