Ebook: Inca Ceremonial Sites in the Southwest Titicaca Basin (Puno, Peru)

TAWANTINSUYU, as the Incas called their empire,
grew in perhaps a hundred years (ca. AD 1430-
1532) to encompass a huge territory of numerous ecological zones and peoples with diverse
customs, languages, economies, and political institutions. The Incas relied on religious ideology
as one important element of imperial control
over this vast and varied area. Ethnohistoric
documents describe a concerted Inca policy of
religious incorporation of the provinces (e.g.,
Cobo 1979:191 [1653: Bk. 12 Ch. 231, 1990 [1653];
MacCormack 1991:98-118; Rowe 1946:293-314,
1982; Valera 1950:145). The subject people's local
divinities, or huacas, were assimilated into Inca
state control, and subjects were gathered to engage in Inca rituals at pilgrimage centers or state
festivals at Cuzco. Inca state ritual was also
brought to the provinces and was performed in
sun temples built at provincial centers, at local
festivals, and at special state ceremonies (such as
the capacocha, or sacrifice ceremony) that were
performed away from the center. Nevertheless,
the ethnohistoric record gives us an incomplete
and Cuzco-centric view of the way religion
worked on the ground in the empire. A close examination of the archaeological record can illuminate the ways in which religious ideology in
Tawantinsuyu interacted with, rather than supplanted or ignored, the preexisting cosmologies,
ritual practices, and shrines of its new provinces.
This chapter looks at the archaeological
manifestations of religion, ideology, and ritual in
an Inca province by compiling the results of surface survey and incorporating previous research
on Inca period ceremonial sites in the southwestern Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru. This region
was important to the Incas, both politically as
the home of the rich, populous, and powerful
Lupaca and Colla ethnic groups, and religiously,
because it was the doorway to the famous Inca
pilgrimage center on the Islands of the Sun and
Moon. Analysis of the style, size, and placement
of ceremonial sites in the Lupaca region suggests
that Inca administrators did not mandate ceremonial site construction merely as a wholesale
imposition of Inca ideology, but took many other
factors into account, including previous nonInca traditions of worship. Furthermore, it is
likely that some sites were constructed and
modified at least partly by local workers without Inca supervision. This general picture of inclusion and accommodation contrasts with more
rigid class exclusion at the sanctuary on the Island of the Sun itself. These little-known sites
and their relation to the Island of the Sun sanctuary give us a window into the inner mechanisms
of outwardly monolithic, legitimizing ideologies. In practice, in the Titicaca Basin, as perhaps
everywhere, ideology was shaped and contested
by countless agents of greater and lesser power. .