Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas: the political economy of north Andean chiefdoms 9780511870026, 9780521302999, 9780521040495

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of tables, figures, and maps (page xi)
Preface (page xiii)
Acknowledgments (page xvii)
Introduction (page 1)
1. The problem of the "páramo Andes" (page 21)
2. The llajtakuna (page 45)
3. Local and exotic components of llajta economy (page 72)
4. Interzonal articulation (page 97)
5. The dimensions and dynamics of chiefdom polities (page 116)
6. The Incaic impact (page 143)
7. Quito in comparative perspective (page 187)
Notes (page 219)
Glossary (page 237)
References (page 242)
Index (page 269)

Citation preview

Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology

General Editor: Jack Goody

59

NATIVE LORDS OF QUITO IN THE AGE OF THE INCAS

For other titles in this series turn to p. 275.

od e e

Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas The political economy of north Andean chiefdoms FRANK SALOMON University of Wisconsin, Madison

one a _The right of the | Sass) | cones MEST at] | lumen of tok "he Henry VIiIl in 1534.

Roya | Sir Ree 44 since 1384. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge

London New York New Rochelle Melbourne Sydney

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo

Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/978052 1302999

© Cambridge University Press 1986 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1986 This digitally printed version 2007

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Salomon, Frank Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas. (Cambridge studies in social anthropology; no. 59) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Indians of South America — Ecuador — Quito Region —

Politics and government. 2. Indians of South America — Ecuador — Quito Region — Economic conditions. 3. Incas — Politics and government. 4. Quito Region (Ecuador) —

History. I. Title. II. Series. F3721.Q55825 1986 986.6'13 85-5761 ISBN 978-0-521-30299-9 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-04049-5 paperback

FOR LAUREL

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Contents

Preface X11 Acknowledgments XVI

List of tables, figures, and maps page xi

Introduction 1 On the practice of ethnohistory 2 Scope of the study 9 The sources 10

Criticism and evaluation of the visitas 13 1. The problem of the “paramo Andes” 21

Central Andean and north Andean civilizations 22

The Quito region as a north Andean habitat 29 Vertical tiers of the inter-Andean Guayllabamba Basin 35 Vertical tiers of the outer slopes (western cordillera) 40

Complexity and the pdramo Andes 42

2. The llajtakuna 45 Locating the /lajtakuna ecologically and chronologically 45

The humid inter-Andean valleys 51

The dry inter-Andean valleys64 59 Bocas de montana

The Yumbo country 65 The regional economic constellation 70 3. Local and exotic components of /lajta economy 72

The maize complex: local popular staples 73 The hunting complex: local sumptuary goods 81

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Contents

The Yumbo complex: exotic popular goods -— cotton 83

capsicum pepper 88

The Yumbo complex: exotic popular goods -—salt and

Coca and wealth objects: exotic sumptuary goods 89 The hierarchy of goods and the political hierarchy 95

4.The Interzonal articulation 97 “tiangueces”: centralized exchange 97 The mindaldes: “merchant Indians” 102

Amazonian contacts 108 Kamayujkuna: archipelago elements 111

The Yumbos: exchange at the level of domestic units 106

articulation 114

Specialized and nonspecialized modes of interzonal

5. The dimensions and dynamics of chiefdom polities 116

Demographic scale of the chiefdoms 117 Political organization 122 The image and ideology of native lordship 124

The revenue sources of lordly households 127 Political authority, marriage, and inheritance 131

Supralocal organization 134 How politically complex were north Andean chiefdoms? 138

Evidence from Quito and theories of chiefdom 140

6.Incaic The Incaic impact 143 Quito 144 The apparatus of coercion and defense: fortifications 148

way Stations 151

The apparatus of transport and communication: roads and

The apparatus of social control: mitmajkuna 158 The annexation of aboriginal elements in the Inca center 167

The tribute apparatus 169 Imposition and diffusion of Incaic culture 172

Reactions to the Inca presence 180

7. Quito in comparative perspective 187

Degrees of Incaiccase impact192 188 The Puruha The Otavalan case 201

The Pasto case 205 Toward a comparative synthesis 212 Vili

Notes 219 Glossary 237 References | 242 Index 269 Contents

1X

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Tables, figures, and maps

TABLES

1, Names and areas of the highland basins of Ecuador page 32

2. Average temperatures, Province of Pichincha 36

3. Forasteros (resident nonlocal aborigines) 113

4. The visita in figures 119 5. Yumbo population c. 1580 121

6. Yanakuna (servitors) as percentage of population 128 FIGURES

1. (Detail of) Carta de la provincia de Quito y sus adiacentes

por Don Pedro Maldonado 11

2. “Landscape belts” of the tropical Andes 23 3. Vertical distribution of climates with freezing temperatures in the tropical Andes, with relation to the upper limit of

agriculture and the level of permanent snow cover 25

4. Vegetation profiles of the tropical Andes 26

5. East-west profiles, Ecuador 30 6. Basins of the Ecuadorian highlands 31

7. North-south profiles of the Ecuadorian highlands 33

8. Classifications of north Andean environments 37

9. Scheme of subregional divisions 47 10. The Quito basin 50 11. Valleys of Machachi and los Chillos 53

12. Altiplano (high plain) of Quito 58 13. Some sites of medium- and long-distance exchange activity 98

14. Schematic reconstruction of pre-Hispanic road net 159 xl

Tables, figures, and maps MAPS

1. Humid inter-Andean valleys 52

2. inter-Andean valleys64 60 3.Dry Bocas de montana 4. Yumbo country in western foothills and lowlands 65

Xi

Preface

If I had not happened to begin my Andean travels twenty years ago in what were once the rebellious hinterlands of the Inca empire, perhaps I would have shared most travelers’ fascination with that ready-made “Andean world” about which the Incas still posthumously indoctrinate visitors

to southern Peru. Instead, an Andeanist education that began at the periphery awoke me to something less familiar than the Inca empire, and, in my eyes, equally remarkable. This was the endurance, after some five centuries’ alien imperial rule both Inca and Spanish, of Ecuadorian “Indian” collectivities still recognizably continuous with pre-Inca groups.

How has it come about that the historical project of being “Canari,” “Caranqui,” etc., went forward through so many episodes of domination, lacking as it did the armor of statecraft? In principle, it was possible to do this achievement the homage of study via any of several Ecuadorian cases, but Quito had some advantages: a

rich document record, relevance to major problems in both Inca and colonial studies, and the opportunity to combine archive work with residence in a Quichua-speaking village. Another reason for concentrating on Quito was that unlike adjacent “Indian” groups (in the regions of Otavalo and Riobamba, for example), whose societies appear distinctive to nonnative eyes because their cultures happen to include many traits we construe as “ethnic markers,” the Quichua-speaking people of Pichincha Province have been all but totally neglected by ethnography. Quito, a city hungry for knowledge of its native antecedents, has so far contrived not to notice its native contemporaries.

The scene of this study may be defined historically as the colonial “corregimiento of the five leagues of Quito,” that is, the jurisdiction bounded by a five-league radius around the city; or geographically, as the inter-Andean basin of the Guayllabamba River (“hoya de Quito,” “cuen-

ca del Guayllabamba”) plus the western slopes of the western cordillera between the Guayllabamba’s left bank and the Rio Toachi, as far as Xili

Preface |

the lower foothills and the easternmost part of the littoral plain; or politically, as the modern Province of Pichincha, Ecuador, with the exception of its westernmost reaches beyond approximately longitude 79° west. The vagueness of the western border is inherent in the loose definitions used in early colonial sources, which in turn reflect incomplete conquest and exploration of the Andean foothills.

To the traveler, this area presents a startling contrast between the steamy rain forests and dizzying mountain ramparts of its western part, and the cool, bright countryside of the high inter-Andean valley. Since there are cultural differences as marked as the geographical ones, most

visitors are surprised to learn that the rain forest and the high interAndean plateaus counted as a single political unit during the colony (except for a short interval in the eighteenth century) and during the republic. After long study I am convinced that there is nothing arbitrary in this association, and that their unity is deeply rooted in prehistory. The study has been based on the exclusive use of early colonial written sources. Preferentially I have used documents of the pre-Toledan era, 1534-1569, since these depict indigenous society before it was deformed by extensive forced resettlement in artificial nucleated villages. However, where sufficient data of this period are lacking, I have admitted some sources up to 1600, and a few later than 1600 for topics where Hispanisms are easilly detected (notably crop lists). In general textual translations have been preferred over paraphrases or summaries, in spite of the cumbersome language of the originals, in order to permit readers an independent judgment on the meaning of the texts. Unless otherwise noted the translations are my own. For all extended passages the original text is given in endnotes. The following rules have governed the treatment of primary sources:

Paleography: Where paleographic transcriptions by other authors are used, their respective systems have been left intact. Suspected errors have not been corrected unless comparison texts were available. In particular, readers should bear in mind that the texts cited to the Colleccié6n Vacas Galindo (CVG) are often defective in paleography and that they should ideally be compared with their originals. For this purpose the equivalent siglas (classification numbers) of the Archivo General de Indias, as given

by Vacas Galindo (in the old AGI classification), are included in the References. Where the paleographic transcriptions were made afresh, the criterion

was to conserve the text as much as possible, modernizing only in the following aspects: (1) Abbreviations were expanded; for example, “mag®” becomes “magestad.” (2) The initial letters of place names and names of persons are rendered in capitals. (3) The initial rr has been replaced by r. XIV

Preface The following sixteenth-century characteristics have been conserved: pagination by folios, to which the signs r and v have been added to indicate recto and verso sides respectively; the absence of punctuation and written accents; the cedilla (¢); and the nonstandardized orthography of numerous words, including some proper nouns.

Quichua and Hispano-Quichua usages: Following modern local pronunciation, the Quito-area dialect has been called Quichua, the Cuzco dialect Quechua. In words belonging to the technical vocabluary of Inca government the contrast of simple, glottalized, and aspirated stops has been signaled with zero, apostrophe, and quotation marks respectively: k/k’/k”, etc. Neither this series nor the k/g (velar/postvelar) contrast can

be established as existing in early colonial Quito Quichua from the evidence in hand, and no attempt has been made to render them in local anthroponyms and toponyms. In order to avoid confusion between indigenous terminology and Spanish terms derived from indigenous words, which never denote the exact

original meaning, quotation marks and italic have been used to signal Hispano-Quichuisms and other pseudo-ethnological words, while the true indigenous vocabulary is signaled with italic only. For example, “mita” refers to conscript labor under the Spanish regime, mit’a to cyclical labor under the Inca system. References: Published sources are cited in American Anthropologist style, using square brackets to indicate date of original publication or comple-

tion of manuscript if widely different from publication date. The same system has been modified for citation of unpublished manuscripts, in the following fashion: in, for example (AGI/S Justicia 671:f.61v-—68r), AGI/S

means Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla; Justicia 671 the document packet from which the material is extracted; and f.61v—68r the folio location. At the corresponding entry in the References, date and content are indicated. There are three exceptions to this system: the visita of 1559 is

cited (M y SM 1559), the visita of 1557 is cited (M y R 1557), and the letter of instruction for the two visitas is cited (Ramirez 1557). The list of archive abbreviations appears at the beginning of the References, in which both published and unpublished sources are listed. { hope to publish the principal manuscript sources in the near future.

XV

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Acknowledgments

This book is the product of a long and on the whole happy journey through the communities, archives, and universities of several countries, originally resulting in a doctoral dissertation (Ethnic Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas, Cornell University 1978) and now in a revised, updated text with translations of all non-English sources. During this venture it was my good fortune time and again to meet people who gave their help

with an open hand. It was, especially, a boon to enjoy the unfailing support of Dr. John V. Murra. This study was nourished by the example of his incomparable devotion not only to Andean research, but to the cause of Andean peoples. I am also deeply indebted to my other academic advisors, Dr. Davydd Greenwood and Dr. Donald F. Sola. Dr. Greenwood, who taught the uses of anthropological self-awareness, and Dr. Sol4, who opened my way into the world of Andean speech, greatly improved the fruits of research by sticking to their critical guns. The support of the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Quito was of great value over several years. For this thanks are due to its Director, Arquitecto Hernan Crespo Toral. An equally cordial vote of thanks is due to P. José Maria Vargas, Curator of the Dominican Archive in Quito, who patiently put at my disposal the resources of the Coleccién Vacas Galindo. The archivists and librarians who guided my way into the Andean past are almost too numerous to name, but among them I wish to thank especially Licenciado Alfredo Costales Samaniego, former Director of the Archivo Nacional de Historia, Quito, and Dr. Juan Freile-Granizo, the current Director, whose generosity in helping me find and decipher documents there was a valuable aid. Sra. Rosario Parra, Directora, and Sra. Maria Teresa Garcia, Subdirectora, of the Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, furnished important microfilms by mail. Among the curators of ecclesiastical records my benefactors include P. Julian Bravo §$.J., Librarian of the Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aureliano Espinosa Polit S.J. in Cotocollao, P. Agustin Moreno O.F., who tends Quito’s Franciscan archive, and P. Octavio Proano O.M. of the Mercedarian Monastery. With XVil

Acknowledgments

his customary magnanimity the late Dr. Joseph B. Casagrande of the University of Illinois enabled me to study the microfilms he assembled under National Science Foundation Grant GS1224. In Bonn, West Germany, Dr. Udo Oberem, who has contributed more to the ethnohistory

of Ecuador than any other living person, contributed to this study not only access to the library of the Seminar ftir V6lkerkunde, but also his counsel on many occasions. It is deeply appreciated. Dr. José Alcina Franch of the Universidad de Madrid and his students Antonio Fresco and Lorenzo Lopez provided an opportunity to visit the Inca-Canari site of Ingapirca. The late Carlos Manuel Larrea afforded the memorable gift of a day’s study in his jewellike private library. On many occasions my contemporaries supplied valuable critical 1nsights, moral support, and document leads. Among these were Juan Castro Velasquez, Jorge Marcos, Kathy Klumpp, Joanne Rappaport, Roger Rasnake and Inge Harman Rasnake. Dr. Segundo Moreno Yanez of the Pontificia Universidad Catélica del Ecuador is particularly to be thanked for his meticulous critique of parts of the project. Berta Ares and Licenciado Fernando Plaza Schuller also provided help at key points. While staying in the community of Zambiza, Cant6n Quito, it was my privilege to live among people whose kindness and steadfastness in the face of adversity educated me in a more disciplinary sense. Among these were Manuel Mesias Carrera, a folklorist and lover of Andean music, and the late Angel Gualoto Lincango, who proved a fascinating informant and a good friend. Several people helped prepare the manuscript, among them Maria Teresa Larrea, Betty Osorio, Sally McBrearty, Dorothy Osborne, and Mary Hoffman. At the University of Wisconsin Carol Block, Anne Gunther, Rick Keir, and Bill Kelly supplied computer expertise. Linda Nicholas drew the Figures. Neither my effort nor theirs would have come to fruition without the support of Cornell University and the Fulbright-Hayes Commission, which funded the bulk of the research. Sra. Blanca Alarcé6n Gaybor of Quito generously lodged and fed me and helped through every hardship. It 1s thanks to my parents and grandparents that the pleasures of study have been mine in such lavish measure. To them, the peoples of Ecuador, and especially to Laurel Mark, who always bore the human costs of the enterprise with faith and good cheer, this work is an offering of heartfelt gratitude.

XVill

Introduction

Quito, Ecuador’s metropolis on the Andean heights, has in earlier incarnations been a Spanish colonial city, an Inca provincial capital, and a crossroads of pre-Incaic aboriginal peoples. Most of the remains which Quito’s past has left to us—documents, handiworks, folkloric memories — are palimpsest-like artifacts on which various peoples and ages have left

their messages superimposed. Any scholar, whether anthropologist, archaeologist, or historian, must begin his work with the discovery of their

stratigraphy, separating out superimposed texts. Only then is there a hope of reconstructing past civilizations and the forces that shaped their succession.

But if the record is a palimpsest, it is not one of those on which a miscellany of unrelated texts has been written. Rather, each successive text is, in a sense, a commentary on the preceding ones; and all share a common theme, the relation between the author’s culture and its natural and human environment. Each of the authors has been influenced by the very text which his own writing obscures.

The present work deals with two of these authors substantively, the pre-Incaic aboriginal societies and the Inca empire, and a third heuristically, the Spanish regime through whose records we have some verbal evidence about the first two. Its central goal is to reconstruct the political and economic institutions of the oldest and most obscured stratum, aboriginal Quito.

To Quitefios it will look obvious why the strands of testimony are worth disentangling. The prehispanic origins of their city have proved an almost completely intractable problem, heavily freighted with patriotic emotion and encumbered by old, unforgiving polemics. But its interest has not faded. As an idiographic problem-—an attempt at knowledge of a unique reality—it is fascinating. The present work is intended, among other things, as a vindication of idiographic inquiry, and as a contribution to the Quitefios’ enterprise in historical self-knowledge. But it also addresses some more general themes: First, aboriginal Quito 1

Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas appears a promising case for the study of chiefdoms. Like Polynesia and Central America, the northern Andes offer ethnohistorical evidence of how stratified and centralized but stateless societies functioned. Archae- ologists, who cannot count on recovering the same functional aspects covered in the document record, regard such cases as windows on the emergence of complex society. Like the Polynesian and Central American cases also, Quito-area evidence clarifies likenesses and differences between chiefdom and state by allowing us to observe the two kinds of unit in conflict and (later) in interlocking organization. But unlike the other two, the Quito case presents us with the panorama of an invading state that is non-European. The Inca conquest of aboriginal Quito allows One to consider such phenomena as colonialism, political frontiers, etc., in a more thoroughly comparative light than most others do. Second, the case bears on larger issues in New World prehistory. Ecuador is one of the areas which Willey (1971:254-359) classified in an “Inter-

mediate Area” connecting the Andean and Mesoamerican culture areas but belonging to neither. Is this area “intermediate” only in geography?

The evidence from Quito suggests that it is also “intermediate” in a cultural and organizational sense. Aboriginal institutions in Quito resemble both Aztec and Inca polities, combining traits usually thought of as distinctive to one or the other. It is an old and traditionally evaded question whether South American and Mesoamerican empire-building traditions have a common prehistory. If we can get a clear view of polities that seem ontogenetically prior to either, located halfway between them, we have at a minimum an interesting problem in distinguishing between common origin, independent invention, and contact effects. Third, the case is methodologically interesting. The attempt to reconstruct a social order from testimony obscured by not one but two layers of alien discourse demands some special effort in the way of source criticism and interpretation. That it can be done to any useful degree is a hopeful sign for ethnohistory, since a large number of other nonliterate societies

appear in the document record only through similarly multilayered, many-voiced, culturally distorting testimonies.

On the practice of ethnohistory

Any rendering of the past is, among other things, an exploration of the potentials of the author’s own culture: specifically, of its ability to give its own bearers an intelligible place in the flux of events, and an intelligible relationship to other times and peoples whose foreignness would, if unin-

terpreted, fill the world of thought with chaos and anomaly. Cultures differ profoundly in their ways of doing this. Some have interpreted change and difference in a way irreducibly different from what we call 2

Introduction “history,” by conceiving them sub specie eternitatis, as manifestations of fixed structural relationships which exist, not in prior time as opposed to the present, but beyond time itself and behind all experienced realities. Others have seen past events as outward signs of inherent directionality built into the nature of time, whether cyclical, eschatological, or teleological in an indefinitely progressive sense; consciousness of this direc-

tionality is then itself the means of decoding testimony about events. Variation exists even within recent Western historiography. Some students have adhered to a positivist vision in which time 1s felt to be to some extent transparent, so that the remains of other times and peoples are capable of telling their own story in a way which breaks through and overcomes the limitations of the historian’s own experience. Others, including the present writer, despair of apprehending the past “as it really

happened” in a final sense, and yet see in the study of the past an essentially reflexive value. Although one can only see the past and the foreign in the mirror of one’s own culture, a person who turns that mirror in new directions will see more than just his own reflection; he will see other people using other mirrors. By observing their actions he may be able to create within the limitations of his own culture an awareness, both of how people “make history” through other systems of thought, and of the possibility that the inner content of their action is ultimately beyond

our reach. How great a degree of validity one attaches to these visions depends on how confident one is of knowing the shape and properties of the instruments through which one looks. The value of such study is reflexive in the sense that 1t encourages us to create special instruments anew and examine our old ones. The ethnohistorian dwells at one of the uncomfortable but exhilarating points where all these problems must be kept in constant view. His special instruments for perceiving the foreign past are insights and categories derived from the fieldwork of ethnologists, and whatever confidence may be reposed in them derives from the fact that they were created in a dialogue with the living. Although the conceptual problems of working with live informants are similar to those of interrogating testimony from the past, the element of accident and loss is less destructive, the variety of voices

that can be heard is greater, and therefore the pretension to a holistic picture of a society less unrealistic. The field ethnologist has more opportunities than the historians to seek out situations that will reveal to him where his perception has been influenced by unrecognized cultural premises. For

these reasons such ethnological categories as “chiefdom,” “redistribution,” or /lajta (Andean settlement) are used instead of terms borrowed from the ethnologically untested terminology of traditional historiography. Nonetheless it is necessary to deal consciously with the question of how we propose to reconstruct past institutions ethnologically while working 3

Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas from testimonies whose own terminology and tacit assumptions we may not share or even fully grasp. There is a difference in basic assumptions between the spirit in which the palimpsest-like written record is used here, and the way it has been used by the recompilers who create synthetic narrative histories based on chronicles. A colonial chronicle is a document of at least three strata: the Spanish author has construed in light of his own culture the data offered by Inca informants, or those who knew them, concerning not only Inca but also aboriginal peoples. The modern recompilers have tacitly, perhaps unconsciously, assumed that the best hope for understanding aboriginal cultures is to seize upon the historical kinship which we and the chroniclers share as members of a west European tradition. Our informants may not be Andean themselves, but at least they are people we can hope to understand when they speak of Andean things. There exists an excellent critical literature for this purpose, and there can be no doubt that such study has been fruitful as regards the understanding of colonial origins. But however skillfully one negotiates the cultural bridge between us and the sixteenth-century Castilians, the question remains, How strong is the bridge between their mental image and the Andean world it tried to

apprehend? ,

Each chronicle must be studied individually in this respect. But certain

tenets of the European thought of the period were so universal and deeply rooted as to form latent axioms which cannot help but have influ-

enced their renderings of Andean reality. Since their time our cultural agenda has changed a great deal, and whole new subcultures, among them anthropology, have made new demands on the past. It has become necessary to take into account the likelihood that these latent assumptions color the data in a way which, from our point of view, obscures precisely the points we most urgently want to explore. Quite apart from the sheer scarcity of chronicle evidence about Quito, certain considerations of this kind lead modern ethnohistorians to turn aside from, or at least to supplement, classical sources in Andean historiography.

First, the chronicle record is strongly colored by the assumption that change is best understood as the product of clashes between elite groups through military means. The notion that changes in livelihood or in cultural

rules about the uses of goods may be causative forces is usually absent.

Second, the notion of society implicit in most chronicles is that of separate strata in a constant relationship to each other, with the active principle of mobilization and change embodied in a privileged minority, and the principle of repetitive, cyclical action in the vassal majority; there is little suggestion of any internal dynamic or tension leading to change, so that any deviation from an idealized estate-like model 1s seen as social

pathology rather than history. | 4

Introduction Third, the idea of history as the teleologically driven working out of the salvation of the world through universal Christianity, in which Spain was

to play a militant role, not only interferes with efforts to understand Andean religious and social thought as an intelligent approach to the environment, but more fundamentally inhibits the perception that the Andean past was something wholly unfamiliar. Many writers were driven by

a need to find ways of subsuming it in a familiar scheme of unified salvation history, lest the existence of an inexplicable form of humanity call in question their entire world view. Fourth, chroniclers were disposed to admire and even morally justify modes of government they saw as similar to European ideals of kingship and empire. Even as they deplored Inca paganism, they often upheld Inca claims to a mission civilisatrice. As a result most chroniclers take little interest in non-Inca local lords. Disdain for these nobles, apparently seen as comparable to Spanish warlords whose luchas de bandas y linajes (‘factional and dynastic struggles’) threatened the nascent nation state, is often particularly strong in those authors who had served as crown officials. If there were no sources but the chronicles, there would be little hope of circumventing these assumptions and their consequences. Fortunately

there are other sources, namely, the vast body of administrative and judicial documentation on native communities which accrued in the course of routine government work from the earliest days of European rule. These documents were researched and compiled for practical administrative purposes and required types of knowledge much more congenial to the anthropological agenda. Whatever ideology their writers may have held, they were constrained by the functional necessity of treating native communities as systemic wholes in whose survival the Crown had a vested

interest, and therefore they had no choice but to understand the local lords as parts of a more general social and economic order.

- Unlike chroniclers of apical institutions, fieldworker-bureaucrats sought detailed depictions of whole communities, down to the last orphan child or resident alien. They considered productive capacity and mechanisms of exchange as integral parts of political order. They were capable of taking stock of differences between culturally ideal and de facto political behavior without indignation. They considered the differences between local and imperial levels of government without presupposing them to be a moral issue, or considering local levels less worthy of study. Perhaps the most decisive advantage of such sources is the practice of presenting raw data in the organizing categories supplied by Andean witnesses themselves. Although these researchers worked from motives far different from those of ethnographers, the compiling of opposed testimony in adversary proceedings and the evaluation of results according to their usefulness in the laboratory of practical politics sub5

Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas jected this research to validity tests at least as rigorous as any used by

narrative chroniclers.

It is possible, as John V. Murra first demonstrated, to undertake true ethnographies of the Andean past by using such sources. The first part of this study (Chapters 1-5) is an attempt at a specialized ethnography, concentrating on the political economy of the northern chiefdoms -—that is, the relations between the mechanisms of exchange locally prevalent and the power structure of villages and regions. It begins with a sketch of the problem in its historical and geographical context (Chapter 1), continues by tracking down in detail the collectivities and productive systems involved (Chapter 2), locates their respective products as parts of a regional economic web (Chapter 3), focuses on the institutional links which

channeled them (Chapter 4), and finally studies the aboriginal political order as a system of privilege based on advantages in manipulating these links (Chapter 5). Some of the detailed material in Chapters 1 and 2 will be of interest primarily to Ecuadorianists. It is presented in a fashion designed to allow skimming.

Our incomplete knowledge of chiefdoms is not a result only of the paucity of well-studied cases. It also derives from the fact that we, as products of highly state-centered societies, have trouble in conceiving how the play of small units, none of which has decisive dominion over the

rest, can result in an integrated system of political economy on a more than local scale. In some measure early colonial observers suffered the same handicap. When trying to describe chiefdoms, sixteenth-century writers usually called them behetrias, a medieval jural term meaning a community entitled to choose its own ruler because it has no legitimate overlord. In the era of the Hapsburgs it carried connotations of chaos and misrule. But the supposition that rule by chiefs entails political chaos does little to explain the situation we actually find recorded, and it was utterly alien to the minds of people who testified about chiefdoms from firsthand

knowledge. Nor is there any warrant for supposing the political life of chiefdoms to be more “simple” than that of states. The process of maneuvering and adjusting in a human environment over which no single chief had full dominion must have been highly complicated, and unless we assume that on the whole chiefs were willing to hazard danger and economic disruption to an infinite degree, we must admit the likelihood that some more or less stable order resulted. This is not to deny that the system was conflict-ridden, or that chiefs fought wars. It does deny that we are entitled to confuse historical chiefdoms with that purely speculative hypothesis, the war of each against all. Such an ethnography of the past, however, does not address the more strictly historical calling of ethnohistory. It concentrates on function, not on change, and would be open to all the criticisms leveled at “ethno6

Introduction graphic present” treatments if it failed to give some account of the fact that the chiefdoms as we know them were not only in a state of change, but in the crux of a great historical upheaval: the irruption of central Andean Inca civilization into the northern Andes. History provides any number of instances of chiefdoms which fell into the crucible of a great centralizing power, but few more intriguing than this. Chapters 6 and 7 address the question of how chiefdoms were made over into elements of a state which, like all states, despised the behetria type of rule, but which differed from states nearer our own experience in at least two important respects: first, its rulers were intimately familiar with Andean chiefdoms, so that their mode of operation shows a subtle understanding of chiefdom politics; second, their vision of their own role, and of the transformation

they proposed to effect, belonged to an intellectual order very different from that of any European empire. The sources for Inca rule are richer than those on local lords, and as a result it is possible not only to reconstruct some of the specific operations by which the Incas transformed the chiefdoms, but even to gain some clues from their behavior about the meaning of this process as seen under the assumptions of Inca thought. Structuralist students of Tawantinsuyu such as Wachtel and Zuidema have made advances toward elucidating the logical and ideational framework in which the invaders from Cuzco organized experience. These authors, by teasing out the principles latent in Inca testimony and artifacts, have shown that the Incaic perception of diachrony was far more alien to our mentality than, for example, the telelogical world view of militant Spanish Catholicism. In fact it had little in common with what we call history. Action over time was not conceived as changing the world, but as representing on the canvas of time the same supra-temporal structures that were also represented in space through the sacred geography of holy places, in plastic material through the use of imagery, and in social interaction through ritual. For these reasons it is not possible to read Inca accounts of the past as

if they were chronicles or histories. They are parts of a different enterprise altogether. Yet it is not necessary either to conclude from this fact that Western paradigms are of no use in studying the Inca past, or, on the other side, to slough off the fascinating problem of the inner content of Inca history by assuming it to be merely an ideological veneer hiding more fundamental “-etic” considerations. We know that Andean modes of thought, although a world apart from our sciences, provided an utterly practical and highly refined apparatus for solving ecological and adaptive problems. And similarly we must conclude, because the record of Inca domination is conclusive, that they also provided in ways we have yet to understand an equally practical guide to the tough realities of statecraft. Perhaps the most striking single fact about the sequence of events that 7

Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas constituted the making of northernmost Tawantinsuyu is the fact that, when one brings together testimony from numerous native witnesses,

diverse in their ethnicity and their attitudes to the Inca state, what emerges is not a record of rough-and-tumble opportunist forays but a pattern of regular sequences so sharply defined that one cannot help suspecting a will on the Incas’ part to design history itself in the image of a structural ideal. Perhaps some day we will be able to see how human conflict—the hard facts of scarcity and war—were conceived not as disruptions of a patterned time-space, but as yet another medium in which,

as in art, architecture, and ritual, the fundamental pattern of the Inca universe might be made manifest through human action.

In the context of the modest findings reported here, such a hope is utopian. But there would be little point in following a craft as arduous as ethnohistory if one did not have high hopes for it in the long run. When

speculating on the maximum ambitions of Andean ethnohistory, we might well ask whether it is not within our power to take up, from our side, the project which Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala first proposed from the Andean side. It is fitting that we should become students of a master from among the defeated, because the victims of conquest, unlike

the victors, do not have the option of denying the reality of the deep cultural differences between the two sides. As victors, some of us have evaded the problem of foreignness by subsuming foreign peoples under familiar categories (“peasant,” “primitive,” etc.) and trying to derive the subjective qualities of their historic action on the cheap by making deductions from these imposed terminologies. Such an evasion is not possible

for the defeated, on whom the culture of the victors has been forced. They experience it as an efficacious reality; they cannot deny its difference, because they suffer the consequences of the difference. One element of an ideal ethnohistory, then, is literally “ethno-history” in a sense analogous to ethnobotany or ethnoscience; that is, an attempt to render a foreign group’s perception of the meaning of historical change by studying the latent or overt principles of thought through which it ordered action. But it is equally important to remember that Guaman Poma did not presume in some way to jump outside his own culture and portray the two cultural worlds as if from a European viewpoint. His insistence on his identity as a man of the Andes, rooted in the legitimacy of a local chiefdom, has its intellectual counterpart in the fact that he tries to apprehend and appropriate foreign reality by applying to it characteristically Andean modes of analysis. His historiography is an operation within his own culture, an attempt to expand its capabilities by apprehending what lay outside it. Similarly the ethnohistoric ideal would be a historiography with an inside and an outside. It would contain a rendering of behavior in terms of explanatory concepts indispensable to our own system of thought (such as 8

Introduction scarcity and decision making, social integration and conflict, complexity

and simplicity, culture and nature, etc.), which would make foreign peoples’ historic acts intelligible in a way that meets our standards for explaining action in general. Indeed we have no choice but to do so, consciously or unconsciously. But this explanation should not rest on arbi-

trary attributions of motives to the people studied; on the contrary, its value would lie in its being joined to an “inner history” showing that this intelligible action may be achieved through foreign systems of thought. The ultimate mission of the ethnohistorian is not just to turn anthropology to advantage in broadening the practice of Western historiography. It is to develop a more genuinely anthropological attitude toward history itself by showing how cultures possess inwardly different diachronic senses — differ-

ent premises about the relation between human action and change —and that these condition the way each “makes history” in its own terms. Scope of the study

Our point of departure has been the work of John V. Murra, and especially that phase of it which is synthesized in his essay “El control vertical

de un maximo de pisos ecolégicos en la economia de las sociedades andinas” (‘Vertical Control of a Maximum of Ecological Floors in the Economy of Andean Societies’ [1972] 1975). Since some of its terms and theoretical elements recur throughout the present work, it will be conve-

- nient to sketch them before undertaking the argument. Murra has called attention to an inescapable functional imperative facing Andean societies, namely the need for access to the natural resources of multiple ecological zones located at widely varying altitudes. Some societies have drawn on levels all the way from the beaches of the Pacific to the barren pinnacles of the New World’s highest mountain chain, and eastward into Amazonia. Others have exploited smaller segments of this “vertical” array. The multitiered landscape, and the many human groups inhabiting its different “pisos” or “stories,” offered extraordinary cultural and natural riches, but also challenged the ingenuity and the might of every group which hoped to guarantee its material autonomy. The combination of cultural elements serving to deal with them is termed the “vertical control apparatus.” Although this appatatus varied in its scale and political organization, study of ethnohistorical sources and the results of field studies during the 1960s afforded strong evidences of a characteristic constellation of vertical controls observable in very many central and south Andean societies, from small

villages to the Inca empire itself. This constellation, nicknamed the “vertical archipelago,” rests on the management of several more or less

small enclaves located so as to control crucial resources at multiple 9

Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas vertical and ecological “stories,” sacrificing territorial contiguity to economic autarchy. In particular, the “vertical archipelago” consisted of a relatively densely populated settlement, culturally more or less homogeneous and self-identified as a single collectivity, where both political authority and the production of the major foodstuffs centered, and multiple remote enclaves in such crucial “vertical outliers” as high salt pans, lumber-bearing forests in the montana belt (sub-Andean tropical forest), coca fields along irrigable sem1arid valleys, and the fishing waters of the Humboldt current. The persons stationed in such outliers retained full rights in their home community. But

their neighbors at the outliers ordinarily came from many “foreign” groups, including some of self-consciously different ethnicity. This pattern, although it existed in a characteristically Inca variant, is thought to originate in remote pre-Incaic times. The spatial limits of its distribution are by no means clear. The clarification of these limits, and of alternative solutions to the “vertical” problem, promises to help define intra-Andean cultural differences and the level of organization at which we can hope to find pan-Andean traits. It may also contribute to eventual explanation of the peculiar trajectory of Andean “horizon” cultures, with their explosive

expansion and rapid fragmentation. | In regard to the case of the Quito region (see Figure 1), which differs from those studied by Murra in the 1960s both in its ecology and in its relatively tenuous connection to pre-Incaic “horizon” cultures, the following positions will be argued: First, that it is possible to detect, through the double curtain of Incaic and Spanish impositions, the outline of certain institutions foreign to both and aboriginal in origin. Second, that the chiefdoms (“cacicazgos,” “curacazgos”) to which these belonged were, although small in scale, highly centralized and stratified.

Third, that their economies solved the “vertical” problem in a manner qualitatively different from that seen in “archipelago” formations by developing diversified exchange links over medium and long distances.

Fourth, that the power of chiefs (“curacas,” “caciques”) rested in large measure on the ability to guarantee such links and to further them through the use of politically authorized exchange specialists. Fifth, that the Inca conquest brought with it the gradual dismantling of such systems and their replacement by ecologically equivalent “archipelagos.” The sources

Attempts to define the polity of ancient Quito have not been lacking. But in general the inquiry has bogged down in interminable debates about a 10

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