War and a Semblance of Peace in the Inca Heartland

This situation does not seem to be motivated by a desire for land, since
there would have been little reason to return the land if it had. Still, one of the
Jauja witnesses, Felipe Poma Macao, gave classic materialist reasons for
territorial expansion:
When one pueblo experienced a large expansion in its population, it
would provoke wars with others to take their chacaras [cultivated
fields], foodstuffs and women… (f. 28v).
We do not know how common it was to go to war over land, but a number
of witnesses mentioned it. Taking land was usually accompanied by killing
the people on it. As Don Felipe Poma Macao noted: “when some towns
defeated others, they killed all the people and took over their lands and their
towns and divided them up among themselves and their captains, setting
their own boundary markers” (f. 29). There is no real evidence that Andean
people thought of land as a commodity of any kind, or even, as something
separable from the people who inhabited it. In fact, everything we know about
the relation of people to the landscape -the rocks, springs and other natural
features associated with it- suggests that people were firmly rooted to their
territories. Killing everyone may have been the only means of breaking this
bond.
On the other hand, killing everyone may have been a means of preventing
retaliation. Only one witness mentioned revenge as part of the cycle of
conflict, however. Baltasar Guaman Llamoca, from the province of Soras (in
the highlands south of Ayacucho) explained what happened after a successful
raid:
When some people defeated others, and the defeated people fled,
the winners arrived in their town and took their wives, women,
clothing, livestock and everything they could find and left. When
the people from that town returned, they made alliances with other
groups and went to war again over what had been taken from them
(f. 45).
This situation sounds like the other side of the coin of the one described
above -in this instance there was no intention of restoring what had been
taken. It should also be noted, the conflict was not over land.
Fighting for the sheer purpose of taking spoils -what we could call
raiding- can have been an end in itself. It was also the result of a successful
campaign that may have been motivated by other reasons. Two witnesses
describe the division of spoils. One was Juan Chancavilca, from Parinacochas
(in the highlands south of Ayacucho), who noted that the cinchecona divided
the spoils among all those who had participated, and did not just keep it all
for themselves (f. 52). The other Parinacochas witness, Alonso Quia Guanaco,
said the same thing (f. 50).
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