The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

922 Karen Spalding
The Inka presence in the Andes, particularly on the peripheries of the
state, was relatively recent - it is estimated that the region of Quito (now
Ecuador) was not controlled from Cusco until the 1460s - and local
sources published since the 1950s have made it clear that there was
considerable variation at the local level in the relations between the Inka
and the peoples under their control. This is not to deny the extent of
Inka demands. The huge extent of material construction that took place
during the relatively short period during which Inka elites ruled the
Andes bears witness to the enormous amount of labor appropriated by
the state. The lavish expenditure of labor not only in construction but in
war, the displacement of entire populations, and the elimination of
others, all indicate that under the Inka, the reciprocities based on kinship
were in the process of transformation into the deeper and more longstanding
inequalities based on the monopoly of resources by a ruling
minority in the Andes. The Inka still formally "begged" labor services
and retained the figment of reciprocity with lavish feasts and "gifts" to
local elites, but the threat behind the gifts was clear not only to the Inka
but to the people absorbed into the state as well.
But despite all of this, the Inka system in the 1520s was hardly a
monolithic state. Franklin Pease has suggested that, rather than a centralized
authoritarian state that collapsed with the death of its ruler, the Inka
system can be better understood as a network of asymmetrical relationships,
ritually confirmed, that were established between the Inka and the
polities that made up the empire self-denominated Tawantinsuyu (hispano-Quechua:
Tahuantinsuyo). 25 Those relationships, established both
with local elites and with the more important regional deities, were not
abstract but were continually renegotiated, as evidenced by the "rebellions"
inside the frontiers of the state throughout its existence. Local
sources indicate that, despite Inka willingness to use brutal tactics against
enemies, internal or external, the authority of the state rested on a
carefully structured web of alliances with regional deities and the elites of
the polities that made up the Inka system. The war over the succession
in Cusco opened the entire network of alliances for a process of renegotiation
that might have been accomplished by Atawallpa but was reinitiated
and prolonged by the appearance of the Spaniards in the Andes.
The conclusions reached by the archaeologists responsible for the exca-
25 Franklin Pease, Caracas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza (Lima, 1992), 21; and his general history, Peru,
hombrey historia, II, Entre el siglo XVIy elXVIII (Lima, 1992), 65—77.
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