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The Archaeology of Wak'as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3484426

1527-1900

Susan Elizabeth Ramírez,

Latin American history and culture

Tamara Bray's book is an interesting addition to the growing effort to understand religion in the Andes. It complements archaeological studies (by Brian Bauer, Thomas Besom, Johan Reinhard, and others), published idolatry records (compiled by Pierre Duviols, Ana Sánchez, Laura Larco, and Marco Polia), and the analysis of these (by Kenneth Mills, Claudia Brosseder, María Rostworowski, Sabine MacCormack, Mary Doyle, and Frank Salomon). It offers a dozen perspectives on the word wak'a (huaca), defined as a sacred and powerful person, place (shrine, oratory), or thing (statue, image, mummy) capable of acting, speaking, moving, and generally influencing daily life for good or evil.Recurring themes in the different contributions include wak'as' capricious and ambiguous natures; their power to transform, personify, resuscitate, metamorphose, create, recreate, and metastasize; their linkage of the past and present; and their symbolic representation of imperial power. Of unique interest is Carolyn Dean's presentation of the sensual aspect of a wak'a's horizon and Steve Kosiba's ontologically informed piece on land and blood.Of concern are the uncritical uses of written sources and ethnographies to support arguments about the more distant past. This is most apparent in the application of some key terms. For example, the definitions of llacta (also llaqta) and, to a lesser extent, marca (also marka) are anachronistic. Today, both words are defined as “pueblo,” which could refer to a town or settlement or to people. Too often it is assumed here to be the former when the historical context suggests otherwise (pp. 86, 148, 154, 177, 214). As a result, both llactayoc and marcayok are misinterpreted. In the sixteenth century, both words referred to the possessor, originator, protector, or guardian of a people, defined by a common ancestry, the essence of ayllu (lineage). In the 1500s, the Spaniards translated the words as “dueños de indios,” an unfortunate translation because of the modern connotations of dueño as “owner,” especially when applied to native authorities. Similar problems occur with chacrayoc (also chakrayoc), which according to the same rationale should be the possessor of a chacra, a planted field. The stones (huancas, guancas, wankas) that represent the chacrayoc in some fields are, according to the idolatry records published by Duviols, believed to have been the first to cultivate the lands (pp. 152–54). Therefore, “tiller” is a better translation than “owner” (p. 154). The citation of Frank Salomon's work on Huarochirí, in which he translates llacta and llactayoc in geographical terms, ignores that the words marca and llacta changed meaning from “people” to “place” in the mid-nineteenth century, which warns one about using modern translations even of old colonial documents to inform archaeological analysis.The use of the terms owner and ownership points to problems associated with understanding land and territoriality (pp. 192, 194, 214, 216, 221). As recent historical research shows, the ground was considered by natives as common and open to all. Persons established usufruct rights to a parcel by using it. When the land lost its productivity or the user left or died without heirs, it became available to another user. Where there was a guanca representing the chacrayoc, appropriate offerings were made before use by another. There was no private property in the Western sense among natives until the 1550s, and then the transition from common to exclusive was gradual. Furthermore, there is no consideration of the ecological niches of the archipelago model, first mentioned by John Murra in 1972; no discussion of shared resources; no recognition that the word tierras (lands) was sometimes a synonym for “people” in the sixteenth century; no mention that subjects of one lord usually lived next to followers of another; and no references to the mobility of people who might possess abodes at more than one location. Such phenomena make the use of territory as a unified, bounded space untenable. Even the word province, so ubiquitous in the chronicle sources but nowhere defined, is troublesome. Sixteenth-century usage in Spain refers to an alliance among different towns—so it is demographically based and does not refer to territory. Thus, I find claims that wak'as served to win territories (pp. 81, 109) and demarcate boundaries (pp. 81, 106–9, 154, 174, 182–83, 249, 252–53, 257, 284, 381) problematic. More accurate might be that a wak'a helped conquer a people or ethnic group, since images were carried into battle to ensure victory and defeated people were said to have been won in a “good war” and thereafter owed tribute labor to the victor. Kosiba comes close to understanding land and tenure before Spanish contact when he writes that the invaders equated land with property, that curacas' rights were a function of labor, and that curacas were influenced early in colonial times by European ideas of value (p. 193). Such realizations alert users to the dangers of overlooking Spanish and Christian filters in early documents, especially those written after the 1550s.One last example of imposing Western understandings on the data is the use of the term wealth (p. 105). Wealth to Spaniards could be measured in accumulated possessions, while Andeans defined it in terms of demographics and power differentials. The wealthy person had many followers who would respond to a request for help. A native authority's status was tied to the number of people under his politico-religious jurisdiction. A poor person was defined as an orphan.In short, Bray states in her introduction that archaeology has the potential “for exploring novel conceptualizations that may disrupt our common sense or everyday understandings” (p. 11). I agree, but until scholars pay more attention to the date a written source was penned, to who wrote the document and his or her motivations, to how Andeans used certain words vis-à-vis Europeans, to how words' meanings changed over time, and to applying the same scrutiny to a scholarly monograph, we will be unable to escape our own cultural assumptions and understand Andean life. I look to interdisciplinary collaborations to overcome the etic and arrive at a more emic interpretation of history.