PART V ANOTHER WORLD

The Separate but Parallel Path of Imperial Formations in the Precolonial Americas

Peter Fibiger Bang

MapV.

Among the more surprising treasures held by the Royal Library in Copenhagen is a manuscript written in Peru and sent from Lima to King Philip III of Spain around 1616. The author was a Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a man of Indian noble lin­eage. In his veins ran the blood of two indigenous royal dynasties, including that of the Incas—at least so he claimed—as well as that of a man who in a previous gen­eration had earned distinction by saving the life of one of the early conquistadors. Here, clearly, was someone worth listening to: a man anchored in the Inca past, an asset for the Spanish future. Even so, Guaman Poma had to wait a long time until he found his audience. The court of Philip paid scant attention to the more than a thousand pages analyzing and criticizing conditions in colonial South America. Whatever the reason—a failure of patronage, the lack of polish in the command of Spanish, the intensity of the protest—the ambitious treatise and its hundreds of fascinating illustrations of life in the New World did not find a publisher, and in­deed may not even have been read. Instead the manuscript, possibly acquired by an ambassador to the Spanish court, gathered dust in the library of the Danish king from the mid-seventeenth century until the twentieth, when it was finally taken out, dusted down, and made available to a wider public.^[1696]

What the reader found, belatedly, was a rare indigenous voice, offering precious in­formation on the character of Amerindian society before the conquest and during the first decades of Spanish rule.^[1697] The objective of Guaman Poma had been to carve out a better place for the Indian population and its leaders within the order of their new im­perial masters.

The attempt to inscribe the conqueror into local history and the local into metro­politan culture is a classic strategy employed by subject elites across the world history of empire in order to claim a position of power, influence, and authority for them­selves in relation to their rulers. Parallel examples, with varying degrees of emphasis, can easily be found. Remember Josephus, the Roman Jew discussed in Chapter 1 of Vol. 1, who wrote a history of a rebellion that had gone fatefully wrong.

While these efforts established a basic commonality between the New and the Old World, modern scholarship has shifted the preferred focus of comparison from the Romano-Catholic experience to reach further back in time to the age of early state­formation in the ancient Near East.^[1701] It has mainly been the task of archaeology to open the Pre-Columbian past of the Americas. Little material in written form was produced by the societies of the New World before the time of European recon­nection and conquest in the early sixteenth century, and that which exists has only slowly yielded to attempts at decipherment. Yet, when we take into account that the historical development of human societies in the Americas took place in isolation from the Afro-Eurasian world, the paths taken are surprisingly similar, although with one qualification: empire emerged as a relatively late outgrowth of social evo­lution in Amerindian society, confined approximately to the last millennium before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Still, where populations began to grow denser, sedentarization and more in­tensive forms of agriculture followed, often through the construction of extensive systems of terraced fields. When population becomes dependent on such produc­tive fixtures, mobility is much restricted, and forms of social complexity begin to develop in tandem with the heightened potential for elites to control producers. '1 he first signs of the development of ritual centers date to the third millennium bce, while state formation takes its first slow steps in the first millennium bce. Archaeologists debate the precise character of these polities, chiefdoms, or states, but by the first millennium ce, the Moche culture in northern Peru, or the Maya in Mesoamerica with their urban pyramid temples discovered in the jungles, leave little doubt that a world of small state-entities had emerged. As scholars have begun to decode Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, it has become increasingly clear that this was a world of “warring states.” Rulers were frequently locked in military con­frontation with each other, and bigger, more powerful cities often fought to have a “friendly” king installed as ruler among their neighbors.

Eventually, as was to be expected, bigger imperial entities began to coagulate out of the fluid rivalries of these state-forming central regions. The process was far from even, punctuated by state-collapse, and difficult to describe in historical detail. Even so, it would be a mistake to see the rise during the fifteenth cen­tury of the Aztec and Inca empires (Smith and Sergheraert, Chap. 24 and Covey, Chap. 25), the two large political entities that the Spanish invaders encountered on the mainland, as having emerged on a blank canvas. They had smaller-scale, more ephemeral predecessors, such as the Wari Empire (ca. 750-1000) in Peru. Students accustomed to conditions in the Old World may be struck by the lack of technologies such as wheeled transport, iron, or horseback riding, as well as the relatively low number of domesticated animals.

Bibliography and Guidance

On the long pre-Columbian development of social complexity and state-formation in Meso- and Andean South America, expert surveys are offered by Foster (2002), Nichols and Pool (2012), and Moore (2014). The identification, by Robert Carneiro (1970) on the basis of pre-Columbian American examples, of “circumscribed” agri­cultural resources as a crucial enabling factor behind state-formation remains classic and provides the basis for the analysis of the emergence of the state by Michael Mann (see Part I). When people are unable to move away from their resource base, they may be dominated and become the targets of military conquest. See Stanish and Levine (2011) for a more recent reaffirmation of the significance of warfare in the development of states in the Peruvian Andes.

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