If Jesús Lara’s La Cultura de los Inkas had been written thirty or forty years ago, it would have been an interesting, controversial, and possibly influential book. But for 1966 it contains little that is new and much that is out of step with current knowledge and with today’s historiographic concepts. Lara is concerned with the theses of Morgan, Engels, Cunow, Castro Pozo, and other writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He disregards almost all of the literature since about 1940, and almost all of the literature not written in or translated into Spanish.
Parts of the book are still pertinent and, if not exactly new, at least well argued and well written. The long introductory review of the colonial chronicles (pp. 11-70) is excellent, as are the discussions of Inca and Spanish theories of Andean origins (pp. 71-102), Inca king lists (pp. 177-190), and markets and commerce (pp. 267-278). In these sections the author gives us straightforward, lucid comparative studies of the chronicles.
Elsewhere—e.g. in the history of the Inca expansion (pp. 207-224)—the chronicles are treated so selectively that they might as well not have been consulted at all. In these sections Lara doggedly follows such doubtful writers as Garcilaso de la Vega and Montesinos, justifying his stand by statements such as “. . .Garcilaso’s work . . . is supported by archaeology, ethnography, sociology, and folklore” (p. 59). In point of fact, few chroniclers are so frequently contradicted by archaeological evidence as Garcilaso, the “sociology” is essentially that of Friedrich Engels, and neither ethnography nor folklore provides any means of testing his statements.
Lara’s book is at its worst in what seems to be its major theme: the reconstruction of Inca origins and pre-imperial history. These sections are based on a series of time-worn assumptions and fallacies: the ayllu as the basic pre-Inca sociopolitical unit, yunga as a tribal unity rather than a general term for lowlanders, etc. Together with these we find such novelties as pre-imperial Chanca migrations, the Incas learning their language from the Quechua, and (a real indication of the author’s bias) the Incas as misplaced Bolivians who migrated from Lake Titicaca.
As an archaeologist, I am particularly unhappy about Lara’s repeated use of archaeological “evidence” to support his conclusions. In spite of these statements—which are fundamental to many sections of the book—he has paid no attention to the vast bulk of pertinent archaeological data. Rather, he relies almost exclusively on that latter-day Ameghinist, Dick Edgar Ibarro Grasso. Whenever Lara’s judgments can be tested against archaeological data, they are almost always refuted. Archaeology has a good deal to offer on the questions explored by Lara, but not when it is abused in this fashion.
