This deliberately combative book raises a number of important and frequently overlooked issues of significance to historians, ethnologists, and archeologists. The fundamental issue is the question of how human societies work: what brings about their rise and success; what triggers their decline and failure.
A second issue lies in the nature and role of ethnohistory. Some consider ethnohistory to be simply the history of nonliterate, non-Western peoples. Others consider it a heuristic tactic, where a historiographic methodology is employed with an ethnological analysis. The documentary sources, including chronicles— by indigenous and mixed-blood writers as well as Europeans—and the voluminous output of the Spanish colonial administration, must be subjected to a much more rigorous historiographic critique for various kinds of bias than they have generally received. Moreover, as our understanding of these societies is increased through archival, archeological, and ethnographic investigations, the old sources must be continually reassessed in the light of new information.
The book opens with two vignettes representing the Aztec and Inca ideological world views. The grisly Aztec case is the better known; the Inca sketch appears fresh and charming, but in fact follows very closely the interpretation of Burr Cartwright Brundage as set forth in his Lords of Cuzco. The introduction also contains a straightforward account of the kind of written sources available to scholars of the Aztecs and Incas, together with a declaration of the authors’ intention to utilize both written and archeological sources in their study.
The two subsequent chapters present a substantive summary first of Aztec, and then of Inca cultural history. They purport to demonstrate the catalytic effect for destabilization of ideological phenomena. The human sacrifices of the Aztecs forced that state into constant expansion to provide captives to feed the sun. At the same time, establishment of personal estates for each of the Inca rulers in turn—which were not passed on to their successors, but administered by the surviving descendants of the old ruler in his name—obliged the Inca rulers to pursue the enlargement of their empire. Thus, each new ruler was forced to create a new personal estate through appropriation of lands or expansive conquest in order to fulfill ideological expectations. This resulted, the authors argue, in an “institutional imbalance in the Inca dynastic system: it virtually required expansionist policies on the part of each heir to the throne” (p. 153).
Unfortunately, the primary source material cited copiously in support of this argument simply does not sustain the thesis. However, support is found in one of the authors’ most frequently cited secondary sources: Brundage’s two books on the Inca (op. cit., p. 51 and passim; and Empire of the Inca). In each case, it is a question of Brundage’s interpretation of the evidence, not a critical evaluation of it.
The two final chapters of the book discuss the comparability of the Inca and Aztec cases, and attempt to place these in the context of a theoretical discussion of ideology versus cultural materialism as necessary prime movers in the development of prehistoric empires in the New World. The last chapter, in particular, seems unduly contrived and polemical.
The authors’ thesis is an interesting one. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the historical materials they discuss are intended to support their hypothesis rather than to provide a full, critical discussion of the evidence. In neither of the cases selected, and particularly in that of the Inca, does such a full consideration of the evidence occur.
