The contributions of archeology to Andean history loom large because the written sources we need are still so limited. This imbalance in the sources is even more striking when we note that the civilizations of the arid coast, which attract foreign field workers, received only brief mention by Spanish colonial observers. The editors of this collection accept this anomaly: just as they refer only in passing to scholarly work by Andean colleagues, so they hope to know the Andean state from the shards. Some have even foregone excavation. The advantages of evolutionary doctrine, as Lewis H. Morgan taught us when he rejected Adolphe Bandelier’s research in the Spanish sources, is that you know when a state structure is present.
It would be a mistake to assume that all the contributors to this collection share the editors’ confidence. They have stapled together two quite different sets of reports to create the book. The senior editor and a few of his friends are truly concerned with arguing and defining the manifestations and reach of coercive power—the state. Most of what they claim probably did happen on the irrigated North Coast of what today is Peru. The desert allows us to trace increasing complexity, urbanism, and warfare. Another set of contributors has no such definitional evolutionary aims. Most report on the finds in their excavations, with asides about how coastal polities were “much more highly developed … than contemporary highland groups.” While highland populations may have enjoyed more extensive contacts, the more privileged elites were coastal dwellers. Many years ago, Paul Kosok pointed our attention to the “precociousness” of irrigated statecraft.
A significant dimension of the present collection is the rejection of a vision of the Andean past urged on us by the grand master of Andean history, Julio C. Tello, who stressed highland achievements in the emergence and development of Andean civilization. However, Shelia Pozorski and Thomas Pozorski are convinced that coastal states are “pre-adapted forerunners of subsequent Andean states.” Such a stance is not necessarily evolutionist: it may well be a historically accurate statement. But if so, the adaptation of early achievement in the highlands will have to be traced.
Two of the essays deal with the presence and significance in late Andean history of “ecological complementarity,” sometimes also known as “verticality.” This postulates that Andean societies, particularly those located on the high puna, controlled enclaves on many separate geographic tiers. Thus, they had access to exotic indispensable resources (fish, fertilizer, hot peppers, maize, timber, coca leaf) not through trade or barter but through resettled kinfolk. Caravans tied the several tiers into a single system. Izumi Shimada’s essay stresses the fact that, along with “verticality,” ethnic groups were also linked “horizontally,” along the coast.
Charles M. Hastings’s “view from the margins” stresses the multiple variants in Andean settlement. “The transition to state-level societies” must have assumed many different forms. In fact, where the “political economy” was vertically dispersed, a stabilization could occur at rather “low levels of organizational complexity.” Hastings’s tracing of ethnic settlement in both pre- and post-European times in the Tarma valley combines intensive, thorough archeological survey with a familiarity with the written sources. Of all the contributions in this collection, that by Hastings is the one I recommend to the historian reader.
