Imperial Expansion and Local Agency: A Case Study of Labor Organization Under Inca Rule

Abstract

Imperial expansion can produce broad economic intensification throughout the provinces to provide key economic resources for the state. However, not all such economic intensification is the direct result of the imposition of an imperial political economy over subject populations. This article presents evidence for some cases where intensification occurred due to bottom‐up responses of small groups that were able to profit from imperial conquest. In the case of the Incas, although the imposition of a labor‐tax system, or mit'a, was an important economic device for their imperial expansion, we question its universality. This article addresses the economic changes that local communities experienced within the Tawantinsuyu by comparing the coexistence of attached and independent modes of production in two cases of mining production in the Atacama Desert, in northern Chile. This contributes to finding and elaborating on explicit archaeological indicators that enable us to contrast both modes of engagement with the political economy of the Inca Empire and to identify, archaeologically, alternative and independent local responses to imperial expansion. Our study thus energizes debates on how and to what extent local populations, under conditions of empire, can negotiate spaces and activities outside of state control. [mit'a, prehistoric mining, bottom‐up dynamics, imperial expansion, Inca Empire]

Using oxygen 18 isotope to problematize the presence of resettled laborers in the far provinces of the Inca empire

“…On a broader scale, this study’s findings illuminate some mechanisms that articulated the political economy of the Inca empire, demonstrating the limitations of state power in the provinces to enforce more powerful means of labor reorganization. At the same time, the use of the scarce local labor to intensify mining production might have limited the output of these activities, influencing particular dynamics of coercion and local agency, which contributed to the creation of either more negotiated or violent political relations in the imperial margins [ 12 , 27 ]. More studies in different provincial territories would enable us to better understand how extensive the Inca resettlement policy actually was outside of the imperial core, with all the political and economic consequences that this implies.…”

“…Despite the paucity of mitmaqkuna presence in the archaeological record, most major changes in terms of the economic intensification of production have been attributed to their presence, or to the general application of the labor tax system. This situation has been largely assumed than demonstrated, particularly in the far provinces of the empire [ 12 ].…”

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

“…Similar to the emphasis on socionatures, there are strong currents within the scholarly literature that are dissolving the categories (e.g., chiefdoms, states, horizons) that have long been the mainstays of political archaeology. Contemporary archaeologists have grown uncomfortable with approaches that assume binaries of king and commoner, colonizer and colonized, core and periphery, and even change and continuity (Baitzel ; Brown ; Garrido and Salazar ; Gron and Sørensen ; Jaffe, Wei, and Zhao ; Kuusela, Nurmi, and Hakamäki ). By and large, research is turning from state or imperial politics to shed light on decentralized complexity, whether the interactions by which people composed networks and communities without the state (e.g., Boivin and Frachetti ; Kristiansen, Lindkvist, and Myrdal ), the “bottom‐up” tactics by which people in rural or peripheral environments endured or withstood centralized rule (Düring and Stek ; LaViolette and Fleisher ), or the “epi‐historical” struggles of Indigenous people who underwent successive colonial projects.…”

Los nuevos sujetos imperiales del valle de Copiapó: estilos Diaguita e Inca local en los pucos del período Tardío

“…Lo relevante en el caso de Copiapó es el proceso selectivo de apropiación de los patrones de diseño diaguita e inca. Esta variabilidad podría deberse en parte a la baja jerarquización política y alta diversidad social de jefaturas locales en Copiapó (Castillo, 1998;Hidalgo, 1972), lo cual podría ser reflejo de una administración imperial relativamente descentralizada, en donde no todas las comunidades de la región fueron integradas a la economía política inca ni al sistema de la mit'a (Garrido y Salazar, 2017). En la misma línea, los múltiples modos de reinterpretación e hibridación de los referentes estilísticos Copiapó, Diaguita y Cuzqueños sugiere un escenario fragmentado de negociaciones en la incorporación de estas poblaciones al imperio.…”