Landscape, Social Memory and Materiality in the Calchaquí Valley during Inka Domination in Northwest Argentina

Abstract

During the last 30 years, investigations centered on Tawantinsuyu have provided new data regarding the nature and characteristics of the Inka Empire, and have shown variability in the processes of conquest and consolidation based on interdisciplinary approaches linking archaeology, history, paleoenvironmental studies, geography and toponymy, among others. In this paper, we shall explore the micro-political processes of a sector of Northwest Argentina (NWA) that was part of Collasuyu, with the goal of understanding Tawantinsuyu as a dynamic political entity that faced particular circumstances in every region, while at the same time recognizing that the differential development of archaeological research in the Andes may have accentuated or attenuated evidence for the empire or its consequences over local processes. We are also interested in showing the integration of a new corpus of data from some NWA regions using the concepts of materiality, landscape, and social memory. In the last few years some have argued that the Inka conquest had a marked symbolic/ritual character in which state colonization was manifested through the construction of a new landscape, based on Inka ideology.