What has been written about Andean warfare has largely been about the Incas (Bram 1941; Rowe 1946; Murra 1986 [1978]; D’Altroy 2002: 205-30).1 The Spaniards who wrote about the Inca expansion were the direct heirs to Inca rule and wanted to know something about how their predecessors had unified such a large territory, stretching from north of Quito (in modern Ecuador) to just below Santiago (modern Chile). Some documentary sources drew from oral testimony or from local historical genres and offer a more ethnographic picture of warfare than other kinds of source materials. What I will do in this essay is develop a perspective on how Inca warfare developed in the region near Cuzco, the Inca capital, by isolating indigenous voices about the events of a century or more before Europeans arrived in the Andes. I want to learn about how the practice of war changed as empire became the goal and explore the question of the role peace played in the process.
One reason to isolate the voices of specific individuals or groups is to cast what they say against more general treatments of the Inca expansion. Sometimes Andean voices speak about particular situations, and what they say has an ethnographic feel. There is less of this kind of material for the Andes than for other parts of the ancient world, in part because Andean technologies for writing or recording were not understood or described by Europeans who first entered the Inca empire. Something like warfare can only be understood from an internal perspective; so every effort will be made in this essay to tease out a perspective on it from the small corpus of promising source material.
World History
