Bolivian historians believe that the Tiwanakan Empire was succeeded on the Bolivian altiplano by numerous small, regional Indian kingdoms. The people of these kingdoms were the direct ancestors of Bolivia’s Aymara. In modern times, Bolivians use the names Kolla and Kollasuyo to refer in a collective sense to the Aymara-based indigenous culture of the Bolivian altiplano and to all the Aymara kingdoms, respectively. (Kollasuyo means “empire of the Kolla.”) There were specifically, however, 12 major kingdoms or nations, of which the Kolla, who were scattered around the shores of Lake Titicaca, were the largest and most powerful.
The political, economic, and social structures of the Aymara nations, including the Kolla and the Lupaca, were highly structured and rigidly stratified into a dual-layered system. Each Aymara nation or kingdom was stratified into two separate and unequal internal kingdoms—one high and one low—and each had its own king and its own ruling elite.
Two entirely complete political and socioeconomic structures existed stacked one upon the other.
The complex organization of Aymara society was believed to have been derived from the Tiwanakans and later adapted by the Inca. On the political side it included dual sets of powerful central military leaders, hereditary regional chieftains (curacas), local ayllu authorities who dealt with the land communes, state religious counselors, and councils of wise elders.
Although at first glance, this dual system seems cumbersome and unnecessarily complex, it served an important function. As has been true throughout Bolivian history, during the period of the Aymara kingdoms, the largest number of people lived on the high altiplano plateau, which had only a limited amount of agricultural land. The people of the altiplano had to rely on crops grown in the distant fertile valleys and in farm districts closer to the Pacific coast. When the Aymara kingdoms colonized or conquered regions that could supply food and other necessities to the population of the altiplano, they also transplanted their dual system of political and socioeconomic organization. This immediately created parallel functional structures in both the agricultural colony and the altiplano homeland. The system cut across differing ecological regions and climatic zones and allowed the Aymara to exploit the agricultural hinterland. In this way the dominant kingdoms, which were all located in the eastern highlands, benefited from the agricultural bounty of the subordinate kingdoms on both sides of the Andean mountain chain. According to the historian Herbert S. Klein, this integrated system exploited the agricultural potential of differing ecological zones to the fullest and made possible the production and exchange of different crops within the empire. These arrangements between the core society of the highlands and the agricultural colonies relied on an elaborate system of kinship, exchange, and labor obligations (the latter was called the mita system and was adopted by both the Inca and the Spanish).
The Aymara’s dual organizational scheme was also applied on a micro level within the social class structure of the ayllu, the self-governing tribal community and collective landholding system based on kinship. These were divided into upper and lower parts with the nobility associated with the upper ayllus and the commoners with the lower. The Aymara social order, which also influenced Incan society, rested on the extended family and tribal agricultural cooperatives of the ayllu. Several ayllus formed a federation of ayllus. The primarily agricultural economy was organized around the communal cultivation of the native potato and highland grains.
Aymara cosmology and religion centered on nature and the sun, moon, and stars. Viracocha, or Pachacamac, was the powerful creator god; Khuno, the dark deity of evil; and Pachamama (Mother Earth), the feminine deity of fertility.
Around a. d. 1460, the aggressive and imperialistic Inca swept down from the north and rapidly conquered the decentralized kingdoms of the Aymara people. The defeated remnants of the dispersed Aymara communities on the Bolivian altiplano were subsumed into the southern region of the Inca Empire. Bolivian historians attribute the disintegration and speedy subjugation of the Aymara kingdoms to internecine feuding and bloody civil wars. In 1470, this fierce love of warfare and independence erupted into a major revolt against their new Inca rulers.
World History
