The Late Intermediate Period: 1000–1400 ce

For the past half century, the era between the decline of the highland powers of Tiwanaku and Wari and the advent of the Inka Empire has generally been called the Late Intermediate Period (LIP). The term was coined to describe a chronological period, not a developmental stage, but scholars have often depicted the period as one of sociopolitical fragmentation between the eras of unity found in the Middle and Late Horizons. Research over the past few decades has shown that such a view is only partially accurate, even if it is recognised that no other highland state emerged until the Inkas. Much of the Peruvian coast was home to a series of states from the 1st century ce onwards, which remained independent of highland rule until the Late Horizon (Map 2.26.1). Moche states dominated the north coast until c. 800 ce and then gave way to the Lambayeque societies, which endured until the 13th century. Sometime after c. 1200 ce, a new power emerged in the old Moche heartland, which developed over the next two centuries into the Chimú Empire. In the highlands, Wari and Tiwanaku are now judged to have retained power until c. 1000–1100 ce, and powerful nonstate societies arose in their wake in the Lake Titicaca Basin and the central Peruvian sierra. Moreover, there is now evidence that the Inkas were creating a state polity in the southern Peruvian highlands by c. 1350 ce. In light of these developments, it seems best to view the LIP as an era in which urban and state power were found in coastal rather than highland polities, and new mountain powers began to take shape.

Investigators of prehistory generally concur that political competition has often been critical to the development of social complexity. Among the key forms of political contention are hierarchical, peer, polity, expansionist, and factional competition. These are politically joined processes whose significance varies (1) as the complexity and reach of the sociopolitical unit is transformed, (2) as the interaction emphasizes internally or externally directed conflict, and (3) as the competition is structured vertically (e.g., between classes) or horizontally (e.g., between polities). This paper focuses attention on factionalism in the Upper Mantaro Valley, Peru, during the late pre-Inka, Inka, and early colonial periods. These successive periods provide an excellent opportunity for examining how political activity was transformed as the context of interaction shifted rapidly from autonomous, to imperial, to colonial rule (Fig. 15.1).

Before discussing the case studies, I would like to underscore four main points concerning the role of factional competition in political development. First, although they lie outside sanctioned structures of sociopolitical interaction, factions pervade political activity from the simplest to the most complex societies. Second, because factionalism often cross-cuts more formal sociopolitical groups, it provides a means by which individuals or groups restructure ties to obtain power and resources (Salisbury and Silverman 1977). The groups that are formed are often volatile, ephemeral, and based on mutual short-term goals, but the outcome of the competition may be a reformation of more formal kinds of political interaction or, less radically, a shift in leadership. Third, despite the scant archaeological interest in factionalism in empirical studies, numerous theories contain this kind of competition as a key element of political change.

Since late prehistory, empires have developed and expanded to dominate extensive territories and large populations. The scale of even archaic empires is remarkable, as they sometimes incorporated millions of people from ethnically diverse backgrounds. To secure control and to finance their activities, these polities fashioned institutional means of rule that typically included administrations for decision-making and mobilization of resources, state religions to foster local consent, and militaries for expansion, protection, and suppression. Explaining the repeated expansions of empires challenges historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but there have been surprisingly few attempts to analyze such evolutionary developments with archaeological data, with some notable exceptions (e.g. R. McC. Adams 1965a, 1981; Sanders et al. 1979). As we hope to show, however, the ample diachronic data of archaeology provide rich opportunities for studying the development of early empires. Of equal significance is the alternative perspective that archaeology provides to the early documentary evidence from the early complex societies themselves.

Archaic empires, existing prior to mercantilism and the industrial revolution, were fashioned by conquest and incorporation of other societies, initially often competitors for power. As in the Inka case, empires arose out of the same conditions of “peerpolity” competition and alliance that characterized the evolution of states (cf. Price 1978b, 1982; Renfrew and Cherry 1986), ultimately succeeding by exerting effective control over diverse and less organized societies beyond the political core.