Inka Human Sacrifice and Mountain Worship: Strategies for Empire Unification

by Thomas Besom

Overview

The Inka empire was the largest pre-Columbian polity in the New World. Its vast expanse, its ethnic diversity, and the fact that the empire may have been consolidated in less than a century have prompted much scholarly interest in its creation. In this study, Besom explores the ritual practices of human sacrifice and the worship of mountains, attested in both archaeological investigations and ethnohistorical sources, as tools in the establishment and preservation of political power.

Besom examines the relationship between symbols, ideology, ritual, and power to demonstrate how the Cuzqueños could have used rituals to manipulate common Andean symbols to uphold their authority over subjugated peoples. He considers ethnohistoric accounts of the categories of human sacrifice to gain insights into related rituals and motives, and reviews the ethnohistoric evidence of mountain worship to predict locations as well as motives. He also analyzes specific archaeological sites and assemblages, theorizing that they were the locations of sacrifices designed to assimilate subject peoples, bind conquered lands to the state, and/or justify the extraction of local resources.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826353085
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	04/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Thomas Besom is a research associate at Binghamton University, SUNY, and the author of Of Summits and Sacrifice: An Ethnohistoric Study of Inka Religious Practices (2009).

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Prologue xv

Introduction 1

1 Symbols, Ideology, Ritual, and Power 20

2 Ethnohistoric Data on Human Sacrifice and Mountain Worship 34

3 The Archaeological Materials from Cerro Esmeralda 57

4 Discussion of the Materials from Cerro Esmeralda 79

5 The Archaeology of Cerro El Plomo and the Santiago Area 102

6 Discussion of the Archaeological Materials from Cerro El Plomo and the Santiago Area 144

7 Discussion of the Anthropomorphic Statuettes 188

8 Conclusions 202

Epilogue 217

Appendix A Results of Segmental Hair Analysis 218

Appendix B Typical Inka Vessels 220

Notes 221

Glossary of Andean Names and Terms 268

References 277

Index 303