more widespread dispersal of ayllus, the kin-based groupings that made up
ethnic groups, to multiple ecological zones (see Murra, John Victor), resulted
in the large-scale “mixing” of identity groups across the landscape. These
circumstances have considerably complicated the task of archaeologists in
defining the ethnic boundaries of Tahuantinsuyu, although a number of studies
successfully describe and analyze the archaeological record of ethnicity in the
Andes.
Further Reading
Cobo, Bernabé. History of the Inca Empire: An Account of the Indian’s Customs and Their Origin, Together
with a Treatise on Inca Legends, History, and Social Institutions. Translated and edited by Roland
Hamilton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979 [1653].
Reycraft, Richard M., ed. Us and Them: Archaeology and Ethnicity in the Andes. Monograph Series no. 53.
Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, UCLA, 2005.
■GARY URTON
ETHNOGRAPHY, AS A SOURCE
Ethnography is a written account of the lifeways of a group of people usually
based on long-term residence by an ethnographer within a given community. As
a basic methodology of study by anthropologists since the late nineteenth
century, ethnography usually results from what is termed participant
observation, in which the ethnographer lives, works, and studies over a long
time within a community. While formal ethnographies did not begin in the
Andes until the early part of the twentieth century, certain Colonial-era travelers
and chroniclers produced works that bore some of the hallmarks of ethnography;
these include the early traveler and chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León, the
native chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, the mestizo chronicler
Garcilaso de la Vega, and even to a certain extent Pedro Sarmiento de
Gamboa. The latter, a Colonial official who was commissioned by the Viceroy
Francisco de Toledo to write the first history of the Inca Empire, carried out an
inquest of more than 100 quipucamayocs (the keepers of the knotted-string
accounts; see Quipus). From the testimony of the cord keepers, Sarmiento
fashioned an account of Inca history and cultural practices that had some of the
elements of an ethnography.
The modern practice of ethnography in the Andes began with the Peruvian
anthropologist-novelist José María Arguedas, a man of mixed
(Spanish/indigenous) ancestry who grew up in the southern highlands of Peru.
Like many ethnographers who followed in his footsteps, Arguedas recognized