Encyclopedia of the Incas

for the first time, scholars identified biases that raised questions about the
accuracy of accounts. Clements Markham, for instance, published a translation
of Sarmiento de Gamboa in 1907 in which he italicized passages that he thought
misrepresented Inca rule. Around this time, archaeologists working in Peru were
becoming aware of pre-Inca civilizations, and were forced to confront the fact
that Inca accounts of their rise to power could not adequately explain the
kingdoms and empires that had come before them (see Chronology, Pre-Inca).
In 1928, Philip Ainsworth Means published the first part of his Biblioteca
Andina, a treatment of the corpus of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources
on the Andes. Taking a cue from the great Spanish historian Marcos Jiménez de
la Espada, Means distinguished between groups of chroniclers whom he called
“Garcilasans” (after the chronicler) and “Toledans” (after the Viceroy Toledo,
who commissioned Sarmiento de Gamboa’s chronicle), which correspond
roughly to the early and late expansion models discussed above. Means
discounted the Toledan accounts as being either ill informed or vindictive, and
he saw the Garcilasan group as consisting of better chroniclers whose
description of gradual Inca expansion seemed more reasonable.
Means’s promotion of an early expansion model set the stage for the current
interpretive paradigm, which John H. Rowe presented in 1945. Rowe reframed
the early/late expansion models by asking whether a source would answer “yes”
or “no” to the question “Had the Incas conquered territory more than about fifty
miles from Cuzco at the beginning of Pachacuti’s reign?” Leaving aside the
question of how and when the Incas conquered the Cuzco region—an inquiry to
which he never seriously returned—Rowe looked at the archaeological evidence
for Inca expansion in provincial regions, concluding that the most reliable
chroniclers and the material remains supported the interpretation of late and
rapid imperial expansion. This new approach to Inca expansion treated it as a
historically documented process, and Rowe produced a map showing the
territories conquered by Pachacuti, Topa Inca Yupanqui, and Huayna Capac.
Subsequent historiographic work has fine-tuned aspects of this map, but the
overall portrait of Inca expansion presented by Rowe in 1945 remains more or
less unchallenged. Archaeological research has begun to raise some interpretive
questions about this paradigm, bringing radiocarbon dates into the reconstruction
of Inca expansion processes. Archaeological dates are less precise than the
calendar dates developed from the Colonial chronicles appear to be, but they
have been instrumental in reconstructing the earliest expansion of the Inca state