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■MELISSA S. MURPHY
HUACA
Often glossed as “sacred place,” huaca is a term used frequently by the Spanish
chroniclers to invoke a concept that they clearly understood to be a core
principle, or value, of Inca and Andean peoples’ religious beliefs and practices,
as well as their senses of being and place. It was a concept that should be
understood as a central ontological (i.e., concerning the nature of being, or
reality) principle in the Inca concept of the universe and the place of humans
within it.
The central problem in understanding this important religious concept is that
the characterizations of it come largely by way of the Spanish Colonial authors,
virtually all of whom were steeped and heavily invested in Spanish Catholic
religious beliefs and values—not to mention grammatical constructions. The
challenge then is to “read back” through the Spanish chronicles, with the aid of
the few indigenous texts available to us (e.g., the Huarochirí Manuscript; see
Avila, Francisco de), to try and capture whatever indigenous essence and
meaning we may attribute to the term. In short, as we will see, huaca-being was
not a petrified, stable, nor fixed state of things; rather, it was a status, value, and
quality constructed over time in the worship and tending of an object, the