Encyclopedia of the Incas

PhD in 1956. He subsequently taught at the University of Puerto Rico (1947–
1950), Vassar College (1950–1961), Yale (1962–1963), and the University of
San Marcos, in Lima (1964–1966), before taking up a long-time teaching
position at Cornell University (1968–1982). He died at his home in Ithaca,
New York, in 2006.
Murra made a number of critical contributions to Inca studies over the
course of his professional life. While early in his career he carried out some
ethnographic research in the central Andes, around Huánuco, where he was
also involved in archaeological research at the site of Huánuco Pampa, his
major work and contributions derived from his intense study of administrative
documents produced by Spanish Colonial administrators during the first half
century or so following the European invasion of the Inca Empire. Murra’s
initial interest concerned the economic organization of the Inca state, the
subject of his PhD dissertation. The Andean economy writ large (i.e., in pre-
Inca and early Colonial times) remained a central focus of his research over
his long career.
From close readings of the Colonial administrative documents, Murra
developed what became the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century for
explaining how the Inca—and more generally, the highland Andean—
economy worked to maintain self-sufficiency in a heterogeneous,
unpredictable, and vertical environment. This centered on what he termed
“vertical archipelagos.” In this scheme, an individual highland community
dispatched settlers—members of its own kin group (ayllu)—to colonize
distant ecological zones, whose resources were unavailable to the nuclear
group, at altitudes above and below the nuclear ayllu settlement. These
colonies constituted permanent “islands” of kinfolk who exchanged the
products of their zone with the nucleus. By this arrangement, the
geographically discontinuous community (i.e. the ayllu), consisting of a
nucleus and its island outliers, dispersed by altitude and ecozone throughout
the landscape, functioned as a “vertical archipelago,” combining people and
resources into one political and economic macrosystem. Without the aid of
markets (which Murra argued did not exist in the Andes before Spanish
contact), the archipelago arrangement accomplished the distribution of the
myriad products available in the Andes across entire social networks . While
Murra’s model is subject to some debate by ethnohistorians today, it still
represents a major interpretive approach to the study of the Incas, their
ancestors, and their early Colonial descendants.