the Bolivian altiplano. Parts of the Atacama Desert and the southern coast of
Peru have very little evidence of Inca administration. To the north, the Incas
occupied a frontier in the Quito area that appears to have combined aspects of
Inca royal domestic power and military occupation. The ruler Huayna Capac
moved his family to the frontier, where the nobility established family estates
and took large numbers of rebellious Cañari and Chachapoya as yanacuna (see
Labor Service).
On the Pacific coast, Inca rule remained indirect in many places where local
states and empires had flourished previously, although the empire invested in
constructing roads, minor centers, and agricultural resources in the middle and
upper valleys connecting the coast with the highlands. Archaeology and
ethnohistory are challenging the top-down descriptions of Inca direct rule, but
helping to explain how the empire governed such a large and diverse population.
Further Reading
Burger, Richard L., Craig Morris, and Ramiro Matos Mendieta, eds. Variations in the Expression of Inka
Power. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2007.
Covey, R. Alan. “Chronology, Succession, and Sovereignty: The Politics of Inka Historiography and Its
Modern Interpretation.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 1: 166–99, 2006.
D’Altroy, Terence N. Provincial Power in the Inka Empire. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1992.
Julien, Catherine J. “How Inca Decimal Administration Worked.” Ethnohistory 35, no. 3: 257–79, 1988.
Malpass, Michael A., and Sonia Alconini, eds. Distant Provinces of the Inka Empire. Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 2010.
Morris, Craig, and R. Alan Covey. “The Management of Scale or the Creation of Scale: Administrative
Processes in Two Inka Provinces.” In Intermediate Elites in Pre-Columbian States and Empires, edited
by Christina M. Elson and R. Alan Covey, 136–53. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006.
Murra, John V. “Social Structural and Economic Themes in Andean Ethnohistory.” Anthropological
Quarterly 34, no. 2: 47–59, 1961.
Niles, Susan A. “The Nature of Inca Royal Estates.” In Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas,
edited by Richard L. Burger and Lucy C. Salazar, 49–70. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Salomon, Frank. Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Zuidema, R. Tom. Inca Civilization in Cuzco. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
■R. ALAN COVEYADMINISTRATION, DECIMAL
The administration of Tahuantinsuyu, the Inca Empire, involved the management
by local, provincial, and Cuzco officials of all affairs pertaining to the wealth of
resources owned and controlled by the Inca state. The administrative records
themselves, which took the form of the knotted-string quipus, included census
and tribute records, as well as information pertaining to the production, storage,