Encyclopedia of the Incas

ROSTWOROWSKI,   MARÍA

Born in Lima in 1915, María Rostworowski is a self-taught Peruvian
ethnohistorian best known for her studies of late pre-Hispanic Peru,
particularly of the Inca Empire and coastal peoples. Her early writings
focused on Inca kingship, specifically on Inca succession. Rostworowski soon
realized that the prevailing accounts of the Incas were based almost
exclusively on chronicles written by Spaniards during the sixteenth to mid-
seventeenth centuries. These essentially Cuzco-centric chronicles said little
about Andean groups other than the Incas, and almost nothing regarding the
coastal inhabitants. Based on administrative documentation, most of which
had hitherto remained unused, she refocused the study of the late pre-
Hispanic Andes to reconstruct the economy and society of the pre-Columbian
coast. Whereas John V. Murra claimed that the main Andean economic
model was that of an autonomous, marketless, vertical economy that
exploited the resources found at various altitudes in different ecological tiers,
Rostworowski posited instead that coastal societies followed a horizontal
subsistence economy that comprised the coastal valleys and included the use
of markets, and therefore availed themselves of the resources found in
essentially the same altitudes. Rostworowski pioneered the combination of
archival research and fieldwork to develop a more precise reconstruction of
the pre-Hispanic landscape. In the 1980s she turned her attention once again
to the Incas, culminating with History of the Inca Realm.

Further Reading
Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, María. Pachacútec Inca Yupanqui. Lima: Imprenta Torres Aguirre,
1953.
———. Etnia y sociedad. Costa peruana prehispánica. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1977.
———. History of the Inca Realm. Translated by Harry B. Iceland. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999 [1988].
■JAVIER FLORES ESPINOZA

ROWE,   JOHN    HOWLAND

During the second half of the twentieth century, John Howland Rowe (1918–
2004) came to be recognized as a preeminent scholar of Inca culture and
society, as well as one of the pioneers of Peruvian archaeology. His