Encyclopedia of the Incas

As scholars working within a political economy tradition have argued at great
length, accounting for these institutional means of mobilizing and controlling
surplus products is critical to understanding the emergence and persistence of
sociopolitically complex formations such as Tahuantinsuyu, the Inca Empire
(particularly within the environmental extremes of the Andean region). Over the
past 50 years, archaeological survey, excavation, and the careful rereading of
archival sources has pointed to both the importance and the variability of Inca
state storage systems and pushed scholars to reconsider the nature of political
control and economic organization in the late pre-Columbian Andes.
This growing body of research has revealed that storage facilities indeed
formed a key part of the state-directed establishment of an integrated imperial
landscape that included the construction of administrative sites, roadside way
stations (tambos), the road network itself, and large agricultural terracing
programs. Scholars have long noted several major spatial patterns in the
distribution of state storage facilities, highlighting the massive concentration and
scale of storage in the highland provinces, especially in comparison with the
imperial core at Cuzco, the capital, and with the Pacific coastal zone. While
research since 1995 has brought greater nuance to these dichotomies, the distinct
provincial highland pattern of massive agricultural storage facilities remains one
of the best-understood features of the Inca economic landscape.
This provincial highland pattern is best known from investigations at central
highland administrative centers such as Huánuco Pampa, Pumpu, and Hatun
Jauja. Adjacent to these sites are large installations of circular and square
storehouses (collcas) arranged in long rows on nearby hillsides; in some cases,
up to several thousand storehouses are associated with a single major
administrative center. Constructed with fieldstone masonry, these modular
constructions tend to consist of one or two rooms and often show carefully
designed features to ensure optimal storage conditions. As archaeobotanical
work has demonstrated, these collcas seem to have been used predominantly for
the large-scale storage of agricultural products such as maize, Andean grains,
and tubers. In some cases, excavations have recovered significant quantities of
unprocessed, single-species plant remains. As such, these facilities drew on the
long-standing highland traditions of staple food processing and storage
developed over millennia of highland adaptation.
Patterns of state-level storage have long been central to interpretations of the
nature of Inca imperial administration, often with an emphasis on those features
that were unique to the Inca case. While a number of early commentators (from