succession between two brothers, Huascar and Atahualpa. In under a year,
Atahualpa had killed Huascar, Pizarro had executed Atahualpa, and the Inca
Empire had begun its rapid and inexorable collapse.
Archaeology tells a different and more complicated story about the rise and
expansion of the Inca Empire. This story begins before the appearance of what
later became the identifiable markers of Inca material culture in Cuzco,
including fine ceramics in a variety of standardized forms decorated with
geometric designs; settlements built around large plazas with low platforms with
a hole for ceremonial offerings to the earth (ushnus); and architecture of the
finest stone masonry often displaying trapezoidal windows, niches, and
doorways. In pre-Inca times, the Cuzco valley had been occupied by colonists,
administrators, and possibly warriors from a complex, probably state-level
society, known as Huari, from the region of Ayacucho, to the west of Cuzco.
These Huari peoples exploited the Cuzco valley and neighboring regions for a
variety of purposes, not all of which are entirely clear. In the Cuzco valley, they
probably set up some of the institutions—such as tribute from subordinate
peoples in the form of corvée labor; the production and offering of luxury goods
as a mode of forming alliances; and other practices—that would be adopted by
the immediate ancestors of the Incas.
The early Incas seem to have descended from local inhabitants, possibly a few
ethnic groups (e.g., the Pinahua and Ayarmaca) represented by cultural remains,
notably a ceramic style known as Killke. Scholars believe that the Killke culture
evolved over time into early Inca culture, influenced by interactions with other
ethnic groups in the general Cuzco region. Around the early fifteenth century
AD, the peoples of the Cuzco valley had achieved a degree of political,
economic, and ritual evolution and development sufficient to identify the nascent
Inca state. These early Incas initiated a course of rapid expansion, either
conquering or forming alliances with peoples ever farther from the Inca
heartland, until, with the conquest of other existing regional states, the empire
had taken on the dimensions and institutions of governance that are described in
the Spanish accounts written in the first half century or so following the Spanish
invasion.
HOW DID THE INCAS ESTABLISH AND MAINTAIN CONTROL OVER SUBJECT PEOPLES?
States and empires, whether ancient or modern, can exercise power in two ways.
One option is force; that is, by establishing sufficient police and military forces
not only to conquer opponents, but also to establish control over subject