Storage, Power, and the Politics of Interpretation. Inca Storage System. From Chronicles to Contemporary Archaeology
Storage, Power, and the Politics of Interpretation
Inca Storage System
From Chronicles to Contemporary Archaeology
This research examines how interpretations of the Inca governance and economy have changed over time, focusing on its storage systems. The emphasis is placed on the administrative center of Huánuco Pampa, a major highland site in the central Andes, as a clue to understanding its political and social organization. By tracing a genealogy of studies, from sixteenth-century Spanish and Andean chronicles produced in the wake of the Spaniardinvasion of the Andes, through mid-twentieth-century archaeological fieldwork to contemporary surveys, this work explores how interpretations of Inca storage mirror broader visions about power, economy, and governance. The research also examines how different modes of representation—ranging from textual descriptions and drawings to photographic documentation, aerial surveys, and contemporary methods—shape how these systems shared, read, and understood. Storage, in this sense, is not only a material infrastructure but also a conceptual space where ideas of control and redistribution are projected and debated.
Scholars have studied the Inca state through their own concerns, interpreting it as a realm of reciprocity and redistribution or as an empire of centralization and domination. Colonial chroniclers documented storehouses primarily through the frame of conquest. Mid-twentieth-century anthropologists like John V. Murra, working from contexts shaped by dependency theory and critiques of capitalism, reinterpreted these storage facilities as evidence of reciprocal, redistributive systems, offering alternative narratives of state organization. This highlighting that what scholars “see” depends on the tools, methods, and questions they bring.
By mapping a succession of authors, contexts, methodologies, and epistemic positions, the aim is to produce a genealogy of these interpretations. The objective is twofold: to uncover how knowledge about Inca storage—and the state—is constructed, and to examine how storage functions as both an object of study and a lens for understanding power relations between the state and its citizens. In doing so, the research engages broader questions about how knowledge the past is produced, stored and shared, , and what political stakes are embedded in these practices.