Ancient Titicaca: The Evolution of Complex Society in Southern Peru and Northern Bolivia

by Charles Stanish

One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is the first comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a fascinating story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, Charles Stanish's book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material that has not yet been published. This landmark work brings the author's intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology.

Stanish provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, he discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. He then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework.

Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of first Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius. The provocative data and interpretations of this book will also make us think anew about the rise and fall of other civilizations throughout history.

338 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2003

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drawing upon decades of Andean archaeological research, including his own investigations, as well as comparative ethnographic accounts and early historical documents, Stanish presents a detailed survey and evaluation of the evidence reflecting developments in political and economic organization in the Titicaca basin prior to Spanish colonization. In a classically processualist mode of interpretation, he argues that settlement patterning and economic production were fundamentally determined by environmental factors, only to be periodically modified toward greater nucleation and intensification by the coercive power of emergent centralized authorities. Such authority figures, in turn, developed progressively more extensive control over the economic and symbolic resources which underpinned their positions by the calculated redistribution of surplus and prestige goods in return for material and political support, in competition with other patrons of similar rank. Thus, according to this explanatory model, did unstratified agro-pastoral societies become nascent chiefdoms, establish strategic alliances which came to underlie complex polities, and gradually grow into massive, urbanized, expansionist states like Tiwanaku and the Inca empire.

While his own theoretical position is made clear, Stanish does provide unbiased comparisons of the competing scholarly viewpoints on major questions. In overall structure, the work begins with a few chapters establishing a theoretical basis for the succeeding analysis and interpretation, the paleoecological and geographic facts of the region, and the history of its archaeological description, and then proceeds basically chronologically from approximately 2000 BCE into the earliest years of Spanish colonization. This text imparts a detailed outline of the late prehistory of the Titicaca region, and serves as a valuable object of comparison for the study of other early complex societies.