Conceptualizing Human-Mountain Relations in the Ancient Andes
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-04-13

In the Andes, indigenous terms for mountains (wamani, apu etc.) typically translate to something like “lord”, “king” or “judge”. And colonial narratives about mountains often describe them as sentient beings; in other words as entities who could speak, make prophecies, pay taxes and even be executed for treason. Basically then, they represented a kind of social elite – beings who were no less a part of Andean communities as anyone else. Traditional archaeological approaches to human-environment relations have, as yet, demonstrated a limited capacity to deal with such radically different worlds. At best, Andean mountains are relegated to the realm of religion (often called “mountain worship”) as a way of keeping them separate from “real” aspects of human-environment relations – like water management, mining and agriculture. In this paper, I argue that not only do such approaches fail to understand indigenous accounts of their world, but actually impede our ability to interpret archaeological data correctly. I present archaeological landscape survey data from the Andean cloud forests, relating to Inka efforts to mass-produce coca leaf, as a case-study in this respect. Rather than see such activities as an effort at agricultural intensification, to extract more resources from an asocial environment, I instead suggest that Inka landscape manipulations can only be understood as part of a project for turning mountains into a disciplined and loyal workforce.

Darryl Wilkinson, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge