Page 270 - Perú indígena y virreinal

Due to their collective nature, relations of production and distribution were based on principles of reciprocity and mutual aid. However, although these relations enabled the system to be reproduced at an ayllu level, they also served to transfer the profits of production to the state. Every man and woman throughout the Empire “owed” the state (that is, Inca, his court and his retinue) an amount of time and work, which they handed over when required to; in exchange, the state reciprocally “owed” the communities a series of benefits, which ranged from divine protection to presents and donations presented by Inca and his representatives. This form of asymmetrical reciprocity enabled the state to reproduce the basic relations that managed production in the country and to receive the profits, providing services in return. At the same time, human resources were used for farming, but also for providing direct service in the urban centres and for the production of manufactured products, for supporting the provision of services, for the army, for building, etc. For this purpose various institutions existed. The Mita enabled the state to use a considerable part of the local peasant population—the mitayoq—for works of a public nature such as temples, roads and palaces; the Minka organized collective labour in benefit of the state. There was also a possibility of moving whole populations or sections of a population—the mitmaq—from one place to another for military or production purposes. The Aqllawasi facilitated female labour forces—the aqllacuna and the mamacuna—that specialized in the production of textiles and other luxury goods; the aqllawasi were veritable factories or workshops organized in the form of convents, not only providing specialized labour, but also women for Inca and his court.
Finally, the curaca lords fulfilled their duties of reciprocity by redistributing products, facilitating a process whereby wealth was shared out, although this was naturally much more beneficial to the lords themselves than to the peasants. A system like this did not require the existence of markets, although exchange took place and markets existed at various levels. Money was not needed either.
In order to sustain this system, the Incas resorted to highly rigorous mechanisms of demographic recording, by means of censuses and decimal monitoring of the inhabitants: tens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, with heads responsible for each group. For example, Chunka camayoq or head of ten production units; Pachaq camayoq or head of one hundred (normally a Chief); Waranqa camayoq or head of one thousand; Unu camayoq or head of ten thousand, equivalent to a province’. All of these figures were under the administration of other camayoq or higher-category officials, forming a pyramid of power, with Inca himself at the top.
The legal basis of the system was highly efficient, as was the administration. Three basic principles governed patterns of social behaviour: ama sua, ama qella, ama llulla (no stealing, no idleness and no lying). These were not simple moral beliefs, but specifically applicable rules that benefited the imperial régime in order to prevent evasion of work and robbery, especially with regard to the property of the state.
In order to achieve all this, it was essential to establish an extremely powerful urban network, one that was, of course, connected by means of the Qhapaq-ñan. An administrative centre was established at Quito, the city of Tomebamba in Cuenca and later on in Cajamarca, further south in Huánuco Pampa, Pumpu in Junín, Vilcashuamán in Ayacucho, only to mention the largest and most powerful in Chinchaysuyu, although we might add Incallaqta in Cochabamba, in Collasuyu. Towns surrounded each city, and villages and hamlets each town. Some ceremonial centres such as Pachacamac, near Lima, were of considerable importance, comparable only to the temples of Cusco. On the coast, each valley had its own large urban centres, although everything indicates that various large pre-Inca cities also persisted.
Manufacturing continued in the same vein as in the former large regional states, featuring a tendency towards mass production which was, therefore, based on a model. The Cusco style became the new model and its forms and substance were later imitated at a local level. The formats of Inca ceramics, both in terms of pottery and the various other arts, were copied with varying degrees of success in areas ranging from the lands of Los Pastos, to the south of Colombia, to those of Los Araucanos in the north, Los Picunches, in Central Chile, and Los Diaguitas and Huarpes in Argentina. The textiles were of local manufacture, although the fine Inca fabrics were especially notable for the high-
quality materials employed and their careful elaboration. Temples were covered in gold, silver and precious stones, whilst the adornments and works of art of the élite circulated from here to there, even though the dominant trend consisted of the mass-produced items created for general consumption in the cities.
The Tawantisuyo Empire was founded in the 14th or 15th Century, following the Pachakuti period. Throughout its duration, a number of significant changes took place in Peru; one of them, perhaps the most important, was the emergence of the idea of land ownership as a form of appropriation, this being as important or even more important that ownership of the labour force. The Incas of Cusco allocated the rich Valley of Urubamba to themselves, in addition to lands in Cochabamba. A new era was about to begin when the Spanish arrived in the 16th Century. The Emperor Wayna Qapaq Inca had just died and the succession was being contested by his children Waskar and Atawallpa.
diversity of territory and architecture
Antonio Bonet Correa
The Discovery of the Americas in 1492, right at the end of the 15th Century, marked the beginning of a new era in Universal History, one that was understood as the dawn of civilization in accordance with the precepts of Western thought. The discovery of a hitherto unknown world and the so-called “invention of the Americas” not only aroused the curiosity of humanists and the interest of the adherents of political and economic power but also served the material and religious expansion of the Old Continent. The military and spiritual conquest of the territories assigned by the Papacy in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) was carried out by the Spanish. With its appropriation and possession of the American territories, the Spanish Empire reached the highpoint of its power on a world scale, which meant that the centre of gravity in Europe after the 16th Century ceased to be the Mediterranean Sea and began to focus on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The conquest of Peru was the last stage in an enterprise of exploration and settlement that took place during the first third of the 16th Century. With the new Spanish order already established in the Antilles and in Tierra Firme, that is to say, in Mexico and Central America, after 1531 the Extremaduran Francisco Pizarro undertook the conquest of Peru in South America. The consolidation and settlement process was slow and lasted more than a decade. Taken in 1533, the city of Cusco—the capital of the Inca Empire, located inland within the Andean region—, and the city of Lima, founded by Francisco Pizarro in 1535—located on the coast—, began to shape what would become the future Viceroyalty of Peru. Civil wars among Spaniards themselves, along with the difficulties they encountered with the natives, held back the colonization process somewhat, which really only started to take effect after Pizarro’s death and the establishment of the Viceroyalty in 1542. With the founding of the cities of Trujillo, Huamanga and Arequipa and the discovery of the rich silver deposits of Cerro Gordo in Potosí in 1545, the Viceroyalty of Peru, with its capital in Lima, acquired a political and economic importance that made it the most opulent and plentiful territory in South America.
The Viceroyalties of New Spain in the northern hemisphere and of Peru in the south, starting in the 16th Century and continuing up until their emancipation and independence from Spain in the early 19th Century, were to constitute the two fundamental poles of the Spanish domination of the New World. Their capitals, Mexico and Lima respectively, with their concentration of political power and merchandising trade, their mix of races and intense cultural life, would become the two key cities on the American Continent. Their layout and architecture would determine the development of the other towns and cities located in these territories. In the middle of the 19th Century, once the New Laws of the Indies had been passed, the fleets had been organized into convoys and the administrative organization of the state and ecclesiastical bodies had been determined, the period of
ENGLISH TEXTS [ 277 ]