Avaliação: Arqueologia Inka – Mobilization as a strategy of power and of government: The case of the qollqa in the breadbasket of the Inkas in the Cochabamba valley, Bolivia

The Inka State (1445-1538 AD) expanded from Cuzco to Bolivia, Chile and Argentina and to Ecuador introducing a statecraft model based principally on the mobilization of numerous population groups across longer and shorter distances. In this sense, the Inca Empire can be conceptualized as a “mobile state” that was to last for only about 100 years.
The territory of modern Bolivia experienced massive population replacements through the colonization of 14,000 mitimaes to work on the fertile State fields in Cochabamba under the reign of Huayna Capac (1491-1527 AD). The original population groups were sent to the eastern borders. The principal interest of the State was the production of surplus and staple food for further conquests including Ecuador. About 4000 granaries (qollqa) in Cotapachi, today consisting of circular stone-lined foundations of about 3.00 m. in diameter, underline the highly important role of the Cochabamba valley in the organization of the Inka empire. The cultivation of maize, which until then appears to have been used only to a limited extent, raises the question of its social role.
The role of the productive/reproductive reorganization of the Cochabamba valley with the implementation of new production techniques, as well as transformations in land ownership and dependency have not yet been thoroughly studied. Cochabamba serves as an example for local perspective, abandoning the narrow state-centric view of Andean states and considering the context of “a wide range of socio-political orders”, in which a centralized state was only one of the actors among a combination of the rulers and the local institutions and the wider Inka state, here especially the mitayos and mitimaes. The mobilization of thousands of mitimaes to work on state projects was the basis of the expansion of the Inka state. The question as to why the institution of the mitimaes became so vital must be answered starting from this innovative understanding of the Inka state.

• Inka, Bolivia, power strategies, mitimaes, mobilization