Understanding Tiwanaku: Conquest, Colonization, and Clientage in the South Central Andes
Understanding Tiwanaku: Conquest, Colonization, and Clientage in the South Central Andes ALAN L. KOLATA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ROM THE PERSPECTIVE of the south central and southern Andes, a recon Fsideration of the horizon concept and its meaning could not, perhaps, have come at a bettlr time. Only a few years ago there would have been precious little new data concerning the nature and impact ofTiwanaku in the cultural history of the Andes. Today that situation is changing dramatically. Although the archaeology of Tiwanaku has been discussed and com mented upon continuously since the days of Max Uhle, the number of substantive field projects designed to explore systematically the nature of the Tiwanaku polity is unfavorably disproportionate to the slew of specula tion that currently passes for our understanding of that ancient state. It seems that Tiwanaku has been admired, remarked upon, and then subtly, if, at times, unwittingly, dismissed, simply because there was nothing new to say. However, the past ten years have witnessed a renaissance of interest and of scholarly work on the complex phenomenon that was Tiwanaku. Recent field projects in southern Peru, northern Chile, and western Bolivia promise to alter radically current perceptions regarding Tiwanaku's role in the geopo litics of the ancient Andean world. Fresh, compelling interpretations of the political economy of Tiwanaku are forthcoming and, for the first time in a very long time, these interpretations will be embedded in conceptual frame works supported by a newly generated corpus of primary field data. Within the limited scope of this paper, I can only characterize in summary fashion the nature of these new data, and outline, in schematic form, the general contours of these emerging interpretive frameworks.
[Show full text]