Under the supervision of Dr. Alan Covey, Kylie Quave will excavate and analyze material remains from the imperial Inka site of Cheq'oq in Cusco, Peru. Cheq'oq was a large storage and residential center pertaining to private noble lands -- or a royal estate -- in 16th-century Cusco. While state political economy functioned alongside local economies and an extensive private economy of estate resources and labor, researchers in the Inka heartland have traditionally focused on the largest administrative centers and royal palaces. In this way, they have overlooked systematic excavation and analysis of estate-associated sites, especially those with non-royal residential elements. This project emphasizes the investigation of a lower-order estate settlement to test hypotheses pertaining to the nature of the estate as an economic system. Who lived and worked on the Inka estate? What kind of status was conferred on these groups that are known through Colonial documents to have been brought into the region from the provinces for attached service to the nobility? And what role did they play in staple and wealth production?
Estates included palaces, irrigated terracing, camelid corrals, and other infrastructure for resource intensification. The Inka charged mid-level elites with the management of their resources and labor force. Depending on the social context, these administrators may have been Inka nobles, or may have come from conquered provincial or local groups. Through horizontal excavations and analysis of the area with Cusco-Inka pottery on the surface Quave will evaluate 1) the accordance of social status on estate administrators and laborers and 2) the organization and intensity of estate wealth production. The elites using the site will serve as the unit of analysis through which to examine how the Inka nobility enacted social and economic changes at the local and regional levels in creating the estate system. Excavations will focus on household organization and production and consumption activities to better understand the new socioeconomic context developed within an imperial capital.
This project will contribute to a comparative anthropological understanding of the role of elite administrators in the political economy and private economy of early states. Imperial heartlands developed with the intensification of elite and state resources, in negotiation with local subsistence economies for land tenure and labor patterns. This project builds a database for cross-cultural models of these processes, comparing and contrasting their role in imperial development.
The dissertation work also integrates research and education: the co-PI, U.S. and Peruvian students, and professional collaborators will be trained in excavation and systematic analyses. Results will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented in public venues. In Peru, local residents will collaborate in educational programming for the community, including a regional exhibition space and guided site visits for children. The co-PI is also active in community outreach in the U.S. through museums and SMU; she will share knowledge gained through the academic training under this grant in those venues.
