Jason Yaeger
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 2003-2004
Tiwanaku and the Construction of Inka Imperial Ideology
Centuries after the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Tiwanaku
abandoned this Andean city in contemporary Bolivia, the Inka Empire used
the city’s impressive pyramids to express core elements of their
own creation narratives in the mid-1400s.
“The Inka were incredible social engineers,” observes
Jason Yaeger, whose research examines the layers of meanings sedimented in Tiwanaku’s
history. They reconfigured the existing structures to accommodate the ritual
activities required in their own cosmology, Yaeger says. Transforming these spaces
into “memory theaters,” the Inka celebrated and materialized Tiwanaku
as the place where Viracocha created the first couples of all ethnic groups and
thus established the ethnic differences that formed one of the bases of Inka
governance.
The Inka Settlement Program that Yaeger directed between
1999 and 2002 was the first study of Tiwanaku’s Inka occupation, despite
two centuries of archaeological fieldwork in the area. He has focused his investigation
on the Pumapunku pyramid and the activities that took place there. Although not
the most imposing structure at the site, this pyramid was particularly attractive
to the Inka and became the heart of their settlement. By the alignment of its
axis, the Pumapunku unites the sacred mountain Illimani and Lake Titicaca, landmarks
that even today anchor a series of dual oppositions in the cosmology of Tiwanaku’s
current inhabitants, the Aymara people. Visitors to Pumapunku passed through
a series of portals and gateways that framed the Illimani. “Given the Inka
penchant for landscape mimesis, this alignment would not have been lost on them,” Yaeger
comments.
Further, unlike other public spaces at Tiwanaku, the
Pumapunku complex provided both a large plaza that would accommodate Inka ceremonial
gatherings as well as a sunken court that formed a natural water reservoir for
the canals and baths integral to Inka rituals. Finally, the Inka believed that
fallen stone portraits of the city’s former rulers near Pumapunku were
models of the first humans.
“My primary point of departure is that landscapes
and monumental buildings form enduring structures that shape human experience,
perception, and interaction in ways that are not entirely arbitrary. Prominent
places are magnets for meanings, becoming symbols that accumulate meanings over
time,” Yaeger says of his approach.
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison
