Within twenty years of Pizarro's landfall on the west coast of South America, the word “huaca” was applied to native religious monuments by Spanish speakers throughout the Americas. Derived from the Quechua waka the first written use of the word was in Juan de Betanzos' Suma y narración de los Incas completed in 1551, and ‘huaca’ eventually was incorporated into the dialects of Spanish spoken in Central America and the Caribbean (Corominas 1974: 800). Betanzos (1987 [1551]) used waka to refer to a sacred place or temple or a priestly residence, but by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the word's meaning had loosened considerably. With the onslaught of extirpation, the definitional boundaries widened to include any burial place, any shrine, any object or construction that materially marked the indigenous concepts of sacred. As the word spread, its definition stretched. The laxity of categories is paralleled in archaeological approaches to ancient Andean monuments. The word huaca has been attached to enormous pyramids (Huaca del Sol at Moche), tell-like accumulations of midden (Huaca Prieta in the Chicama Valley), and burial crypts (Huaca las Avispas at Chan Chan). Only two concepts unify such different structures – they are artificial and they are large – and a moment's reflection suggests such a classification obscures more than it illuminates.

Yet how can one begin to classify and to understand the differing social uses and meanings that prehistoric monuments had for Andean people? First, there is the issue of defining what a monument is.

The following summarizes archaeological data from twenty-two Andean sites spanning the period of approximately 5900 BC to AD 1470. These sites are located in central and northern Peru, principally in the central highlands and Pacific coast (Figure 2.1). The sites range from relatively small structures to truly monumental constructions; some are located in the midst of residential zones and yet others lack evidence of significant habitation. Some of these sites are unique, while others fit comfortably into well-documented architectural traditions. For all their variation, these sites may not truly represent the range of prehispanic Andean constructions; the current data rarely are sufficient to reconstruct well-defined settlement patterns or to evaluate these sites' positions in regional settlement systems. Simply, our knowledge of Andean architecture is outweighed by our ignorance.

Thus, the sample is not ideal, but there are good reasons for selecting these particular sites. First, the focus was somewhat arbitrarily limited to central and northern Peru – an area familiar to me – and therefore ceremonial centers located elsewhere in the Andes, such as the Archaic site of Asana (Aldenderfer 1990, 1991), were excluded from the sample. Further, I selected sites for which detailed plans based on excavated data were available, and which had maps showing the relationship of a particular structure to the larger settlement.

“Space is never empty,” the geographer Edward Relph writes (1976: 10), “but has content and substance that derive both from human intention and imagination and from the character of the space.” Relph describes the different kinds of space humans experience and create: the unselfconscious space experienced by an infant moving without reflection, the space shaped by human perception, and space which is cognitive and abstract. Like other elements in the cultural landscape, architecture often contains explicit material statements about human intention and imagination, expressing human desires to literally shape the world. When such material patternings become widespread and shared, we are seeing the physical remains of what Relph calls “existential space”:

The Panopticon may be one of the true oddities of architectural history, but it was more than a mere curio. The model prison was designed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the British Utilitarian philosopher who unsuccessfully promoted his plan for twenty years, spending a small fortune in the process (Evans 1982:195–197). Bentham was primarily concerned with the nature of government and the justice of punishment, and, for that reason, a pioneer of prison reform, though a somewhat quirky one. The hidden labyrinths of eighteenth-century prisons led to unobserved abuses, and Bentham's solution was the Panopticon (Figure 5.1) – a circular, glassroofed structure, with cells along the outer ring all facing onto a central rotunda where a single guard could keep every prisoner under constant surveillance (Johnston 1973: 19–21). Bentham lavished a creator's prose on the project: “The building circular – A cage, glazed … The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference, the inspectors concealed … from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence … One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell” (cited in Evans 1982: 195). Bentham's Panopticon was an architectural plan designed explicitly as a means of social control “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1977: 201).

Ancient traces of stone suggest humans have lived in buildings for at least 350,000 years. If the features and dates from the Paleolithic site of Terra Amata, France, are interpreted correctly (de Lumley 1969; cf. Villa 1983), early humans built small, temporary huts of saplings, cobbles, and brush on the edge of the Mediterranean during the Holstein interglacial. More permanent dwellings date from ca. 12,000–10,000 bp, as proto-agricultural Natufian peoples crowded around permanent springs in the post-Pleistocene Levant (Henry 1989) and sedentary hunters and gatherers using Jomon pottery settled the forested river valleys of the Japanese islands (Aikens and Higuchi 1982; Pearson 1986; Watanabe 1986). An unbroken legacy of human buildings stretches from the massive walls and tower built 9,350 years ago at Jericho, perhaps the oldest example of communal construction (Kenyon 1952,1972; cf. Mellaart 1975; Bar-Yosef 1986), to the Louisiana Superdome, the world's largest arena with seats for 95,000. And with an apparent inevitability which is simply an artifact of hindsight, humans translated early dwellings into other architectural forms as rooms served as burial crypts, pithouses became kivas (Cordell 1979: 134; Scully 1975), and houses of men were transformed into dwellings of gods (Bukert 1988; Fox 1988). Over the last 10,000 years, the built environment has become coterminous with the human environment, as people have raised artificial boundaries defining private and public, secular and sacred spaces.