The Southern Cone is the great triangular landmass extending from the edges of the Central Andean high plateaus southward to Tierra del Fuego (see Map 9.1). Under familiar social-evolutionist assumptions, this vast space has often been called “marginal” because nearly all of it lay outside the political realm of the Inka and because, in general, its native societies operated with simple technologies and small populations. In suggesting more nuanced images, we differentiate among five component spaces. First, at the northern edge of this macroregion, we distinguish a region that we call the South-Central Andes. It comprises northern Chile, northwestern Argentina, and part of southern Bolivia. Here social complexity took shape relatively early (1500 B.C.E.–C.E. 1450), and here too Inka rule eventually penetrated. It makes sense to consider the South-Central Andes’s prehistory over the long term as dynamically linked with Andean developments proper. On the other hand, groups living in the huge spaces south and east of the South-Central Andes experienced different processes and produced social forms fundamentally dissimilar from those of the Andes. These are the peoples to which the “marginal” rubric has most stubbornly adhered. They inhabited four spatial units comprising the Southern Cone proper: the Chaco, the Pampas, Araucania, and Patagonia.

The purpose of this work is to afford a prehistoric vision of the peoples of these territories, starting from the moment when their societies began to build social complexity by using a technology that allowed domestication of the environment. In absolute chronological terms, this includes a period from 1000 B.C.E. up to the fifteenth century C.E. The extreme environmental diversity of the Southern Cone – which includes every thing from high deserts to forested fjords – and the far-from-obvious relations between its environments and cultural processes, make a unitary treatment inappropriate. The processes that led to agriculture and animal domestication in the South-Central Andes occurred differently or not at all in the rest of the Southern Cone. Ceramic and copper metalwork developed briskly in some of its areas, but in Patagonia they were unknown. Copper metallurgy, which in the arid north of Chile took shape about as early as it did in the Old World (more than 1,000 years B.C.E.), arose there not out of any obvious adaptive process but as part of a sumptuary complex reinforcing rituals. In some cases although people knew of these techniques and could have practiced them, their adaptations did not require incorporating them. Other prehistoric processes were no less uneven.

This chapter focuses on complex regional cultures that emerged on the coast and in the highlands of northwestern South America, from what is now southern Colombia through Ecuador and Peru to the Peru-Bolivian high plains (altiplano). In chronology it extends from the latter part of the first millennium B.C.E. to the seventh century C.E. For much of Peru, the beginning and end of this period are marked, respectively, by the spread of Chavín and Wari “horizon styles.” “Horizons” are homogeneous styles that rapidly expanded over large areas.

Andean prehistory is commonly seen in terms of alternating periods of horizontal or interregional integration (i.e., religious movement or empire building) and of regional diversity. In terms of this perception, we are concerned here with cultures dating to the first era of integration (the “Early Horizon”) and the following era of regional diversity. Cultures covered include: Chavín, which is associated with the Early Horizon, Paracas and Nasca on the arid south coast, Lima (also known as Maranga) on the central coast, Vicús (or Sechura), Salinar, Gallinazo (or Virú), and Mochica (or Moche) on the northern coast, Layzón, Cajamarca, and Recuay in the intermontane basins of the North Highlands, all in Peru; La Tolita, Jama-Coaque, Bahía, Guangala, and Jambeli on lush to semiarid coastal Ecuador, and Pukara (also often written Pucara) and Tiwanaku (or Tiahuanaco) in the altiplano or extensive, high plateau grassland around Lake Titicaca (the highest freshwater lake in the world at about 3,810 meters above sea level; Map 5.1; Table 5.1). Such cultures were variously called Mastercraftsmen, Florescent, or Classic cultures based on their material achievements, including construction of monumental adobe mounds, and the artistic and technical excellence of their metal objects, textiles, and ceramics. In this chapter, we adopt the designation “Early Regional Development” (hereafter ERD) culture, as it describes the regional character of the cultures under study without attaching undue subjective value or evolutionary implications to them.

The chapter begins by identifying a number of major biases and limitations of the available data and perspectives and by discussing their effects on the culture synthesis offered in a subsequent section. The chapter then presents a broad-stroke characterization of their natural settings and subsistence bases and strategies, emphasizing creative management of environmental potentials and limitations. The bulk of the chapter characterizes the major material, organizational, and ideological features of selected cultures. Their developmental processes and positions in the long-term trajectory of the Andean civilization are also discussed.

Nonstate complex cultures are one of the most widespread types of ancient human societies. The complex society, or chiefdom, as some call it, was a successful way of life that hardly exists today. Accounting for the existence of such societies encourages us to look at their beginnings, florescence, and demise. We can ask what were the conditions that brought them into being? How were these cohesive and stable societies supported and integrated? What kinds of economies did they have, and how were people organized and resources used? What were the concepts embedded in their rituals and arts? And what led to their eventual replacement by other types of societies? This chapter describes the rise and development of indigenous complex cultures in South America from the late Ice Age through the Holocene, or Recent era.

THE RISE OF COMPLEX SOCIETY

Explanations of the rise of complex societies up to now have focused on five factors: patterns of environment, the impetus of human population growth, economic growth, as well as cultural diffusion, and the interaction of polities. Some theories hold that population growth in diverse, arid, circumscribed environments fostered conflict over agricultural land and ultimately led to military conquest and state organization. Statehood is thought a necessary, rational solution to living in dense, sedentary populations. Such organization came into being because central rulers and hierarchical organization were needed to run regional agricultural economies and redistributive systems. These environments possessed the rich agricultural soils to support large, sedentary populations and diverse material resources, whose exploitation and exchange were an impetus for cultural complexity. State organization is also thought to have permitted the establishment of stable societies and expansive cultural traditions; it both inspired and enabled the development of high art and monumental architecture. Finds of such cultural achievements in an archaeological culture, therefore, would be evidence of early state organization, by this reasoning.

Conversely, complex societies could not develop in tropical lowland environments, whose soils are too poor for agriculture to support population growth and whose resources are too uniform to require redistribution. The nonstate societies that could exist in the lowlands would be unstable, unable to support and organize dense, sedentary populations, and unable and indisposed to create high art and monumental architecture.

The common assumptions about the environmental and economic associations of early complex societies have been difficult to demonstrate empirically.

At the time of the Spanish invasion (c.E. 1532), the Inka ruled the largest empire the New World had ever seen. It extended from the sacred center of Qusqu, now called Qosqo, Cusco or Cuzco, northward along the spine of the Andes through what are today Peru, Ecuador, and southernmost Colombia, as well as southward into Bolivia, northern Chile, and northwestern Argentina (Map 10.1). Its domains also covered the Pacific seaboards of nearly all these lands, and parts of western Amazonia. From a European perspective many areas ruled by the Inka looked inhospitable, even marginal. Yet the Inka controlled a land rich with varied natural resources and domesticated plants and animals. Andean peoples developed the sophisticated management and redistribution mechanisms required to utilize this wealth effectively centuries before the Inka rose to power. Although the Inka based much of what they wrought on technologies and institutions developed centuries earlier, the size of the Inka enterprise made it unique in the Americas.

Inka wealth in its owners’ eyes consisted supremely of richly woven textiles, herds of llamas and alpacas, and thousands of storehouses. To the Spanish invaders, however, gold was the most immediate and measurable sign of Andean wealth. The last Inka emperor, Atawallpa (written Atahuallpa, Atawalpa, etc.; his name may mean ‘Fortunate in Creative Works’), sensed the Spaniards’ gold lust and amassed vast quantities of gold and silver in a vain attempt to buy his freedom. Eyewitnesses recorded the amount of the ransom to have been nearly ten tons of gold and seventy tons of silver. But the Spanish conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, killed Atawallpa shortly after the delivery of the great treasure. Even this was only a fraction of the total amassed by the Spaniards.

The rapid rise of Tawantinsuyu (written Tahuantinsuyu, etc.), as the Inka called their empire, was as spectacular as its geographic extent. The Quechua name could be glossed ‘four parts united among themselves’ or ‘fourfold domain’. From their center in Cusco the Inka built a logistics network of administrative centers, waystations manned by relay runners, storehouses, and religious shrines, all linked by daringly constructed roads. As they expanded, by diplomacy or by force, if necessary, the Inka encouraged ethnic diversity. At the same time, they propagated their administrative language, Quechua, and superimposed their solar religion and their administration onto the older societies whose heterogeneity is emphasized shortly.

INTRODUCTION

South America was the last of the continents to be discovered, invaded, and permanently settled by our species. It was a pristine land; thus the tale of settlement, as known through archaeology, has great potential both romantically and scientifically. However, in reaction to the excesses of European prehistory, in which migration and invasion were apparent at nearly every major cultural juncture, American archaeologists generally have eschewed migration as an explanatory mechanism and even failed to recognize it in the archaeological record. In the first case, the initial settlement of the Americas, obviously migration must be considered. Human radiation or migration was part and parcel of the exchange of Old and New World faunas – predominantly west to east – that took place between the Eurasian and North American Arctic in Cenozoic times (66 million years B.P. to present). During the last part of Cenozoic times, the Quaternary Period (2 million B.P. to present), when there was a Beringian land connection only part of the time, radiation and exchange took place among proboscideans (the order containing mammoths, etc.), horses, camels, mountain-sheep and goats, musk oxen, bison, moose, elk bears, foxes, wolves, and finally the predator that most concerns us – the members of our own species who had managed to adapt to the “mammoth steppe,” to prey upon the Palearctic (and eventually Nearctic) fauna.

Archaeological evidence for Amerindian ancestors’ migration through the Arctic is sketchy. There is still argument over the details of chronology and route, but it is clear that the human career in America is an extension of Eurasian Upper Paleolithic lifeways. From the beginning, the favored route has been an inland passage through Siberia, Alaska (either the Yukon Valley or the northern slopes of the Brooks Range), up the Canadian Firth and Mackenzie drainages, and finally, between the Keewatin-Laurentide and Cordilleran glacial lobes, into the North American heartland. Some have taken minority positions favoring maritime/ coastal entries across the North Atlantic or the North Pacific glaciated shores, but these have found scant support. The similarities are striking between Paleoindian (American) and Upper Paleolithic (Eurasian) hunting and gathering adaptations, migratory behavior, and artifacts.

This introductory chapter surveys writings that contain native South American versions of the past and problematizes the way they contain them. Its main purpose is to afford readers a “feel” for native sources’ diverse viewpoints, their verbal textures, their transformations during editing into non-native genres, and their historiographic promise. Secondarily, it raises questions about making a History out of materials that mobilize memory in ways more or less distant from Euro-American historiography. In what sense is a chant in praise of mummified ancestors or a Kogi origin story a historical source? What reading shall we give them? Aside from writing histories of South American Indians, a stillunderdeveloped but basically conventional part of the academic agenda, has anyone written South American Indian histories? What sorts of textual pasts are indigenous South American writers producing now? The first five parts sketch the literature of colonial native testimonies.

The next three sections concern modern sources in their relation to ethnography (see Map I.I). The final two sections concern methodological issues about oral tradition, literacy, and the material record. Overall, and especially from page 51 onward, the chapter is concerned with some critical questions that arise in the effort to imbue historiography with ethnographic insight: How different and how separate are mythic and historical “past-discourses”? Why has the West been slow to recognize South American social memory? What difference does the introduction of writing make to indigenous treatments of the past? Where local uses of the past differ fundamentally from literate historiography, how can historians handle them with authenticity?

RECORDING OF EVENTS AND MEMORIES IN NATIVE MNEMOTECHNOLOGIES

South America offers nothing similar to Mesoamerican codices because no native South American culture practiced writing in the common sense of the word before Iberian contact. To be sure, before 1492, most South Americans expressed thoughts about descent, time, and change in innumerable mnemonic practices, which, without resembling writing, were taken as legible remembrances. Some groups encoded the past in bodily actions: dances with costumes representing ancient beings, or chants, or pilgrimages to origin places. Others inscribed the past in sacred artifacts, some meant to eternalize evocative bodily action: lifelike ancestor mummies, trophies such as masks made from human faces (in Peru) or skins of enemies stuffed with ash (in Colombia) to commemorate victories. Other mnemonic objects aggrandized a historic person or kin group in tomb architecture, including (in Peru) palatial structures holding dead sovereigns.

The native populations of the region that the Europeans came to call Caribbean were the first to negotiate the new realities to which this encounter gave rise, as well as to endure the ecological and demographic consequences of that arrival. The Caribbean was thus center stage in the crises and transformations of the indigenous societies of the Americas during the fateful years 1492–1580. The Caribbean is defined here as equivalent to the old Spanish administrative region of the Audiencia de Santo Domingo. This comprised the Spanish-occupied islands of the Caribbean Sea and also included the littoral region known as Tierra Firme (see Map 11.1).

THE CULTURAL FORMS AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OF CONQUEST

In the islands of the Caribbean a series of brutal occupations, particularly in the Greater Antilles, meant that the native population had all but disappeared from view within a few decades of the initial encounter. In the Lesser Antilles, autonomous native society persisted much longer and developed in a more convoluted fashion because the inhabitants fiercely resisted the establishment of colonial enclaves. Similarly the variable impact of the Europeans on the native societies of the mainland, although it could be locally disastrous, also allowed for more extended interactions to develop, as in the Lesser Antilles. This meant that a wide range of novel political and economic responses emerged amongst the native population. Obviously many of the political and cultural strategies that developed showed continuity with the traditions of precolumbian times. But none of the societies of the Caribbean region that were extant in 1492 could be said to have survived unscathed. Whether fated for extinction or florescence, autonomous historical development certainly continued among Amerindian societies, even if the issue of how to respond to the Europeans became central to the native political agenda.

Impact on indigenous regional trade and alliance systems was fundamental even where contacts with the Europeans were not physically direct, inducing change amongst groups well before they ever encountered the invaders. This pattern of effect outrunning cause is particularly evident in the spread of Old World diseases on an epidemic scale. Epidemics proved lethal to the biologically pristine human populations of the New World and encouraged a rapid and widespread migration away from the epicenters of disease dispersion.

“It is impossible either to enumerate or comprehend the multitude of barbarous heathen that Nature has planted throughout this land of Brazil,” wrote Portuguese chronicler Pero de Magalhaes Gandavo, around 1570. To be sure, the enormous cultural and linguistic diversity of lowland South America presented a stifif challenge to sixteenth-century Portuguese observers, in spite of their considerable experience with the intricate political configurations of coastal Africa, South Asia, and the Far East. Even so, early European writers left relatively abundant, detailed descriptions of coastal populations. Portuguese, French, German, and English chronicles and reports, along with the massive letters and relations penned by Jesuits, constitute a wide array of sources for the reconstruction of indigenous social organization. However, although this material has been central to Brazilian ethnological debates over the development, dispersion, and structure of Tupi culture for much of the twentieth century, it has been all but abandoned by mainstream Brazilian historiography for over a century. Indeed, the historical dimension of indigenous societies and of their relations with the European invaders remains a glaringly neglected facet of the history of Portuguese America.

Although rich in information and detail, the early literature on indigenous Brazil showed some difficulty in discerning territorial divisions, political organization, and religious institutions in terms familiar to the Western experience. Sixteenth-century writers sought to simplify the intricate mosaic of languages and societies by dividing the native population into broad generic groups. Most of the coastal societies, sharing practically identical cultural attributes, came to be called Tupi, and their language the lingua geral da costa (‘common language of the coast’). But the cultural affinity between Tupi societies failed to correspond to any sort of political unity: From the European perspective, the most remarkable characteristic of the Tupi lay precisely in the constant warfare between competing segments. Referring to the Indians of Porto Seguro and Espírito Santo in his important treatise on the peoples of Brazil, Gabriel Soares de Sousa illustrated this apparent paradox: “And even though the Tupinikin and Tupinambá are enemies, between them there is no greater difference in language and customs than that between the residents of Lisbon and those of Beira.”

This portrait of acute and persistent political fragmentation was enhanced further by the presence of a great number of non-Tupi societies interspersed among the Tupi peoples along the coast, occupying vast expanses of the interior of Portuguese America as well.

Chiefdoms, the polities most often referred to by sixteenth-century Spaniards when they spoke of señoríos, curacazgos (from the Quechua, kurakd), and cacicazgos (from the hispanicized Arawak, cacique), were autonomous societies in which there were permanent, centralized political hierarchies headed by chiefs. The chieftainship was institutionalized and hereditary, with the rule of succession usually specified and restricted to élites. Chiefdoms constituted a persistent sociopolitical form in South American prehistory, occupying a great range of environments including highland and lowland basins, marshlands, desert, coast, islands, lagoons, floodplains, and piedmont. At the time of European contact, chiefdoms were widespread throughout the continent.

In this chapter we discuss chiefdoms/señoríos in four sections. The first considers what Europeans saw and reported at contact, and how their views and categorizations of societies correspond to models of sociopolitical organization that anthropologists and others use today – models that have been developed in the context of a very long-term set of inquiries regarding the development of complex societies. In the second section we discuss structure and process in Chibcha chiefdoms of the Colombian altiplano. The analysis, which is based on a variety of primary sources, aims to delineate how a particular set of political hierarchies were organized and integrated, how they functioned, and how centralization operated with respect to them. The third section is a general overview of chiefdoms in regions that remained independent of Inka rule – the areas encompassed by Colombia, Venezuela, the Ecuadorian coast, and Greater Amazonia. Emphasis is on political centralization. Primary focus is on societies that had paramount chiefs and multiple levels of political hierarchy in contrast to the broad array of independent regional chiefs with fewer political levels. Political centralization in sections two and three is looked at with respect to internal processes – patterns of interaction by which a given people resolve a number of social, political, and environmental stresses, and in so doing optimize hierarchical links, as well as external factors – activities such as exchange of goods and ideas, and participation in alliances and warfare with other groups, all of which affect individual polities and give rise to large interactive geographical regions. The fourth section deals with chiefdoms that lost autonomy as they were overrun by the Inka in the fifteenth century and integrated into the empire.

Nature has often raised the most formidable barriers ever experienced by humans in their developments; oceans, deserts, forests, and mountains have served to divide and isolate peoples from the very beginnings of human existence. Landscapes have also presented situations that on the contrary have favored and even encouraged human interaction over vast areas. Maritime basins surrounded by continuous stretches of coastline are likely to have had this stimulating effect not only around their coastal periphery but also directly between various points across their shores, when adequate seafaring technology had become available. This is not a matter of environmental determinism but more properly of opportunistic circumstances.

The Mediterranean is a classic example. Peoples and civilizations emerging around its shores were bound from the earliest prehistoric times, not only by the uniformity in climate and landscape but culturally by a common Palaeolithic substratum, and later by a shared subsistence basis of wheat, olives, sheep, and marine fishes. Although political integration was only once and briefly accomplished by the Romans, the area never escaped a cultural interdependency that at times bounded France to the Holy Land, or Spain to Morocco.

GEOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL CONDITIONS

In the New World the only geographical setting that could have led to a similar situation is the Caribbean Sea. This unique maritime basin is essentially a division of the Atlantic Ocean that overlaps both North and South America; indeed, a true maritime basin even extends as far north as the Gulf of Mexico (see Map 8.1). The more precise boundaries of the Caribbean Sea originate in the north at the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and Belize, reaching south as far as the island of Trinidad and the delta of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. The mainland of the South American continent set the Caribbean’s shores to the west, and the West Indian islands mark its eastern and northern boundaries in the form of a massive barrier to the open Atlantic. Continuous communication was at least potentially feasible all around its periphery even before European contacts, and despite stretches of difficult coastlines, simple open boats could progress along the coasts even without sails. Overland communication along coastal plains and valleys must also be considered in spreading peoples, commerce, and ideas to the entire region.

This chapter treats the period during which great states appeared in the Andes and urbanism there reached its apex. The information is basically archaeological, although important data also come from sixteenthcentury documentary sources. The first part of this process is known as the Middle Horizon (c. C.E. 560–1000); the term “horizon” signals the spread of a typical culture and social organizations across multiple regions. The second is called the “Late Intermediate Period” (eleventh to fifteenth centuries); the term “intermediate” indicates a period of diverse, regional developments between horizon cultures (see Map 6.1). Like the widely diffused culture of Chavín in remote antiquity whose traces make up the Early Horizon (see Chap. 5), the Middle Horizon showed farflung unifying tendencies. Some of them set precedents for a third unification in the Late Horizon, or Inka era (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries). Like the Early Intermediate that followed Chavín, the Late Intermediate was an era of accentuated variety, sometimes carrying forward and reworking already-ancient cultural legacies.

THE PRECURSORS

During the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries C.E., each region took on a particular social form, with characteristic linkages among valleys and river basins, different levels of complexity in social and economic organization, and unique ways of managing territory. Clearly the variability of the environment constituted an important factor in this process of regionalization.

The mid–sixth century witnessed an era of serious climatic alterations in the Andes, which could have led to displacements of populations and to nutritional and social crises of varying magnitude. It seems that in Cusco and the Lake Titicaca area rains fell almost 30 percent below normal levels for about 30 years, between the years C.E. 562 and 594. These conditions undoubtedly affected the normal development of productive activities throughout the entire territory, possibly explaining the general tendency toward changes and dislocations in most of the populations of that period. Although paleoclimatic records indicate continual alterations in humidity throughout the whole Holocene – characterized by periods of drought and also by rains that extended over several years – this 30-year stress was exceptionally long and seemingly intense.

In the southern sierra, two processes that seriously affected the Andes as a whole emerged, although evidently not as direct consequences of such natural events. First was the formation and development of a state that expanded from the southern sierra – modern Ayacucho – throughout the entire territory of the Central Andes.

This volume, the third in the Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, presents the history of the indigenous peoples of South America from the earliest peopling of the continent to the 1990s. It concentrates on continental South America but also makes some reference to peoples of the Caribbean and lower Central America who were linguistically or culturally connected to South America. A volume of such chronological, geographical, and ethnographic scope is a daunting challenge. It has rarely been attempted. The last great benchmark compilation on the peoples of South America, Julian Steward’s Handbook of South American Indians (1946), which was digested but also denatured in Steward and Faron’s (1959) Native Peoples of South America, influenced a generation of scholarly inquiry. As editors, we looked upon the present volume as a way of integrating much of what has been learned and altered in the half century since the publication of that work, and as a means of making these new findings and studies available to a wide readership.

The Handbook, although it contains some excellent historical research, was evolutionist rather than historical in its overarching intention. We are concerned with presenting South Americans as historical actors in the full sense.

The present volume is not a handbook or an encyclopedia but rather an idea-oriented history. It does aim at broad coverage, but it emphasizes development of general themes rather than completeness. Not every group will be mentioned, nor every society explained, but the broad patterns and general processes that large clusters of them shared will be delineated and discussed. Some authors have questioned habitual analytical blocs, some have reconceptualized periodizations, and many have problematized the common labels under which South American peoples are grouped. Among the idea-oriented approaches we encouraged were those that sought to relate indigenous peoples’ own reported or selfdocumented ideas about the past with the record as constructed through exterior views. This volume marks an early stage in the encounter between “histories of Indians” and “Indian histories,” which are gradually taking shape as native peoples overcome their longstanding marginalization from the orbit of Spanish/Portuguese literacy and win the standing of conceptual protagonists.

It may be useful for readers to know the process by which this book came into being.

INTRODUCTION

The arrival of Europeans on the South American continent, and the wars of conquest and journeys of exploration that soon followed, occasioned much writing of diverse kinds. This chapter concerns the development of European ideas about “Indians,” and some consequences of these ideas. Rough-hewn narratives by soldiers, fortune hunters, and explorers rub shoulders with historical works of sophistication and elegance. The Spanish crown issued administrative questionnaires about South American peoples, their religions, governments, and regional histories, and also about the continent’s geography, fauna, and flora, thereby generating volumes of responses by colonial officials. Systematic lexical and grammatical studies of Amerindian languages written for and by missionaries can be supplemented by less learned but often valuable observations of a more casual nature. In addition, there are maps and itineraries, letters and lawsuits. Beyond all that, a voluminous literature soon came into existence in Europe to rearrange and reinterpret data found in eyewitnesses’ original writings with a view to European tastes and predilections. And finally, there also exists a small but precious corpus of writings by Amerindians, recording how those who were at home on the continent perceived the destruction of much of their world and the transformation of what remained within the framework of foreign-created institutions.

Even so, however much we propose to focus on the cultures and histories of the native peoples of the Americas, it is impossible to get away from the productions of foreigners: Spaniards and Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen who wrote down their experiences of the newly discovered continent. Even as writing took place, writing supplanted, and as a result destroyed, alternative, indige nous methods of handling and preserving information. Writing was a tool of the invaders, an instrument to organize and control subject populations, preserving, for the most part, only those aspects of their cultures, religions, and historical memories that were meaningful in the new colonial context. But that is not the whole story. For, as a tool, writing was in some respect neutral. Just as in early medieval Europe, it had been monks and other ecclesiastics who preserved within their Christian and Latin literary culture certain fragments, and sometimes more than fragments, of the Germanic cultures that Christianity destroyed or modified, so also in the Americas.

What follows is as much reconstruction provoked by Ockham as a study of Ockham. My main aim is to provide a framework to accommodate various things Ockham said but did not put together as neatly as we might wish.

What provokes this project is the apparent tension between obedience to divine will, which figures so prominently in Ockham's academic writings, and the nonsacral reasonableness so prominent in his political works. Granted, both divine command ethics and a demonstrative science of morals are found in the academic writings, and extensive references to God's will as well as astute Aristotelian political analysis are found in the political works. Ockham did not abandon God's will in favor of philosophical reason when he abandoned John XXII for the protection of Ludwig of Bavaria. Yet there is, I believe, something to the impression that Ockham, especially the earlier Ockham, held God's will to be a uniquely supreme, comprehensive, unrestricted moral principle, and also something to the impression that the later, political Ockham was distinctive in arguing for a secular political order operating according to a rationally ascertainable natural law but lacking any inherent religious orientation. At any rate, such impressions set the problem I want to grapple with in this chapter.

William of Ockham presents his ethical theory not systematically but in remarks and discussions scattered throughout his writings, a fact that has obscured the structure of his views. He worked within a tradition of moral philosophy that took the basic normative principles to be given in the Bible and the conceptual tools of moral theory to be given by Aristotle; with these materials he put forward an original, powerful, and subtle theory. Ockham holds the rightness or wrongness of an act to depend not on any feature or characteristic of the act itself or its consequences but on the agent's intentions and character (elaborated in Ockham's theory of the will and of the virtues respectively). The goodness or badness of the agent's will, in turn, depends on its conformity to the dictates of right reason in the first stage and to God's will in the final stage.

THE NATURE OF MORALITY

Morality deals with human acts that are in our control – more exactly, with acts that are subject to the power of the will according to the natural dictate of reason and other circumstances. The requirement that morality be a matter of reason and will rules out brute animals as moral agents2 while allowing angels and humans to qualify. But before one attempts to spell out the respective contributions of reason and will to moral action, a fundamental question needs to be addressed, Is morality a rational enterprise in the first place? Are there moral truths, and if so, can we know them?