An early inventory of the sources for Andean ethnohistory is Phillip A. Means, Biblioteca Andina (1928), Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 29, 271–525. It is still a useful discussion of the eyewitness accounts of the European invasion. More recent compilations by Peruvian historians are Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Manual de estudios Peruanistas, 5th ed. (Lima, 1959) and Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Los cronistas del Perú (Lima, 1986).

Beginning in 1956, the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, published in Madrid by the Real Academia through its Ediciones Atlas, undertook new editions of many of the European chroniclers: for example, Bernabé Cobo’s Historia del Nuevo Mundo, (1653; Madrid, 1956). Each work has a new introduction, although they are of unequal value; the texts themselves are carefully reproduced. Two very early titles, whose existence was suspected but which had remained inaccessible, have finally surfaced: the missing second half of Juan de Betanzos’s account of events at the Inka court during the last years before Pizarro was located by María Martín Rubio in a private collection in the Balearics: Suma y narratión de los Incas (1551; Madrid, 1987); the Jesuit historian Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María reproduced the last missing part of Pedro Cieza de León’s Guerras civiles peruanas (1552; Madrid, 1985).

After the collapse of the Inka state, Andean societies had to endure a new kind of subordination that shattered the polities and gradually eroded ethnic differences. While these processes played themselves out, the ethnic leadership was coopted to buttress colonial rule. Annually capitanes assembled and led thousands of miners drafted for the mines of Potosi; until late in the seventeenth century they were still in charge of recognizable ethnic cohorts (such as the Carangas, the Pacajes, or the Lupaqa). It is worth asking at what point in colonial history the corregimientos still reflected ethnic lines.

Each of the polities was fragmented at a distinct historical rhythm: Changes, but also continuities, differed from region to region; even today there are differences of scale among social units, according to country. Ecuador and Bolivia tolerate larger, multivillage units, whereas “community” legislation has pulverized them in Peru.

In Part V we do not attempt to offer a survey of the many problems emerging from the imposition of a colonial system. This would require a volume of its own, if not more. The three chapters here explore a particular issue covering the whole period from the sixteenth century to our own times – namely, the transformation of a multi-ethnic world, full of large-scale societies, into “indigenous communities.” In fact, the “community” is a colonial creation, heir to the policy, after 1570, of deporting the Andean population into reducciones, strategic villages that deprived the population of ready access to their shrines and widely dispersed landholdings.

In recent years studies of Andean civilizations by native scholars have flourished in the Andean homelands. Overseas scholars have also lent a hand. Although events in all five Andean republics have warranted curiosity about current developments, the more notable feature of this scholarship has been the growing number of inquiries about the Andean achievement before 1532. The dense populations in a precapitalist society, the remarkable productivity of high-altitude crops and the effect of high-altitude biology, unparalleled textile arts and the vast installations for weaving manufactures, the native perception and use of the southern sky, religious and political symbolism – all of these are privileged topics of current scholarly concern.

Beyond the academic community, many others have become active in defense of the Andean patrimony. Andean camelids and their pastures, the cultivation and use of the coca leaf, the terracing and irrigation of the mountainsides – all these are threatened by foreign intervention. Another expression of this defense is a growing preoccupation with the literary future of the Aymara and Quechua languages, spoken by some 10 million citizens of the five republics, at a time when the mass media have discovered that these speakers are also a market.

In 1984, the Facultad Latino-Americana de Ciencias Sociales of Quito began to offer a two-year program leading to a master's degree in Andean history – an initiative without precedent. Graduates of universities in all five Andean republics, and some from elsewhere, applied; and about thirty received scholarships supporting a year of formal class work with an international faculty drawn from three continents. A second year of thesis research in the field or the archives will follow.

Built up through successive conquests of many and diverse ethnic groups, the Inka state continued to utilize preexisting Andean institutions. It looms as the supreme polity, crowning all the embedded and pyramidal ethnic structures it had incorporated. Kin ties and ethnic solidarities, the promises of assymetrical reciprocity and redistribution, were all systematically reutilized as ideological disguises justifying new social relations. A qualitative threshold was crossed as the Inka state expanded: The development of a state apparatus, with its own dynamic and logic, suggested by the increase in the numbers of mitmaq colonists, yana retainers and aqlla weavers – all separated from their ethnic base. Do we merely imagine the risk and fundamental challenge that we detect in this change?

Thus the perspective changes, depending on whether one's study centers on the organization of the state, viewed from above, or whether one observes from below the more accessible ethnic groups or older polities. We mentioned above the disappointing awareness that our understanding of the Inka state has not kept up with the rhythm of information concerning other Andean institutions. Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, who died in 1898, has had no successor as a locator and editor of unfamiliar eyewitness sources. Waman Puma's “letter to the king” of 1615, published by Paul Rivet in 1936, has been reprinted several times; in 1980 a critical edition, with translations of the texts in Quechua and the indexes to facilitate its use was published in Mexico.

Recent years have witnessed a flowering of studies devoted to “Andean symbolism,” the subject of a noted symposium, part of the 1976 Congress of Americanists (B. Isbell 1978). Many of these papers used a structural analysis, which has proved productive for the Andean world. Billie-Jean Isbell's assertion at the time, that the Andean peoples were spontaneous structuralists of astounding subtlety and sophistication, may well be accurate. To elucidate this involves methodological questions. It is not enough, after all, to describe the conscious functioning of Andean thought: An effective understanding of an ethnographic classification also depends on thorough awareness of the social morphology and the economic system. The very same principles guide not only practice but also the mental representations. The latter are not just “superstructures,” more or less autonomous; they are active components in the reproduction of the total social universe.

Following on his work localizing the ceque lines and ayllu of the circum-Cusco area (1964 and later), R. T. Zuidema (Chap. 11, this volume) shows how the hydrographical network, tamed by the irrigation system, is also “humanized” by being fitted into upper and lower moieties. The same patterning governs the perception of the ecology, the location of social units, rituals, and myth.

In an environment of violent contrasts, frequently at the very limits of adaptive possibilities, Andean America is truly a testing ground for human and social disciplines. The societies developed here, numerous and extremely diverse, lived in isolation from the rest of the world for thousands of years, achieving most of what they did on their own. Their history followed an original, pristine course. The culmination of these processes is the emergence of Tawantinsuyu, the Inka state, one of the larger and more powerful preindustrial polities.

If such independent development were to be appreciated for the rare opportunity it provides for comparative inquiry, one could expect Andean studies to flourish. This dimension is not yet the dominant one. Nonetheless, independent of any comparative urge, our understanding of the Andean world has undergone some major changes during the last few decades, a progress not only quantitative, through an accumulation of discoveries, but also qualitative, through changes in the sources used, our methods, and the very object of our inquiry. How do we explain this mutation?

For centuries, historians, both from the Andean republics and from abroad, had centered their fascinated attention on the Inka “empire.” Ever since the sixteenth century, Andean precious metals had fed fantasies of El Dorados; Andean institutions also provided “facts” for the Utopian needs of writers as diverse as the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Marmontel. As recently as 1928, the carefully documented work of Louis Baudin was entitled L'Empire socialiste des Inkas.

Some years ago the Swedish historian Ake Wedin urged us to reject Rowe's chronology of Inka expansion, which claimed that Cusco rule had expanded and was destroyed by the Europeans, all in less than one hundred years (Wedin 1963).

John Howland Rowe's evidence, marshaled more than thirty years ago, seemed convincing then, became the conventional wisdom, and continues to be persuasive (Rowe 1945). Many of us active in the Andes did wonder how such a vast polity, incorporating scores if not hundreds of separate ethnic groups, spread out over more than 4,000 kilometers, could have been welded together in less than a century. Wedin stressed the lack of any occidental precedent for such rapid expansion; he also voiced his skepticism at the claims of Inka oral dynastic tradition recorded less than twenty years after the European invasion.

An indispensable component of this incorporation has been stressed, if in preliminary form, by Paul Kirchhoff (1946). When undertaking the expansion, the kings of Tawantinsuyu, the Inka state, were heirs to an experience of statecraft going back centuries, if not millennia. Wari, Chimu, Tiwanaku – all were pre-Inka states, and archaeology gives us no reason to assume that even these were the earliest complex, stratified societies of the region. How to incorporate and then govern disparate linguistic and ethnic groups was part of the political repertoire of thousands of local Andean lords well before A.D. 1000.

The Andean environment would seem to pose insurmountable difficulties for man, for it consists of one of the most arid coastal deserts in the world, of high plateaus that are cold and dry, and of vertiginously steep Amazonian slopes. Yet its inhabitants have used its resources in such a way that they have managed not only to survive but also to create a series of civilizations that confer upon the Andes, for all their diversity, a remarkable cultural unity. Even the most isolated valleys have been open, sometimes repeatedly in the course of millennia, to external influences. Thus archaeologists have come across objects of Chavin, Tiwanaku, or Inka origin some hundreds of kilometers from their place of manufacture, along with remains from the local tradition.

In this first part of the volume, Olivier Dollfus analyzes the diversity of Andean environments through both time and space, and Ana Maria Lorandi examines the factors that seem to account for the spread of the three great “horizons” that succeeded each other before the European invasion. These two essays complement the article by Lautaro Núñez, who evokes the destiny of the Tarapacá Valley over what turns out to be truly a long haul (from 6,000 B.C. to our day). The ecological circumstances of this valley, located today in northern Chile, were perceived and rated in the most varied ways by the many societies that have succeeded each other: The successive changes in the settlement pattern and in the awareness of potential resources are witness to the multiplicity of possible solutions and to their originality.

Soon after the European invasion, the newcomers became familiar with a few score indigenous nouns. They discovered the khipu, a knot-string record used in bookkeeping and the enumeration of people; it came in handy when granting encomiendas, since both the Andean and peninsular law dealt with souls liable to tribute, not territory. They were delighted to find an existing servile population, the yana; this permitted the accumulation of “perpetual servants” without contravening royal ordinances prohibiting the enslavement of “Indians.” They had some trouble understanding what tupu stood for, since it measured not only surfaces but also distances; it differed too, according to the ecological fit of a given plot of land. They had no trouble adopting the mifa, which facilitated the mobilization of thousands of workers far from their homes.

And yet despite (or maybe just because of) the ready adoption of these terms into the colonial vocabulary, the Andean implications, the shades of meaning, frequently even the most elementary glosses of these concepts escape us.

Whether we are thinking of access to land or about royal lineages, of the state's revenues or the drafted hosts, it is indispensable to understand the fundamental concepts underlying the organization of Andean societies from inside the system. But we face this task four centuries too late. Although Andean languages are still spoken by about 10 million people, much of the esoteric vocabulary dealing with statecraft is lost. The kind of sophisticated consultant available to Eric de Dampierre, Jan Vansina, or Ivor Wilks in Africa has long since vanished in the Andes.