Vertical archipelago

The vertical archipelago is a term coined by sociologist and anthropologist John Victor Murra under the influence of economist Karl Polanyi to describe the native Andean agricultural economic model of accessing and distributing resources. Aside from certain cultures, particularly in the arid northwest coast of Peru, pre-colonial Andean civilizations did not have strong traditions of market-based trade. Like Mesoamerican pochteca traders, there was a trading class known as mindaláes in these northern coastal societies.[1] A system of barter known as trueque is also known to have existed in these coastal societies as a means of exchanging goods and food stuffs between farmers and fisherman.[2] A simple currency, known to archaeologists as axe-monies, were also present in the area (as well as western Mesoamerica).[3] By contrast, most highland Andean societies, such as the Quechua and Aymara, were organized into moietal lineage groups, such as ayllus in the Quechua case. These lineages internally shared labor through a system called minga. This minga labor system itself rested upon the concept of ayni, or reciprocity, and did not use any form of money as in the case of the coastal Andean traders. Fundamentally, it is a concept of "ecological complementarity" mediated through cultural institutions.[4] Some scholars, while accepting the structure and basic nature of the vertical archipelago, have suggested that inter-ethnic trade and barter may have been more important than the model suggests, despite the lack of evidence in the archaeological and ethnohistoric record.[5][6]

Absent the use of trade to access resources, economic transactions were essentially intra-lineage obligations of labor. These lineages required a base level of self-sufficiency to achieve autarky. In the Andes, a long mountain range with a great variety of ecozones and resources, the need to access the proper lands for specific crops or animals meant lineages created miniature colonies or sent seasonal migration (such as transhumance) in different ecoregions. As the Andes are a relatively young mountain range, there is an especially great variation in waterfall and temperature, which has great importance for agriculture. This is all the more important as only about 2% of the land in the Andes is arable.[7]

Ecozones

Headed from the arid, western coast to the humid, eastern slopes bordering the Amazon basin, there are four basic ecozones which highland Andean communities exploit:

Under the Inca

See also: Mit'a

The Inca state drew its taxes through both tax in kind and corvée labor drawn from lineages and administered through a bureaucracy composed largely of local nobility. The corvée labor force was used for military operations as well as public works projects, such as roads, aqueducts, and storage buildings known as tampu and qollqa. There were parallel institutions of lineage-based colonies known as mitmaqkuna, which produced goods for the state and provided strategic security in newly acquired areas, and yanakuna, which were retainers with labor obligations to higher members of the state.[10][11] Lands belonging to the Sapa Inca, the state church, and to panaqas (lineages descending from individual Sapa Incas according to the principle of split inheritance) were often vertical arrayed to access a variety of resources. Indeed, it has been widely suggested that the terraces at Moray were testing grounds for determining which crops would grow under what conditions in order to more efficiently exploit ecozones. The terraces were apparently constructed so that different temperatures and humidities could be achieved through the creation of microclimates, and therefore produce different kinds of crops.[12][13]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Salomon, F. (1987). A North Andean Status Trader Complex under Inka Rule. Ethnohistory, 32(1), p. 63-77
  2. ↑ Moseley, M.E. (2001). The Incas and their Ancestors. Thames & Hudson:New York, p.44
  3. ↑ Hosler, D. (1988). Ancient West Mexican Metallurgy: South and Central American Origins and West Mexican Transformations. American Anthropologist, New Series, 90(4), p. 832-855
  4. ↑ Rowe, J.H., & Murra, J.V. (1984). An Interview with John V. Murra. The Hispanic American Historical Review, 64(4), p. 644
  5. ↑ Van Buren, M. (1996). Rethinking the Vertical Archipelago: Ethnicity, Exchange, and History in the South Central Andes. American Anthropologist, New Series, 98(2), p. 338-351
  6. ↑ Moseley, M.E. (2001). The Incas and their Ancestors. Thames & Hudson:New York, p.43-48
  7. ↑ Murra, J.V. (1968). An Aymara Kingdom in 1567. Ethnohistory, 15(2), p. 115-151
  8. ↑ McEwan, G.F. (2006). The Inca. W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, p. 19-24
  9. ↑ D'Altroy, T.N. (2003). The Incas. Blackwell Publishing:Malden, p. 28-35
  10. ↑ McEwan, G.F. (2006). The Incas. W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, p. 97-102
  11. ↑ Moseley, M.E. (2001). The Incas and their Ancestors. Thames & Hudson:London p. 55-56, 70-77
  12. ↑ Earls, J. The Character of Inca and Andean Agriculture. P. 1-29
  13. ↑ Atwood, R. (2007) Letter from Peru: The Mystery Circles of the Andes. Archaeology, 60(5)
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