The Inca Empire began when stones answered Pachacuti's call to become flesh and join him in battle. After returning to their original form, these stones remained infused with sacred power—each had a biography, preferred offerings, and would undoubtedly take human form again. The dead maintained a similar hold over the living in the fifteenth-century central Andes, as did ruins, lakes, and mountain peaks. The past was thus both ever-present and a potent force in determining the future.
The authors of the book's nine chapters take us into this animate landscape where the boundaries between the past, present, and future were, at best, fungible and blurry. Two of the volume's seven case studies concentrate on the Inca. The introduction by Swenson and Roddick outlines key concepts and Bray's concluding chapter offers a general commentary on Andean temporalities. The remaining authors take readers back to as early as the second millennium BC through investigations of settlements in Peru and Bolivia.
The first of the book's two main themes is emic temporality and its relationship to changing political, economic, and social structures. The authors stress that there was no single way to reckon time in the pre-Columbian Andes. Time could be—to use a few of the temporalities noted in the volume—astronomical, cyclical, synecdochical, and mythical, with multiple systems of reckoning often playing out concurrently. They note how shared practices, such as a harvest, building event, or temple procession, could be used to elevate or modify a temporality: time itself was integral to ongoing cultural negotiations.
The three chapters on Peru's north coast more fully explore this first theme. Swenson compares Huaca Colorado, built to channel “the power of chaos, flux, and death,” with the earlier site of Jatanca, created to “displace the entropic processes of time's passage.” Spence Morrow furthers this argument for Huaca Colorado by showing how temple renovations and models were used to control the passage of time. Seoane and Culquichicón discuss the links between sites and stars, and they explore the implications of a 300-year experiment to reckon time in a radically new manner.
The second theme of the book is a critique of the imposition of linear chronologies onto the pre-Columbian past. This critique is two-fold. Building from the book's first theme, one concern is that Andean groups would have thought neither in a single arrow of time from past to present, nor in the discrete blocks of time—Early Horizon, Tiwanaku IV, Preceramic—imposed by archaeologists. The second part of this critique is that practices and materials had different temporalities that did not move in lockstep. Farming systems often continued after a city was abandoned, despite the end of an era.
In the first of three contributions that address this second theme, Sayre discusses how archaeological approaches to time obscured the changing rhythms of daily life at Chavín de Huántar. Roddick presents the sites, objects, and landscapes of the Lake Titicaca Basin as brimming with temporalities that are erased by the “totalizing power” of our chronologies. Chase calls for a re-reading of the Huarochiri manuscript as embroiled in ongoing land conflicts rather than as a collection of legends.
The Incas continued engagement with Pachacuti's stone soldiers was part of a broader program, discussed in Wilkinson and D'Altroy's contribution, of treating the past as living kin. Although the volume's authors may overdraw the distinctions between Andean and Western temporalities—the past lingers, mutates, and repeats for all of us—the conquistadors’ bewilderment over Andean practices nonetheless speaks to a cosmological chasm that remains difficult to bridge. The temporal is political, as Bray notes in the closing chapter, and this book underlines the critical need for all of us to be more cognizant of how time is always under construction, both in the pre-Columbian world and by archaeologists today.
