Any visitor to Cusco cannot ignore the skills of the Inka masons in cutting stone, building walls and carving or enhancing large boulders or rocky outcrops. They are informed that even a piece of paper or a knife cannot fit in the joints between the blocks in the well-fitted stone walls of the city and its environs, and are amazed at the intricate carving of seats, steps, platforms and niches as well as a few animals on boulders. Carolyn Dean, an art historian, has pieced together a very interesting book on the meaning of stone for the Inkas, based on observations she has made on ‘hikes and outings' and supplemented by good use of colonial documentation. The book is well written and well illustrated with photographs, but alas there is no map and no site plans or line drawings. Its four chapters (‘Rock and Remembrance’, ‘Rock and Reciprocity’, ‘Rock and Rule’ and ‘Rock in Ruins’) relate four principal aspects of her thesis as she lays out the role that stone played in Cusco during Inka times, in the colonial era and into the modern day.

The most impressive chapter is clearly the first, in which Dean argues that rocks, whether carved or uncarved, represent Inka w'aka – that is, sacred places – that are generated by the nature and location of the rock itself. Dean states that the Inkas believed the very rock was animated and imbued with a life force, which they utilised through the petrification of ancestors and the use of stone in various objects – some portable, such as wawki (brothers or effigies), and others very large and immovable, including wank'a (petrified owners of places), saywa (boundary markers), puruawqa (petrified warriors), sayk'uska (‘tired’ stones) and sukanka (horizon pillars). She defines two other categories: ‘echo stones’, which are rocks that are either natural or have been shaped to mirror the form of the landscape beyond them; and apacheta, which have traditionally been considered rock piles left by travellers on passes or crossroads but which through various chroniclers, such as Arriaga and Murúa, she considers ‘built structures’.

While Dean cogently develops the Andean notion of animation and essence (camay) for stones as a mode for the interpretation of particular geographical features and artefacts, it must be said that rocks do not offer, by any means, a complete picture of the Inka understanding of landscape. Everything, living or inanimate, was considered to have been created and hence possessed camay, and to play a role in the everyday life of the people and their environment. Therefore, springs, pools, waterfalls, fountains, trees, tree roots, mountains, hills, cliffs, caves, the sky, clouds and stars as well as certain animals, birds, shells, flowers and man-made objects, including pottery, clothing, pins and knives, have camay. These features are found throughout the Cusco landscape, in the Andes in general, and among all objects, utensils, tools, plants and animals. The Inka and Andean landscape is ordered, and everything is in association and interplay with everything else, to the extent that whole areas can be regarded as having animation or are identified as a human or other body with feet, legs, torso, hands, arms, head and so on. It is not just that the rocks are animated, but rather that everything has these qualities for memory of events, for memorialising the past and for creating an understanding of the world.

In the second chapter, Dean argues that rocks were important elements of the Inka sacred landscape and as such, stonework in structures, terraces and tombs was symbolic of the all-pervading qualities and essence of rock. She uses this argument again in the third chapter to posit that for the Inkas, stoneworking was a signature that displayed their hegemony and power over the conquered peoples and provinces of the empire. She views the well-fitting stonework as a metaphor for the Inkas' engagement with, and control of, the camay of stones, which their masons revealed by ‘nibbling’ each block, transforming it in order to construct their impressive buildings and terraces. This is a very strong argument, but is it correct? It is true that the Inkas valued certain stone blocks to the extent that they transported them as far as southern Ecuador and probably elsewhere in Tawantinsuyu. However, it is probably not their worked or ‘nibbled’ nature that was important but the fact that this andesite had come from the flanks of sacred mountains in the Cusco valley, namely the Rumiqolqa quarry close to the important Urqos Wiraqochan mountain; a second andesite quarry, Waqoto, lies on the flanks of Pachatusan, ‘the stanchion of the world’. Indeed, these stone blocks came from places associated with the Creator, Wiraqocha Pachayachachiq, and while some of them had been selected for the most important architecture in Cusco, others were taken north to build a structure in a ‘new cusco’ at Tumibamba (Cuenca).

Dean is puzzled by the fact that in some cases well-fitted stone facades had been covered with plaster and therefore could not be seen. However, this should not be puzzling at all as many important buildings were made not of such high-quality stonework but with substructures of various grades of stonework capped by adobe brick or even pirka (random rubble) walls. Even buildings within Cusco are known to be of such mixed construction, as the buildings at royal palaces such as Qespiwanka, Chinchero and Tambokancha and the temple complex at Rajchi were also well made with adobe superstructures, while the urban kancha of Calca and Ollantaytambo had superstructures made from pirka.

Dean's book is the fourth study by an art historian of Inka rocks in and around Cusco since the 1980s and is certainly the most accessible and readable. It should be read by all serious scholars of the Inka people. It explores the importance of camay, but is far from the most definitive work on that subject or on the importance of landscape to the Inkas.