Archaeological research is a privileged method for the reconstruction of local and regional histories, and—as demonstrated by the works reviewed here—South America is a first-rate location for that enterprise. These two books present advances in research in diverse parts of the current territory of Bolivia; both works also show the possibilities and challenges of the (re)building and representation of indigenous pasts that are still sometimes called “prehistoric.”
The contribution by Smith examines the Khonkho Wankane site and places it in the forefront of research on the emergence and evolution of complex societies from the Titicaca Basin between 800 BC and AD 500. The volume is outstanding in its content and also because of the implications of its theoretical positioning for the understanding of precolonial Andean history. The book begins by exploring the potential of the concept of biography of place—a term encompassing the diverse meanings given through time to a territory by its inhabitants—for the reconstruction of a historical trajectory. The approach to place-making at the site is, consequently, conducted through the constant use of the idea of entanglement among people, objects, and concepts. Another emphasis of the book lies in its analysis of the local dynamics of political power, seen as contested and fluid rather than vertical.
The built landscape of Khonkho Wankane was, in its time (as it is today for the area's communities), a source of interest and amazement. The platforms and sunken courts could be conceived as mountains and circulating bodies of water. The details of that artificial space are discussed in sections that present the position of Khonkho Wankane in the sequence of the altiplano's Formative period and the results of recent excavations at the site. Khonkho Wankane is also examined as a privileged space for the construction of traditions. For Smith, the proximity to the caravan routes in the southern part of Lake Titicaca was a key factor in, first, that process and, second, in the rise to power of the settlement as a hub for the distribution of products coming from distant zones. Although originating in mortuary celebrations, the local making of place included innovative traditions. One example would be the defleshing of individuals with special status, a practice that was apparently represented in one of the stelae at the site. Smith believes defleshing was developed to facilitate the transport of ancestors’ remains. The curation of some human remains could also correspond to other categories of individuals, victims of sacrifice for example, something that must be verified as studies in the area progress.
The local experience of place and belonging, and the generative power of public architecture in Khonkho Wankane, are presented next. The analysis of the architectural environment brings the author to not only disarticulate the elements of its spatial syntax but also to discard a rigid dichotomy between integrative forms of social cohesion and divisionist ones. For Smith, the site, in spite of maintaining the role of axis mundi, experienced a gradually increasing restriction of access to its inner ceremonial loci. Smith's intrasite analysis of the Khonkho Wankane inclusivity-exclusivity ranges reveals an early emphasis on intimacy and commensalism. Generations later, the principal sensorial experience of the public would have been obtained through processions directed by different groups. That alteration suggests changes in the conception of the human body, which went from being a transformative agent of offerings to becoming part of a larger process of collective transformation obtained through rituals and solemn (and festive) progressions.
The data-based definition of the site's capacity to decentralize its own agendas is one of the strengths of the publication. That position is welcome, and the book joins a set of other new works that highlight the capacity of the public in ancient societies to critically examine official performances. The relationship between the final phase of Khonkho Wankane's history and the dynamics of the caravan routes is treated in the final chapter. Working on perspectives previously advanced by Núñez, Dillehay, and Nielsen, the author interprets the activity of the camelid caravans as vital to the management of periods of climatic stress that in the past affected the altiplano's peoples. The confluence and dispute between locally devised goals and those based on contact with foreign groups were, for Smith, a means of local political practice. In his view, Khonkho Wankane ideology and economy were interlocked in a cosmovision that equally privileged communal and individual negotiation.
For Smith, the integration of landscape, settlers, and memories was both source and end of the ambiguity and tension visible in local principles of authority. His reconstruction does not end there. According to Smith, the meeting between division and convergence, secrecy and revelation, was instrumental to the construction of Khonkho Wankane's rules of power and social positioning. What about the deconstruction of those principles? For the author, as the experience of place at the site became more centralized, the caravan leaders looked for new alliances, recreating the process once more in new and different places. In time, the human experiences in Khonkho Wankane were restarted in other spaces—particularly in Tiwanaku, one of the settlements that benefited from its fall.
The book by Alconini explores the southeast frontier of the Inca state and the collision from AD 1450 to 1532 between that expansive polity and the Guaraní-Chiriguano ethnic groups. Mentions of that episode in colonial documents and travel narratives written in the nineteenth century converted Inca rule in Bolivia's southern valleys and part of the Chaco into an accepted fact in the memory and political discourses of several Andean countries. That reconstruction of the past was a simplistic one and promoted the idea of the clash between a civilization and some “savage” peoples in a rhetoric similar to, if not inspired by, the idealized history of Rome and its Germanic neighbors. Alconini reveals a distinct and more complex reality related to the identities and purposes of groups that had acted in a constantly disputed territory since before the fifteenth century. Her book is also placed within a wider context, that of frontiers as real and imagined contested spaces.
The encounter between Incas and Guaraní was, no doubt, one in which divergent forms of social and economic organization came together in a violent way. The author starts her analysis of the politics of Inca expansionism by conceptualizing the preindustrial empires and defining the agency of frontier communities as based in their liminal physical and symbolic position. The Incas reorganized the social and economic institutions of numerous Andean peoples and created a multiethnic state. The transformation of the absorbed regions was carried out through a “language of reciprocity” in which gift giving became central to the legitimation of political asymmetries and compromises. Other strategies included the resettlement of mitmakuna and yanakuna groups in distant regions, among them the borderlands with the Chiriguano groups.
The Guaraní entry to the Andes was, however, part of larger population movements carried out across the South American lowlands. Alconini's review of the economic and ideological motivations of that mobility does not omit analysis of ethnohistorical references in the search for Candire, the place or embodiment of abundance pursued by some Guaraní groups in constant peregrination—a mention that invites comparison with similar cases in northern Mesoamerica.
The area invaded by the Chiriguanos was occupied by the Charcas societies and included the zone settled by the Yampara, who would become allies of the Incas and defenders of the territory in conflict. The demography and cultural patterns of the Yampara sector during the period of Inca and Guaraní influence are examined through new data available for the Yampara sector and especially for Oroncota, a main administrative and religious imperial center provided with prestige buildings and households for local and mitmakuna settlers. The low frequency of ceramics from the eastern valleys in the area is also contrasted with the ethnohistorical background, an exercise revealing the distance between the materiality of Chiriguano presence and the mentions of their territorial advance in the written records. Alconini's characterization of expressions of Inca power in the Yampara zone—with low disruption of native settlement patterns and selective forms of adoption of foreign values—will be of particular interest to scholars of preindustrial colonialism.
Cuzcotuyo, another fortified Inca settlement, was located in the Khosko Toro region, closer to the Chiriguano lands. The final occupational phase of the site saw an increase in the use of vessels stylistically related to the tropical valleys, something that for Alconini suggests hospitality directed toward some allied or less belligerent Chiriguano groups. The final section of the volume compares the model generated by research in Oroncota and Khosko Toro with the Inca frontiers in Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile. Through that exercise, the dynamics of the southeast Inca frontier are placed in a context that, given the extension of Tawantinsuyu, reaches a continental scale.
The biographies of places—such as those of Khonkho Wankane and the southeast Inca borderland—are biographies of communities; at the same time, they have a direct relationship to our position regarding the ancient and modern societies that we study. There are other aspects to be mentioned. The books by Smith and Alconini describe in detail sites and regions important to South American archaeology that are also impacted by modern occupations. Both works should be published in Spanish, in support of the preservation of that cultural heritage. Finally, these works also bring us to reflect on the making in the present of frontiers that, like those of the past, seem destined to be as soon constructed, or proclaimed, as surpassed.
