14 - Of Kings and Capitals

ALAN L. KOLATA Cities, and the larger political formations within which they are embedded, are dynamic congeries of political, economic, and social institutions that are shaped and reshaped by historical circumstance. This dynamism and mutability in the face of exogenou-s forces might suggest the impossibility of a coherent, general theory about the forms and forces of urban transformation of the archaic city. Underlying the seemingly chaotic, undirected exigencies that constitute the life cycle of cities, however, are regularities of structure and similarities in form, function, and historical evolution that provide touchstones for a such a theory. In this respect, I am in complete agreement with Charlton and Nichols (this volume) on the validity of cross-cultural analyses. This chapter explores the structure of indigenous cities of the Andean region and evaluates them in terms of cities elsewhere in the preindustrial world. This comparative method will set the organizational principles that structured certain Andean cities in a richer context of regional and empirical variability, thereby bringing into relief potential patterns of similarity and dissimilarity. My specific focus is on the urban system of the Inca, for which documentary evidence is richest, but I will also refer to two other expansionist state societies-Tiwanaku in the Lake Titicaca basin and Chan Chan, capital of the north coast Peruvian kingdom of Chimor (Fig. 14.1). The basic lineaments of the argument I make apply to these Andean capitals as well. Each of these Andean states was characterized by a symbolically dominant metropole, with secondary cities subordinate to the center. This configuration contrasts dramatically with other urban systems in the prehispanic Americas-for instance, that of the late fifteenthand early sixteenth-century Basin of Mexico, where a constellation of relatively autonomous city-states was enmeshed in a complex matrix of politics and elite competition for natural and human resources (Hodge, this volume). In some sense, city-states-defined as "small, territorially based, politically independent state systems with a city and a hinterland, relatively self-sufficient economically and relatively homogeneous ethnically" -were rare in the Andean highlands. The only examples that seem to coincide with this definition are the Aymara Kingdoms of the Lake Titicaca basin (particularly the Lupaqa and Colla) prior to their incorporation into the Inca empire in the mid-fifteenth century. These kingdoms appear to be the product of the disintegration of the Tiwanaku empire during the eleventh century.