Pacariqtambo, or Making Concrete Inca Origins

Cuzco School painting of Manco Capac (Wikipedia)

In our effort to familiarize ourselves with more scholarship on the Incas and precolonial Peru, we read Urton's The History of a Myth: Pacariqtambo and the Origins of the Inkas. A short study, Urton's work seems to follow more in the footsteps of Zuidema, opting for a more structuralist approach to the Spanish chronicles and sources on the pre-conquest past of Peru. In our understanding, Urton argues that the origin myth of the Incas from the caves of Pacariqtambo were "concretized" and "historicized" based on very specific conditions related to colonial society in the 1560s and 1570s, particularly the period of Viceroy Toledo's rule. In short, some of the Pacariqtambo area caciques (such as the Callapina family, on 3 different occasions in colonial Peru) argued their descent from Manco Capac and other Inca nobility through a "reworking" of the "mythohistorical" narratives/traditions of Pacariqtambo as containing the caves from which Manco Capac and the early ayllus of Cuzco first arose. His argument is plausible since Indians who could "prove" their noble descent were exempted from taxes and personal service to Spaniards. So some descendants of old kuraka and provincial Incas by privilege likely did engage in some "creative" genealogical reconstructions of their lineages. 

We, however, were a little lost or perplexed by some of Urton's additional arguments. For instance, when he tries to connect the widowed woman who helped Pachacuti defeat the Chancas and save Cuzco to an ancestor of the first Callapina who petitioned to have his noble status recognized in 1569. Is the evidence sufficient to link one of his named ancestors in that 1569 document to a woman who, assuming she did exist, lived in the 1400s and became part of the "mythohistorical" narratives of Pachacuti's victory over the Chancas? It is possible, but we increasingly enter into more uncertain terrain. The final chapters of the book explore the ethnographic present and modern ritual travel/pilgrimage, speculating on how the religiously syncretistic nature of today's Pacariqtambo ayllus and celebrations of the saints may reflect past ayllu-connected rituals regarding kinship and the origin of the Incas. Again we have less evidence to draw from, but it does appear that the ayllus of today's Pacariqtambo have rituals tied to the reworking of their pre-Hispanic past and Catholic saints, rituals. Moreover, Urton does seem to be right that the exact "location" of Pacaritambo and the modern area bearing that name didn't seem to become concrete until 1569-1571, and that some of the Cuzco Inca noble witnesses of the first Callapina were also informants of Sarmiento de Gamboa for his chronicle on the Incas. But without more familiarity with his more detailed ethnographic work on the indigenous peoples of Pacariqtambo today, it was a little harder to see how exactly it supports the earlier chapters in the text. 

Nevertheless, reading this has challenged us to finally engage the works of Zuidema and Urton on the Incan and precolonial past of Peru. Our own bias in favor the "Rowe" model has definitely precluded us from fully considering the colonial context in which the aforementioned "mythohistorical" narratives of Inca origins were first written down in the 1500s and 1600s. But if the traditions about Pachacuti's interest in history and consolidating a "standard" narrative are accurate, perhaps we are all in one form or another acolytes of the Pachacuti school of Inca history. The degree to which it is acceptable more as "myth" versus history depends on context and was probably always in flux, depending on the narrator and audience. Our misfortune today is we lack a full understanding of how amauta and quipu-readers conceived of historicity, although we suspect that the most recent of the Inca emperors were more definitively historical figures rather than mythologized ones like those recalled in the chronicle of Montesinos.