UCLA

The Inca Civil War (1527-1532) paved the way for the European invasion of the Andes, devastating the largest American Indigenous empire through tremendous loss of life in battle, political fragmentation, and erosion of the legitimacy of the Inca imperial project. Indeed, this war of succession might be the key to understanding both the formation and the collapse of the Inca state. Its transformative character led the major combatants to build their legitimacy claims via political alliances that allude to the birth of the Inca Empire through the narrative of “return to normalcy” and “return to origins.” Until now, however, the conflict has remained a historical footnote in the grand scheme of the trans-Atlantic encounter.

This dissertation is a multidisciplinary exploration of the Inca Civil War, examining colonial texts, archaeological data, extant architectural remains, and modern scholarship to bring to the fore one of our first studies that both surveys where the civil war occurred and provides an in-depth study of the key site of Kañaraqay. In doing so, it suggests that crises are critical temporal nodes which offer unique, and perhaps clearest, views of how imperial projects function, as they present acute stresses to the institutions that define them, whether these stresses are overcome or not. As the Inca Empire was built on masterful negotiation between the ruling minority and the various subjugated groups, these political alliances and their stability became critical when the empire was threatened by the combined stresses of internal and external conflict.

Beyond the Andes, this research makes several important theoretical and methodological contributions. It bridges the 1532 gap between disciplines such as archaeology, history, and art history. It, further, offers a view of the nature of empires as networks of alliances, albeit ones built on unequal power, challenging the traditional hegemon-subalternity model. Finally, as the main test case of this dissertation examines the construction of the site of Kañaraqay, it speaks to the relationship between monumental architecture and power, suggesting that large building projects were tools for power acquisition rather than mere reflections of such power.