Tiwanaku and Wari influence on early Inca society
The early Inca state of the Cusco valley did not arise in a cultural vacuum. It was built directly on the institutional, religious, and architectural legacy of two earlier Andean empires of the Middle Horizon (c. 500–1000 CE): Tiwanaku, centered on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, and Wari, centered on the Ayacucho basin of highland Peru. Both states had outposts, road networks, and colonies that reached into the Cusco region, and both collapsed in the centuries immediately before the Inca rise. The young Inca state inherited their administrative techniques, their imperial iconography, and a stratum of religious beliefs that can still be traced in the Inca pantheon and in the layout of imperial Cusco. The cultural debt to Tiwanaku and Wari is one of the most studied and most important problems in Andean archaeology, and it is essential to understanding the origins of the Inca before the imperial transformation of the fifteenth century.
The two predecessor states differed from each other in important ways. Tiwanaku appears to have been a theocratic center whose authority radiated outward through a network of colonies and pilgrimage sites, while Wari was a more directly territorial empire with provincial administrative centers. Both, however, developed large-scale statecraft in a region where the Incas would later operate, and the Cusco valley lay within the zone of influence of each.
Tiwanaku and Its Reach into the Cusco Valley
Tiwanaku, whose capital lay near the modern town of Tiwanaku in western Bolivia, flourished from roughly 500 to 1000 CE. At its height it controlled a network of colonies extending south into northern Chile, west into the altiplano of Peru, and northwest toward the Cusco basin. Its principal monuments — the Akapana pyramid, the Kalasasaya sunken temple, and the Gateway of the Sun — embody a distinctive iconography of winged figures, condors, and a staff-bearing creator deity that archaeologists identify with the later Andean god Viracocha.
The Tiwanaku presence in the Cusco region is documented by the spread of Tiwanaku-style pottery, textiles, and metalwork and by a series of rural ceremonial sites on the altiplano and in the high valleys north of Cusco. The site of Ollantaytambo, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, preserves a precinct of finely fitted stones that some scholars have argued is a Tiwanaku-era temple platform later reused by the Incas. Whether or not this is correct, the iconographic vocabulary of Tiwanaku — the chachapuma (jaguar-fanged) motif, the stepped fret, the frontal deity figure — is unmistakably present in later Inca state art, especially in the reliefs of the Coricancha and the carved rocks of the Kenko complex near Cusco.
Tiwanaku’s political influence began to wane in the tenth century, possibly because of prolonged drought on the altiplano, and its colonies appear to have been abandoned by about 1000 CE. The Cusco basin was not directly under Tiwanaku rule at this late date, but the regional population continued to venerate Tiwanaku shrines and to use Tiwanaku-derived ritual objects. When the Incas built their first great ceremonial center at Cusco, they were building on sacred ground that older Andean polities had already established.
Wari and the Cusco Region
Wari, the other great Middle Horizon empire, was centered on a large planned capital in the Ayacucho basin, about 600 kilometers northwest of Cusco. Wari’s imperial expansion occurred in the seventh and eighth centuries CE, and it penetrated the Cusco region through both conquest and colonization. The most famous Wari site in the Cusco area is Pikillacta, a planned city of some 50 hectares located about 25 kilometers southeast of Cusco on the road to Lake Titicaca. Pikillacta’s orthogonal grid of rectangular compounds, its heavy plastered walls, its long storage buildings, and its network of roads and observation towers reflect a fully developed imperial administrative style. Archaeologists debate whether Pikillacta was an active Wari province or a Wari-era ceremonial and garrison town that continued in use after the Wari collapse, but the site is consistently dated to the Middle Horizon and was clearly abandoned before the Inca expansion.
The Wari presence in the Cusco region is also documented by smaller administrative centers, by characteristic Wari-style polychrome pottery found in burials and on occupation sites, and by a series of hilltop fortifications along the routes leading out of the valley. The Wari state, like Tiwanaku, declined in the early centuries of the second millennium CE, leaving behind a patchwork of successor polities, of which the Inca state of Cusco was the eventual heir.
Cultural and Institutional Inheritances
The influence of Tiwanaku and Wari on the early Incas can be traced in at least four distinct domains: religion, monumental architecture, road and storage systems, and statecraft.
In religion, the Incas inherited a highland belief system in which creator deities, ancestor mummies, and huacas (sacred landscape features) played central roles. The cult of Viracocha, the creator god, has clear antecedents in the staff-bearing figure depicted on the Tiwanaku Gateway of the Sun, and the cults of Pachamama (the Earth Mother), Mama Cocha (the Sea Mother), and the various mountain apus all draw on Middle Horizon prototypes. The early Incas adopted the practice of mummifying ancestors and treating their preserved bodies as ritual foci — a practice visible in Wari contexts and central to later Inca state religion.
In monumental architecture, the Incas inherited a tradition of large-scale stone construction, including the use of finely fitted polygonal masonry, terrace building, and the construction of sunken courts and rectangular platform mounds. The lower walls of the cyclopean fortress of Sacsayhuamán above Cusco, attributed by most archaeologists to the late pre-imperial period, are made of stones so large that they were long thought to require Wari or even earlier state organization to quarry and move. Whether or not this is true, the technique of fitted ashlar masonry later perfected at the Coricancha and other monuments of imperial Cusco is a direct development of Middle Horizon practice.
In road and storage systems, the Cusco region had been integrated into the Wari road network, and the Incas built on this base. The great Inca road system known as the Qhapaq Ñan overlapped with earlier Wari and Tiwanaku routes in several places, and the principle of the state granary — the qollqa — used to store agricultural surplus, has clear Wari precedents at Pikillacta and other sites. The imperial Inca system of provincial administration, with appointed governors, state storage, and labor obligations, was a development of Wari provincial practice.
In statecraft, the most important Middle Horizon inheritance was the idea of an Andean empire itself. The Incas, when they began to build their empire in the fifteenth century, were deliberately imitating and surpassing the political models of Tiwanaku and Wari, including the use of forced resettlement, state-sponsored religion, and the integration of distant provinces into a single redistributive economy.
The Collapse of the Middle Horizon and the Inca Opportunity
The collapse of Tiwanaku and Wari around 1000 CE opened a power vacuum in the central Andes. Into this vacuum moved a constellation of small successor polities — the Chanka in Andahuaylas, the Lupaca and Colla around Lake Titicaca, the Quechua polities of the Apurímac valley, and the various ayllus of the Cusco basin. The Incas were one of these polities, and for several generations they were not the most powerful. Their success in the fifteenth century was in part a story of inheritance: they built on the cultural and material capital of Tiwanaku and Wari while their rivals had been slower to do so.
This inheritance is the deep background against which the imperial transformation under Pachacuti and the foundation of the empire must be understood. The Inca Empire was not so much an unprecedented creation as the most successful re-invention of an older Andean tradition of empire.