Inca Society, Culture and Daily Life

The society, culture, and daily life of the Inca — known in their own language as the Tawantinsuyu or “realm of the four quarters” — combined a rigidly stratified social order with a dense web of kin-based, ritual, and economic obligations that bound roughly ten to twelve million people together along the Andes between the early 15th century and the Spanish conquest of 1532. At the apex stood the Sapa Inca, the divine sovereign whose authority underpinned every aspect of Andean life; below him were royal lineages, provincial nobility, the free commoners known as hatun runa, and a substantial population of retainers and resettled laborers called yanakuna and mitma. Family life revolved around the ayllu, a corporate kin group that held land, organized labor, and traced descent from a common ancestor, while marriages were arranged to bind lineages together and to produce children who would serve the state and the sun. Subsistence depended on a sophisticated agricultural system of terraced hillsides, raised fields, and maize- and potato-based rotations, supplemented by camelid herding, fishing from the cold Pacific, and a redistributive economy that moved goods without coined money. Material culture was dominated by brilliantly dyed textiles of wool and cotton, by metallurgy in gold, silver, and the copper-gold-silver alloy called tumbaga, and by objects of polished stone. Religious and civic life was punctuated by elaborate festivals — most famously Inti Raymi — accompanied by the haunting music of the quena and zampoña, while formal instruction was carried out by the amautas, sages who taught the sons of the nobility in the fortress city of Cusco and recorded state affairs on the knotted cords of the quipu.

Overview

Inca civilization reached its mature form during the reigns of Pachacuti (r. c. 1438–1471), Topa Inca (r. 1471–1493), and Huayna Capac (r. 1493–1527), who together transformed a small highland kingdom around Cusco into a polity bound by a road system of some 40,000 kilometers extending from modern southern Colombia to central Chile. The empire’s population, estimated by demographic historians such as Noble David Cook and Henry F. Dobyns on the basis of early colonial tribute censuses, has been the subject of long debate; the Revised Handbook of South American Indians and John Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas suggest figures of between nine and fourteen million, with the more cautious recent literature converging on roughly ten million in 1520. Within this vast and ethnically diverse population the Incas imposed a system of stratified obligations, ideological conformity through sun worship and ancestor veneration, and material integration through state storage and redistribution rather than the market exchange familiar to the European observers who arrived in the 1530s.

A handful of chroniclers — most importantly Garcilaso de la Vega, half-Inca son of a conquistador and an Inca princess; the mestizo priest Martín de Murúa; the soldier-chronicler Pedro Cieza de León; the Mercedarian friar Bernabé Cobo; and the jurist Juan de Matienzo, who published the first systematic account of Inca administration in 1567 — produced detailed accounts of Andean life in the decades after 1532, and their testimony is corroborated by archaeological excavation at sites such as Cusco’s Coricancha, the royal estate of Ollantaytambo, the administrative center of Huánuco Pampa, and the highland shrine of Vilcashuamán. These sources together show that daily life for the vast majority of Andeans was dominated by the demands of high-altitude agriculture, by textile production for the state, and by the cycle of ritual obligations known as ayni (reciprocal labor) and minka (communal labor for the community).

The everyday material culture of the empire has been reconstructed not only from the chroniclers but also from the tens of thousands of textile fragments, ceramic vessels, and bone tools recovered from provincial centers, household refuse heaps, and burial sites. The integrity of the empire’s material culture — its near-uniformity in ceramics, in textile technology, in storage architecture, and in agricultural implements from Quito to northwest Argentina — is one of the strongest indicators of the effectiveness of the Inca central state. The Spanish themselves, who arrived in 1532 expecting to find a fragmented mosaic of polities, were struck by the orderliness of Andean life: Francisco Pizarro’s secretary Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, Hernando Pizarro’s detailed account, and Miguel de Estete’s Relación del viaje de Panamá al Cuzco all note the large standing armies, the food stocks in every town, and the discipline of the labor obligations. This order, the Spanish recognized, was rooted in the social system of the Incas rather than in any technological or military superiority — a recognition that would shape the colonial appropriation of the same administrative forms in the decades after 1532.

Language, timekeeping, and the quipu

The administrative reach of the Incas rested in part on a single administrative language, Runasimi (today called Quechua, in a Spanish orthography), which was imposed throughout the empire and is still spoken by some ten to twelve million people across the Andes. The Incas had distinguished a generalized lingua franca — Cuzco Quechua, with its characteristic five-vowel system and ejective consonants — from local dialects such as Chinchay Suyu Quechua in the north, Aymara on the altiplano (a structurally distinct language, not a Quechua dialect), and Puquina, a now-extinct language spoken by certain mitma colonies. Cieza de León noted that officials in any part of the empire could be addressed in Quechua, and that the intip churin (sons of the sun) and their scribes used a standardized form of the language that approached a written administrative register, although the Incas had no alphabet.

In place of writing they used the quipu, a complex knotted-cord device of which several hundred examples survive in museums from Lima to Berlin. The quipu consisted of a primary cord from which a series of pendant cords hung, each cord carrying knots tied in specific positions to record decimal orders of magnitude, color, and, in the latest work of Gary Urton and Sabine Hyland, a substantial amount of narrative information in the form of mnemonics. The system was, in effect, a three-dimensional data storage device that recorded population counts, tribute assessments, military rosters, agricultural yields, and a calendar based on a lunar-solar reckoning. The people who maintained the quipu, the quipucamayocs, were an hereditary caste of male (and a few female) specialists who underwent long training; many were preserved in colonial office in the 1560s and 1570s as village record-keepers, and the literature of the visitas provides a record of the breadth of their knowledge.

Timekeeping was based on a synchronized lunar-solar calendar of twelve months, with adjustment by intercalation to keep the solstices fixed; the year began with the December solstice, and the major ritual cycle described by Garcilaso and Betanzos divided the year into the period of Quilla (lunar reckoning) and Inti (solar reckoning). The Incas used vertical pillars (sucancas) to track the solstices, and these were erected at every major ceremonial center. Within each month, feast days were determined by the moon’s phase; the eighth (Qhapaq Inti), the ninth (Huaraca), and the full moon were the most important.

Daily life of the commoner

The day of a free commoner began before dawn with the sharing of a small quantity of chicha (often a low-status t’ulpa chicha) and a ration of chuño or steamed potatoes, after which the household walked to its fields. Among the hatun runa the daily work was determined by the agricultural season: in the August-to-October planting season men broke the ground with a chakitaqlla (foot plow) and lampa (hoe), while women carried and spread the seed; in the November-to-January growing season men weeded and women replanted; in the February-to-May harvest they worked in teams; and in the dry winter months they turned to weaving, building, and the manufacturing of textiles for the state. The detailed day-by-day account of this life is given in The hatun runa and commoner life.

A typical household in the highlands consisted of a stone-and-adobe house of one or two rooms, with a low thatched roof; an adjacent open kitchen space with a tulpa (low hearth); and a series of trojes (small storerooms) in which the household’s quota of ch’uño, q’uwa, and sara was kept. The houses of the nobility and of the state were larger, often two stories, with two sets of k’anchas (enclosed courtyards) and a separate pantry. The arrangement of villages reflected both the social hierarchy and the demands of agriculture: a commoner village (llacta) typically clustered around a small open plaza, with a qollqa and a temple (wasi or huaca), while state-built administrative centers, such as those along the Qhapaq Ñan, were carefully planned and oriented to solar events. The social geography of these villages is detailed in the geography and administration overview.

The Inca social order has often been described as a pyramid, but the metaphor is misleading because each stratum was bound to those above and below by concrete obligations of labor, tribute, and ritual, rather than by the abstract legal relations of European feudalism. The fundamental division was between the Cuzco, the population of the Inca heartland of privileged lineages, and the Hurin and Hanan moieties of the city, and the rest of the empire, organized into four suyus — Chinchaysuyu to the northwest, Antisuyu to the northeast, Contisuyu to the southwest, and Collasuyu to the southeast — each subdivided into provinces of varying size and population. Within this framework, four broad strata can be distinguished: the Sapa Inca and his immediate kin, the royal panacas and the high nobility, the free commoners or hatun runa, and the unfree servants and resettled colonists known collectively as yanakuna and mitma. The detailed functioning of each of these layers is treated in the Inca social hierarchy overview.

The Sapa Inca

The Sapa Inca — “the only Inca,” in the original sense of a unique sovereign — was at once political ruler, military commander, supreme judge, and the living representative of Inti, the sun god, from whom the royal line claimed descent through the legendary founder Manco Cápac. He wore golden masks, sat on a low silver throne in the Coricancha during major festivals, and traveled in a litter borne by subjects of high noble rank. His body was mummified upon death and consulted on state affairs thereafter; the empire he left at his death was partitioned not among his sons in any straightforward sense but among the descent groups of his predecessors, a system described by Maria Rostworowski de Diez and Gary Urton that gave rise to the deadly civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa from 1529 to 1532.

Nobility and panacas

Below the Sapa Inca stood the royal panacas — descent groups that held the mummy, lands, and retainers of a deceased ruler and that maintained his cult in perpetuity. A panaca traced descent through the male line of the deceased Inca and was led by a senior relative, sometimes the chosen heir of a Sapa Inca before that person acceded to the throne. The most prestigious panacas included the Capac Ayllu of Pachacuti, the Tumebamba line of Topa Inca, and the line of Huayna Capac, whose wealth in textiles, lands, and dependents was used to maintain the dead sovereign’s “perpetual life” through ritual and feasting. A detailed account of their structure and inheritance is given in Inca nobility and the panacas.

Beneath the royal kin stood a provincial nobility of curacas, who were the hereditary leaders of local groups and who administered their subjects on behalf of the state in exchange for exemption from mit’a labor and the right to wear distinctive dress. After the Spanish conquest many curaca families were confirmed in their positions by Charles V’s 1542 New Laws, and their descendants formed the basis of the late colonial mestizo aristocracy in the Andes.

Commoners (hatun runa)

The great majority of the population, perhaps 80 to 90 percent, were free commoners called hatun runa (“big people”) or simply runas (people). They lived in ayllu communities, cultivated their own fields and those of the state and the sun, served periodic labor obligations under the mit’a system, and produced textiles for state stores at rates set by administrators. Their standard of living has been reconstructed from ethnohistorical sources such as Pedro Sancho de la Hoz’s account of the 1527–1529 expedition to Ecuador and from the surviving visitas (administrative inspections) of 1558–1570. Daily life for the hatun runa is examined in The hatun runa and commoner life.

Servants and yanakuna

A substantial proportion of the empire’s working population consisted of yanakuna and mitma — two categories often confused by European readers but distinguished with care in modern Andean scholarship. Yanakuna were retainers attached to the Sapa Inca, to panacas, or to the Temple of the Sun; they were removed from their natal communities, did not own land, and were obligated to perpetual personal service. Mitma (sometimes mitmaq or mitmaqkuna) were colonists sent by the state to distant provinces, either to consolidate control of newly conquered territory, to extract a particular resource such as coca leaf or salt, or to defend frontier regions. Their descendants in the sixteenth century often retained special land and labor privileges granted by the colonial state, and they remain politically important in some Andean regions. The legal status and historical evolution of both groups is detailed in Yanakuna and mitma in the Inca state.

The ayllu kinship group

The single most important institution in Andean life was the ayllu, a corporate kin group that owned land, organized labor, celebrated the dead, and held the rituals that made the state intelligible to its subjects. The ayllu traced descent either patrilineally or bilaterally, depending on the period and the region, and was held together by a shared ancestor — sometimes a pre-Inca local deity, sometimes an Incaized lineage founder — whose pacarina (place of origin) was venerated as a sacred landscape feature, often a mountain, a spring, or a stone outcrop. The ayllu varied in scale from a few dozen households in a single valley to thousands of households spread across several ecological zones; in the late Inca period, a system of ñan roads and state inspectors linked the smallest ayllu to the imperial center, and the curaca of the ayllu reported to provincial quipucamayocs in the regional capital. The full institutional and territorial organization of the ayllu is surveyed in The ayllu and its structure.

The ayllu was the unit through which labor and tribute were assessed: a household that could not fulfill its obligations for a season — because of a poor harvest, the death of a head of household, or a military campaign that had taken its adult men — received assistance from the wider ayllu in a manner that the chronicler Polo de Ondegardo described in 1571 as the “ministry of justice” of the Inca. This mutual-aid system, known as ayni and minka, persisted under Spanish rule and remains the basis of much highland Andean labor organization today, a fact that has shaped anthropological debates on Andean “reciprocity” since John Murra’s foundational work of the 1950s.

Within the ayllu, internal ranks were based on seniority, on birth, and on the favor of the Sapa Inca. The curaca of the ayllu was typically the senior member of a lineage, often a direct descendant of the founding ancestor; below him, the p’urin pucllayuq (the elders) advised on ritual; below them, the alcaldes of the ayllu organized the dispatch of laborers; and at the base, the yanapaq (the assistants) performed service. Marriage within the ayllu was regulated by endogamous preference — the classic study of a single highland community, presented in John Murra’s Accesiones de collavina a Cuzco entre 1524 y 1606, shows the proportion of marriages contracted outside a given ayllu hovering between 15 and 25 percent — and the ayllu maintained a network of social and ritual links with parallel and allied groups. The ayllu also functioned as a wasi (house) of mourning: it kept the mummies of deceased members, reactivated them in ayni rites, and used the resulting community of the living and the dead to organize the agricultural cycle.

The ayllu was held together by a complex calendar of ritual obligations (cargos), by the minka of work and food, and by the aray (council) in which disputes were settled. Disputes were often resolved by senior members of the ayllu, and the chicha poured at the resolution sealed the agreement. Many aspects of this system survived the conquest and the era of reducción (forced resettlement) of 1569–1575, and the present-day comunidad campesina of the Peruvian Andes is widely recognized by ethnographers as a direct descendant of the Inca ayllu, with about 5,500 such communities existing as of 2024.

Family and marriage

Within the ayllu, the basic social unit was the tiana or extended household, ideally containing a man, his wife, their unmarried children, and as many married sons and their wives as could be supported by the family lands. Marriage was universal and nearly universal in its adult incidence: the 1570 Toledo visitas recorded widows and widowers remarrying, but unmarried adults of either sex were rare. The detailed conventions of betrothal, bride service, and divorce are treated in Inca marriage customs. Briefly, the formal betrothal (sirviqusqa or sawaripay) was arranged by the families of the bride and groom, often with the intervention of a camayoc (a ritual specialist) and always with the giving of textiles: a lliclla (mantle) and aqsu (dress) to the bride, and reciprocal cloaks and food to the groom’s family.

Two forms of marriage were distinguished by the chroniclers. Sayru or siri marriage was the standard consensual union, terminable for serious fault and requiring the repayment of the bridewealth if the wife left. Pormo or warmi churinkapa was a trial union in which a couple lived together for a probationary period (often one to two years) before committing to permanence; children born of this trial marriage remained with the mother, and both partners could return to their natal families. Polygyny was permitted but practiced mainly by the Sapa Inca, his nobles, and senior officials; in most cases polygynous wives ranked according to the order of their marriage and the status of their natal families.

Inheritance and the devolution of land are treated in Inheritance and land tenure in the Inca ayllu. The short version is that the Inca system did not recognize individual alienable title to land: the Sapa Inca owned all land in the empire, but the state allotted use rights to ayllus and households on a roughly equal per-household basis, reserving portions for the sun, the Inca, and the deceased ancestors. Sons and daughters of an established household received access to land through the ayllu; younger sons might be sent out as mitma to a distant province, while daughters were given in marriage to other ayllus, taking with them a dowry of textiles and household goods but generally not the land itself.

Agriculture

Agriculture was the foundation of Inca economic life. Andean farmers practiced a sophisticated system of vertical archipelago cultivation, in which a single ayllu would maintain plots at several different altitudes, from the maize belts at 3,000 meters up to the potato and oca (Oxalis tuberosa) belts above 4,000 meters. The state expanded and formalized this system through the construction of terraces (andenes) and raised fields called waru waru on the altiplano. Murra’s studies of the Oruro region have shown that even small communities might hold a dozen discrete zones, and that produce from one altitude was exchanged — through state stores, kin networks, and market trueque — for produce from others. The geography of these agricultural zones is treated in the geography and administration overview.

The state invested enormously in agricultural infrastructure. Major terraces at Pisac, Ollantaytambo, and Choquequirao doubled the cultivable area of steep slopes and reduced erosion; the Inka Pirqa terraces near Cusco were maintained by mit’a labor from a designated population, and chroniclers such as Garcilaso record that the state rotated workers through these projects. The Lake Titicaca basin, where Andean peoples had practiced raised-field agriculture since the Formative period, was a major focus of state intervention, and the raised fields have been the subject of substantial twentieth-century research by Clark Erickson and the Proyecto Especial del Lago Titicaca.

Key crops

The Inca cultivated well over a hundred different crops, but four were of pre-eminent importance: potatoes, maize, quinoa, and coca. Potatoes, in their many hundreds of native varieties, were stored as chuño — freeze-dried potatoes produced by leaving tubers on the ground overnight in the frost, then treading out the water and sun-drying them. Maize, the prestige crop of the state, was central to religious ritual (a jar of maize beer was poured at every shrine), was stored in state qollqas (granaries), and was the staple of feasting at Inti Raymi and other major festivals. Quinoa and its close relative kiwicha (Amaranthus caudatus) provided high-protein grain for the lean winter months and were used in ritual fasting. Coca, the sacred leaf chewed with a small quantity of lime, was reserved for ritual and elite use in the late prehispanic period; its cultivation was restricted to designated cocaleras in the eastern Andes, and possession of the leaf was a privilege regulated by the state. A more detailed crop-by-crop treatment is given in Inca food and agriculture.

Food and drink

The daily diet of the hatun runa was based on ch’uño and a handful of steamed or boiled root vegetables, supplemented by maize at festival time and by the meat of camelids, cuy (guinea pig), and freshwater or marine fish. The state allocated meat from its herds of llamas and alpacas according to the mit’a obligation of each household, and chroniclers describe elaborate Inca cuisine in the royal court, where meat was sometimes hung in the wind of a fan to remove fat before serving. Across the empire, food was prepared in ceramic vessels, sometimes raised on a low stone hearth and sometimes in a qoncha, an inverted pot with a fire built on top. Famine relief, archaeological evidence shows, was an important function of state storage; the survival of the Sapa Inca’s regime depended on its capacity to feed people in years of failure of the papa or sara crops.

A central culinary institution was the aqui or aklla wasi — a “house of the chosen” where young women of proven lineage were prepared for service. The senior acllas were given in marriage by the Sapa Inca to nobles and officials he wished to reward; the Yurac aclla (white chosen) and Pacaric aclla served the Temple of the Sun in Cusco and in provincial shrines. The aclla system, well-documented in colonial sources, has been studied by Irene Silverblatt and Sabine MacCormack and is fundamental to understanding the integration of women into Inca state structures.

Beverages were at least as important as food. Chicha, a lightly fermented maize beer, was the universal drink of the empire; it was prepared in special vessels and poured at every major ceremony, at every sacrifice, and at every important social interaction. Higher-status chicha was made from carefully selected maize and was sometimes flavored with honey, mishki (a sugar-cane derivative), or quinoa. The use of coca and chicha together was — and remains — the defining gesture of reciprocity in the Andes. A single household consumed perhaps two to four liters of chicha a day at festival time and a lesser amount in ordinary seasons, the maize being supplied from a designated state store, with the household’s own quota reserved for exchange and ayni. The vessels used to serve chicha, called q’ero, were themselves highly decorated and ranked; a ceremonial q’ero of gold or silver was reserved for the Sapa Inca and the highest officials, while ordinary q’ero were made of wood, painted or carved. The great quantity of chicha consumed is suggested by the storage capacity of state qollqas, where tens of thousands of liters of fermented maize were held at any one time during a major festival period.

Crafts and textiles

The most highly valued products of Inca material culture were textiles, which functioned simultaneously as clothing, as a measure of wealth, as ritual offerings, and as objects of state accounting. The state controlled the production of cloth for the army, the priesthood, and the royal household, and required each household to weave a fixed quota of cumbi — fine cloth of camelid fiber, woven on a backstrap loom, in the geometric patterns called t’oqapu that signified the panaqa or community of the weaver. A detailed account of these patterns and their social meanings is given in Inca textile patterns and t’oqapu.

Dyeing was a sophisticated chemical process: cochineal (chinak’urku) for red, q’illu (Baccharis) for yellow, ch’illka (Indigofera) for blue, and a range of mineral and plant sources for other hues. Some colors — particularly the deep blue of the makis and the red of the warak’ay — were reserved for the Sapa Inca and the highest nobility. The combination of cotton, which grew only in the warm valleys below 2,500 m, and the wool of the alpaca and the vicuña, which lived at 4,000 m and above, illustrates once more the role of vertical ecological complementarity in Inca production.

Trade and economy

The Inca economy is best understood not as a market economy but as a system of redistribution without money: goods flowed from producers to state stores (qollqas) and from those stores to soldiers, priests, and ritual specialists in a pattern dictated by the state. Within that framework, the trueque (barter) of goods and services between households and between communities was a constant, but the scale of the operation is striking: at the time of the conquest the empire was moving tens of thousands of tons of food, cloth, and metal per year along its 40,000-kilometer road system, and the architecture of state storage at the major provincial centers (such as the 700-plus qollqas at Huánuco Pampa) reflects this capacity.

Metallurgy was the other major craft of the empire, and the Inca inherited and refined a tradition that stretched back to the Chavín and Moche periods. The metal most prized was gold, which was associated with the mascaipacha (royal headdress) and with the sweat of the sun; silver was associated with the moon and with tears. Artisans worked in gold, silver, and the copper-gold-silver alloy called tumbaga that produced a wide range of colors depending on its composition; the details of these techniques are treated in Inca metallurgy and the working of gold, silver, and tumbaga. Metal objects were largely used in ritual rather than daily life: the gardens of the Coricancha, which the chroniclers described as fields of golden maize and silver llamas, were a statement of the cosmic order in metal. The qori kamayoq (gold workers) and qollqa kamayoq (silversmiths) were full-time specialists attached to the Sapa Inca and to the Temple of the Sun, organized into hereditary corporations and divided into provincial workshops. Their products were largely ritual and ornamental — tumi knives, plaques, headdresses, chaquira (beadwork), figurines, and a remarkable assemblage of miniature gold and silver objects representing animals, plants, and human figures that have been recovered from tombs such as the so-called tomb of the Lord of Sipán in the preceding Moche tradition, the tomb of the Lady of Cao, and several Inca royal burials in the Cusco basin. Major collections in the Museo del Oro in Lima, the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, and the British Museum preserve the craft in detail.

The labor force that produced the empire’s textiles, ceramics, and metalwork was drawn substantially from the mitma and yanakuna populations, who were moved to areas of raw material — cotton at the coast, cumbi wool on the highland, and metallic ores from mines at Porco and elsewhere. The state also ran quarries of obridian (used for mirrors, knives, and tools), wanka (the building stone that gives the city its name), and the green-stone qolq used for ceremonial bowls. Production was meticulous, and a single state tunic (uncu) of cumbi cloth took perhaps three to four hundred hours of work by a team of weavers.

Clothing, dress, and personal adornment

Dress was a strict marker of rank in the Inca world. The Sapa Inca wore a mascaipacha — a tasseled headband with a single plume of the reddish feather of the Q’ente (a small raptor) — and a brilliantly colored uncu (long tunic) of cumbi cloth, fastened with a tupu (a large gold or silver pin). The royal sandal was a usuta of finest plaited gold wire. The queen (Qoya) and the Pallas (princesses) wore akllas (a different long dress, often white) and heavy gold earrings, and they were adorned with chipana (a forehead ornament) and a wiñay cochka (an “eternal bracelet” reserved for women of the royal panaca).

The nobility wore finer cumbi, the right to certain dyes, and particular headdresses. The curacas wore unku and a chuku (a woolen or feathered cap). Commoners wore the q’ara uncu — a plain brown or black unku of llama wool, with no ornaments and a lliclla (a small mantle) thrown over the shoulders. The yanakuna and mitma were marked by a particular style of dress, often with one short sleeve. Sandals (usutas) were a status marker: the Inca usuta had black binding and was woven of cumbi; commoners’ sandals were of coarse llama wool with vegetal fiber. Clothing was a primary form of state accounting, and a chronicler such as Cobo could identify a person’s origin and rank from the patterns woven into their dress and the design of their headdress.

Music, dance and festivals

Music accompanied almost every activity of Inca life. The most characteristic instruments were the quena and zampoña — the quena being a vertical end-blown flute traditionally made of bone or cane, and the zampoña a pan-pipe of two parallel rows of reeds tuned diatonically or in characteristic hanan and hurin intervals. The pinkillu and antara were related wind instruments, and percussion was provided by the wankar (a single-headed drum) and the cajón (a box struck with a stick). Ensembles of these instruments accompanied the taqui — the dances that ritually re-enacted the mythical origins of the Andean people, the conquests of the Inca emperors, and the agricultural cycle. The full range of these traditions, and their persistence into the colonial period, is treated in Inca music and festivals. Dances were of two main classes: the taqui purucu (men’s dances), performed with weapons and at a quick, military tempo, and the taqui warmicu (women’s dances), at a slower, more measured tempo, accompanied by q’onopa (a wailing song). The Quinua Raymi dance celebrated the sowing of the maize; the Huarucicu dance celebrated the harvest; and the Qori Huayra and Chacchacuna dances were performed at the solstice. Music and dance were an integral part of the calendar, of the agricultural year, and of the ritual cycle that held the empire together, and the survival of these traditions in the syncretic festivals of the colonial and modern Andes is one of the most striking examples of cultural continuity in the New World.

Festivals were a central feature of the Inca religious year. Inti Raymi, the “feast of the sun” celebrated at the winter solstice in late June, was the most elaborate: a procession of mallkis (mummified ancestors), the Sapa Inca and his court, the acllas (chosen women), and the curacas of the four suyus in the great square of Cusco, with sacrifices of llamas and the pouring of chicha to renew the bond between the Sapa Inca and the cosmos. Capac Raymi, celebrated in late December, marked the initiation of noble youth into adulthood, while Qhapaq Raymi in the months before the solstice was a state ritual of purification of the Sapa Inca and his court. Other major festivals included Pachamama Raymi (August, in honor of the earth mother), Hatun Cosqui (the great rainmaking ceremony), and Situa Raymi in September, when the sicknesses of the past year were driven out of Cusco. After the conquest, many of these festivals were suppressed, but the underlying beliefs re-emerged in the explicitly nativist messianic cult of Taki Onqoy of 1560–1565, which called for the rejection of Spanish rule and of Christian cult, and whose suppression is one of the foundational episodes of colonial religious history.

The Qoya Raymi, celebrated in the ninth month, marked the capacmi (purification) of the queens and the Qoya Sumaq, the principal wife of the Sapa Inca. The Yapa Raymi in the tenth month was a harvest festival of thanksgiving, and the Huaracicu in the eleventh month marked the completion of the year’s agricultural work. The Qhapaq Raymi in the twelfth month was a state ritual of purification in which the Sapa Inca and the royal court underwent a five-day fast and a public renewal of the bond with the cosmos. Together these festivals organized the social year of the empire and gave a rhythm to daily life that has been documented in detail by Tom Zuidema in The Ceque System of Cuzco (1964), one of the foundational works of Inca ethnohistory.

Education and the amautas

Formal education in the Inca world was limited in scope and restricted to the elite, but it was far from rudimentary. The amautas — “wise men” — were sages trained in the fortress city of Cusco, in the schools attached to the Coricancha, and in the yachay wasi (house of knowledge) of the Inca. Sons of panacas, of the high nobility, and of distinguished curacas studied there the history of the empire, the laws of Mama Ocllo and Manco Cápac, the reading of the quipu, the appropriate form of public speech, the calendar, the practice of medicine, and the religious calendar of the empire. The most famous amauta of the early colonial period was Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, a descendant of the Inca nobility who in 1613 dictated an account of the pre-Christian religion that remains a primary source for Inca cosmology.

A particular kind of formal training was reserved for the curacas, who were taken to the Cusco yachay wasi for a year or more in their youth to learn the Inca legal tradition, the use of the quipu, the appropriate form of public oratory, and the policies of the Sapa Inca. The same system was used to train the cuyacamayoc (sometimes glossed as “priest of the moon” in the colonial sources, though the term is more naturally read as a compound of cuy “guinea pig” + camayoc “keeper”), the huacapri camayoc (keeper of the principal huaca), and the tarpuntay (agricultural specialist). The amautas were also, as Garcilaso wrote, the historians of the empire: they composed the cancuy wasin (songs of conquest) that were performed at the coronation of a new Sapa Inca and that re-enacted the deeds of his ancestors.

A parallel but distinct profession was that of the quipucamayocs — keepers of the quipu who recorded tribute, population, and the calendar in knotted cordage. Modern scholarship — most prominently the work of Gary Urton — has shown that the quipu was a sophisticated recording system and that the quipucamayocs were a hereditary administrative caste whose descendants continued to function as village record-keepers into the seventeenth century. The system as a whole — schools, teachers, and the quipu accounting it produced — was a state instrument of social integration and ideological reproduction.

A separate but related institution was the yachay wasi of the amautas at the Coricancha and at provincial centers, where a curriculum of formal rhetoric, history, and the cancuy wasin (songs of the conquest) was taught. Senior amautas were among the few specialists in the empire permitted to question the public policy of the Sapa Inca, and they could do so in the open court of the Sapa Inca without fear of reprisal, a privilege Garcilaso de la Vega cited in 1609 as evidence of the philosophical character of Inca government. Commoners received a more practical education at home: boys were taught agricultural work, the use of the chakitaqlla and the lampa, the shearing of camelids, the dyeing of wool, the making of coca lime-powder, the construction of terraces, and the basics of the ayllu’s history and ritual obligations; girls were taught the grinding of maize on a piedra de moler, the brewing of chicha, the spinning of wool and cotton, the weaving of the household’s ayllu patterns, and the appropriate conduct of marriage and the management of a household. By the time of marriage, an Andean woman could produce a complete unku of q’ara llama wool from a single fleece, and an Andean man could build a substantial terrace and a household storage structure in a working week.