CHULLPAS, USHNUS, AND THE POLITICAL RELATIONS WITH THE INSIDE-WORLD IN THE INCA EMPIRE

AXEL E. NIELSEN

Washington, D.C.

Congreso; 83nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology; 2018

Society for American Archaeology

Previous research has interpreted chullpas as open sepulchers, altars, and landmarks which participated in political projects mainly by helping to reproduce corporate identities through ancestor worship and by inscribingpower hierarchies and territorial claims on the landscape.This paper builds on the premise that chullpas were not just things with a certain function, but non-human persons (wak'as) capable of acting in differentways,given the affordances of their corporeality as towers or chambers. This idea raises new possibilities for thinking about the political work of chullpas in the Andean highlands. The formalized opening that characterizes these structures, for example, allowed them to mediate between the world of people (akapacha in Aymara) and the inside-world(ukhupacha), where powerful agencies lived. Combining historical information and archaeological data from the South Andean highlands, I discuss the role that chullpas played in the Inka political machine as mediators with the non-human members of society who belonged to the ukhupacha.