Materializing Inka–Colla Interaction in the Viceroyalty of Peru

This poster engages as its central problematic a recurrent iconographic motif, identified by scholars as depicting a ritualized drinking encounter between the Sapa Inka and his Colla—an Aymara-speaking ethnic polity based in the northern Lake Titicaca basin during the Late Intermediate Period—counterpart. This motif was painted onto keros (Andean ceremonial drinking vessels) produced in the colonial Viceroyalty of Peru over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its depiction of a peaceful interaction between the Inka sovereign and an evidently analogously powerful Colla monarch contrasts with historical accounts of Inka military conquests of a resistant altiplano; and archaeological evidence suggesting that the political landscape of the late pre-Inka Titicaca basin was characterized by fragmentation, rather than by unification under a Colla state. Integrating iconographic analysis, sixteenth and seventeenth century historical sources, and a synthesis of archaeological data from the historic Colla heartland, this poster interrogates the implications of such a depiction of Inka-Colla interaction in the early and mid-colonial Andes. Situating the circulation of keros featuring the Inka-Colla motif among the prosperous, elite Aymara dynastic lineages of the colonial Lake Titicaca basin, this poster suggests that the iconographic motif served a performative function, alternately (and perhaps simultaneously) insisting upon the equivalence of the historic Colla señoríos to the Inka empire in terms of sociopolitical complexity; while also asserting the essential benevolence of Inka rule and imperial expansion. It concludes by arguing that the teleological narratives of Inka imperial history largely encoded in colonial sources represented only one among manifold visions of the pre-colonial past available to Andean societies for mobilization and contestation under Spanish colonial rule.

As a project engaged in the study of material culture, iconographic analysis, and the interrogation of archaeological data, it is particularly well-suited to the poster format. The poster will facilitate the extended visual presentation of selected examples of the Inka-Colla kero motif, in addition to emphasizing archaeological figures—for example, visualizations of regional settlement patterns, maps of individual archaeological sites, and ceramics—that are crucial to the intellectual arguments advanced by the poster.