Using evidence provided in the assigned Machu Picchu reading (Burger and Salazar pdf), explain a how one might apply a Marx
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As always, 3 pages, double spaced.
Using evidence provided in the assigned Machu Picchu reading (Burger and Salazar pdf), explain a how one might apply a Marxist model (page 283 in the text) to the site. Additionally, discuss the decline of the city and the reasons. What "model(s) of explanation" (using 282-283 examples) most fits in explaining this change?
The Processual Approach
The processual approach attempts to isolate and study the different processes at work within a society, and between societies, placing emphasis on relations with the environment, on subsistence and the economy, on social relations within the society, on the impact that the prevailing ideology and belief system have on these things, and on the effects of the interactions taking place between the different social units.
It is a characteristic of processual explanations that they have usually focused on ecological and social factors the operation of which can be analyzed in some detail. Sometimes a systems model is used, looking at the interaction of what may be defined as the subsystems of the culture system. A good early example of a processual explanation, even though today it is regarded as incomplete, is offered by Lewis Binford’s explanation for the origins of sedentary society and of a farming economy.
In 1968, Binford published an influential paper, “Post-Pleistocene Adaptations,” in which he set out to explain the origins of farming, or food production. Attempts to do this had been made by earlier scholars. But Binford’s explanation had one important feature that distinguished it from earlier explanations and made it very much a product of the New Archaeology: its generality. For he was setting out to explain the origins of farming not just in the Near East or the Mediterranean—although he focused on these areas—but also worldwide. He drew attention to global events at the end of the last Ice Age (i.e. at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, hence the title of his paper).
Binford centered his explanation on demography: he was concerned with population dynamics within small communities, stressing that once a formerly mobile group becomes sedentary—ceases to move around—its population size will increase markedly. For in a settled village the constraints no longer operate that, in a mobile group, severely limit the number of small children a mother can rear. There is no longer the difficulty, for instance, of carrying children from place to place. Crucial to the question was the fact that in the Near East some communities (of the Natufian culture around 9000 BCE) did indeed become sedentary before they were food-producing. He could see that, once settled, there would be considerable population pressure, in view of the greater number of surviving children. This would lead to increasing use of such locally available plant foods as wild cereals, which had hitherto been considered marginal and of little value. From the intensive use of cereals, and the introduction of ways of processing them, would develop the regular cycle of sowing and harvesting, and thus the course of plant-human involvement leading to domestication would be well underway.
But why did these pre-agricultural groups become sedentary in the first place? Binford’s view was that rising sea levels at the end of the Pleistocene (caused by the melting of polar ice) had two significant effects. First, they reduced the extent of the coastal plains available to the hunter-gatherers. And second, the new habitats created by the rise in sea level offered to human groups much greater access to migratory fish and to migrant fowl.
Using these rich resources, rather as the inhabitants of the Northwest Coast of North America have done in more recent times, the hunter-gatherer groups found it possible for the first time to lead a sedentary existence. They were no longer obliged to move.
In some respects Binford’s explanation is seen today as rather too simple. Nevertheless, it has many strengths. Although the focus was on the Near East, the same arguments can equally be applied to other parts of the world. Binford avoided migration or diffusion, and analyzed the origins of farming in processual terms.
Marxist Archaeology
Following the upsurge in theoretical discussion that followed the initial impact of the New Archaeology, there
was a reawakening of interest in applying to archaeology some of the implications of the earlier work of Karl Marx. Marx was an extremely influential nineteenth-century philosopher and political economist. Although his work covered a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of conflicts between social classes.
( Archaeology Essentials: Theories/Methods/Practice, Fourth Edition )
( 1 / 3 )
The key feature of Marxist archaeology, then, is that change within a past society was caused mainly by the contradictions that arise between the forces of production and social organization. Characteristically these contradictions emerge as a struggle between classes (if this is a society where distinct social classes have already developed). Emphasis on class struggle and internal differences is a feature of most Marxist explanations: this is a view of the world where change comes about through the resolution of internal dissent. It may be contrasted with the “functionalist” view favored by the early New Archaeology, where selective pressures toward greater efficiency are seen to operate and changes are often viewed as mutually beneficial.
In traditional Marxism the ideology of a society—the whole system of knowledge and belief—is seen as largely determined by the nature of the economic base. This point is disputed by the “neo-Marxists” who regard ideology and economics as interrelated and mutually influential, rather than one as dominant and the other subordinate.
Karl Marx has influenced the interpretations of many archaeologists, especially concerning how change occurs in a society.
There are many positive features that Marxist analyses share with processual archaeology, but, in comparison with the processual studies of the New Archaeologists, many such Marxist analyses seem rather short on the handling of concrete archaeological data. The gap between theoretical archaeology and field archaeology is not always effectively bridged, and the critics of Marxist archaeology sometimes observe that since Karl Marx laid down the basic principles more than a century ago, all that remains for the Marxist archaeologists to do is to elaborate them: research in the field is superfluous. Despite these differences, processual archaeology and Marxist archaeology have much in common.
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Machu Picchu Rediscovered: The Royal Estate In The Cloud Forest 1
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Machu Picchu Rediscovered: The Royal Estate In The Cloud Forest1
Richard L. Burger And Lucy Salazar-Burger2
The Story Machu Picchu has been described as one of the world's most mysterious places, not only because of the other worldly atmosphere created by its ruins, slopes, and mists but also because of all the questions we have about it.
Why was it situated on what seems to be a totally irrational location, a narrow ridge on heavily forested slopes? What led the Inca to invest large amounts of labor in building one of the most beautiful settlements known anywhere in the world in such a remote place? Why was its spectacular mountaintop site unknown to the Spanish conquerors of the Inca? What role did Machu Picchu play in Inca society?
Since its rediscovery by Hiram Bingham in 1911— knowledge of it before this had generally remained unknown to the world beyond local inhabitants—and despite the fact that thousands of visitors have journeyed to Machu Picchu, these mysteries remain unresolved in the mind of the public. Travelers, Peruvian and foreign, continue to receive implausible and misleading interpretations and go on crediting these erroneous notions. Bingham himself held and advanced many of these still current misconceptions, which, despite the evidence, have persisted for three-quarters of a century.
The ruins of Machu Picchu have inspired many myths, but some of these stories are an outgrowth of the limitations of Hiram Bingham's training and early twentieth century scholarship in general. The redoubtable leader of the 1911 Yale Peruvian Expedition was a professor of Latin American history at Yale, a geographer, explorer, and adventurer, but he was no archaeologist. Bingham was highly intuitive but dependent on confusing and often inconsistent Spanish Colonial documentary sources. He used these materials to draw a number of conclusions that archaeological research and other kinds of investigation contradict. His reliance on this one type of evidence and his lack of training in the other led Bingham to convince himself that what he had found was indeed what he had been seeking.
Because of the vagaries of history, Machu Picchu, whatever it may have been, had remained in a near pristine state between its "loss" in the sixteenth century and its recovery in the early twentieth. Consequently the site offers the most complete example
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of Inca planning known to date. Thanks to Bingham's three expeditions in the 1910s (the expeditions of 1912 and 1914-15 were cosponsored by Yale and the National Geographic Society), the Machu Picchu materials at Yale Peabody Museum have offered unlimited opportunities for new studies, which in many cases have totally refuted his theories. In fact, no other collection of Inca materials outside of Peru is nearly so large or complete or has so much potential to yield insight. Current studies of these materials continue to shed light on the governance and administration of the Inca empire, the life of its elite and its servants, and the nature of Inca society and culture.
More than eighty years after Bingham's first expedition, the mist is at last rising from Machu Picchu. While from the perspective of archaeological research this process is just beginning, the insights it has produced have already transformed our understanding of the site and the empire of which it was a part. It is now time to share those insights with a wider audience beyond the community of scholars in the field. Likewise, along with the stewardship of the unique collections excavated by Bingham eight decades ago comes a responsibility to make those collections more accessible to the public.
It is with these goals in mind that the Peabody Museum has begun the process of planning and seeking support for the establishment of a permanent exhibition focusing on Machu Picchu. In its proposed exhibit, the Peabody Museum seeks to demystify Machu Picchu and provide its visitors with a clearer notion of the function of the site, its role in Inca history, and the process by which archaeologists have solved the Machu Picchu riddle.
The Expedition Adept at attracting both financial backers and publicity, Hiram Bingham, Yale ‘98, eventually migrated out of academia into politics, serving successively as Lieutenant- Governor, Governor, and U.S. Senator for Connecticut. Before that career change, however, Bingham made his name as the amateur archaeologist and intrepid explorer who both "discovered" Machu Picchu and expounded the abiding—and mistaken—explanations of the site that continue to be accepted.
In 1911, with support from Yale alumni, Bingham mounted an expedition to the Cuzco area in southern Peru, the capital of Tawantinsuyu, the great Inca empire. He was looking for Vilcabamba, the Neo-Inca capital on the forested eastern slopes of the Andes; from this city descendants of the Inca emperors had opposed Spanish conquest for forty years. The Spaniards ultimately subdued the resistance and sacked Vilcabamba in 1572; the area around it became depopulated. In fact, the city's location remained lost to scholars.
Bingham hoped to find Vilcabamba by using sixteenth-century historical references. Aided by a road built recently to facilitate the coca leaf trade, Bingham followed the Urubamba River into an area particularly favored by the Inca royal family, previously inaccessible to exploration. On July 23, 1911, a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, told him of Inca ruins high on a ridge over the river, hidden by secondary
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Melchor Arteaga crossing bridge over the Urubamba River. The bridge was washed away a few weeks later, leaving only one log. Photo by Hiram Bingham, July 24, 1911.
growth. The next day, guided by Arteaga and then by the child of a local sharecropper who had tilled the ruins, Bingham came upon an extraordinarily well-preserved Inca with unusually fine masonry; he returned the following year to clear and excavate the site.
While the name Machu Picchu did not appear in any of the chronicles with which Bingham was familiar, he nevertheless connected the site to the places described in them. He proposed—incorrectly, as it turns out—that Machu Picchu was the birthplace of the Incas, based on the link that he saw between an unusual three-windowed building at the site and the myth that the ancestors of the Incas emerged from three caves or windows. Bingham's gifts as a popularizer of his own work had the unfortunate effect of establishing this and other misinterpretations as facts in the public consciousness. It was he who described Machu Picchu as a lost city, although, in fact, it was neither a city—its population had been 750 at most—nor was it lost in any meaningful sense.
In an agreement with the Peruvian government, Bingham brought the materials recovered at Machu Picchu back with him to Yale, where Peabody Museum curators and staff have carefully curated and protected them since that time. One of the advantages of this arrangement is that they have remained available for reanalysis. As we shall see, new questions and the new techniques that now exist for answering them have enabled modern scholars to rediscover Machu Picchu.
Rediscovering Machu Picchu Contrary to Bingham's speculations, Machu Picchu's origins appear to have been quite recent, perhaps sometime in the 1450s or '60s, preceding by less than a century Pizarro's conquest of the Incas' vast Andean empire. The site's origins also appear to have been considerably less spectacular than Bingham's theories would have it in other ways. In 1982, we concluded on the basis of the archaeological evidence that Machu Picchu, far from being the Inca birthplace, was merely one of a number of personal royal estates built by Incan emperors at a remove from the imperial capital, Cuzco. In fact, eighty years of
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The Sacred Plaza and Intihuatana Pyramid of Machu Picchu with the peak of Huayna Picchu in the background. Elwood Erdis and a local Peruvian assistant in the foreground. Photo by Hiram Bingham, 1912.
scholarship have radically transformed our understanding of the Incan empire and of Machu Picchu's position in it. These new insights have given a new understanding of the Machu Picchu site, and while these studies have confirmed some of Bingham's intuitions, they substantially refuted others.
Machu Picchu can only be properly understood in the larger context of Inca social, economic, and political structure. Machu Picchu does not resemble any of the five types of settlement that account for 99% of the sites within Tawantinsuyu between 1450 and 1532 A.D., when the Iricas held sway:
•It was only a tiny fraction of the size of Cuzco, the Inca capital, for example, with its magnificent temples, palaces, and fortress.
• Nor was its form or size comparable to Inca provincial administrative capitals like Pumpu or Huanuco Pampa.
• Its location and strongly religious character set it apart from the administrative way stations called tambos that the Incas had set up along their 50,000-kilometer (more than 30,000 miles) road network.
• It was far too elaborate to have been either a rural village or one of the planned government agricultural sites on which the Incas forcibly settled alien ethnic communities as a punishment or development strategy.
• Its classic Inca architecture and the artifacts recovered from it showed that Machu Picchu could not have been one of the non-Inca villages that paid tribute to the empire through their labor on public works, state lands, mines, and other projects.
However, Machu Picchu does have features consistent with one special type of settlement—the royal estate. These—and there was a group of them in the empire—were defined as being outside of the state administrative system and their support area, belonging instead to specific emperors and their descendants. These kin groups, called
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panacas or royal corporations, were each headed by an Inca king and supported in luxury by the lands and retainers acquired by conquest during that king's reign.
These royal retreats were associated with lands that were farmed for the panaca, the produce of which supported the centers and their visitors. There seem to have been many of these settlements in a number of areas, but the Urubamba Valley to the north of Cuzco was specially favored, perhaps because of its proximity to the capital and its warmer climate. Descriptions of Huayna Capac's estate in Yucay, upstream from Machu Picchu, tell of exotic lowland animals and plants being kept for the emperor's pleasure. According to the chroniclers, these centers were used as country estates for relaxation when the king or his descendants traveled out of Cuzco. Hunting, entertaining other Inca nobles and foreign dignitaries, and other activities are mentioned.
The fine Inca masonry, the small size of the settlement, the absence of features tied to the economic infrastructure, and other elements led us to conclude in 1982, solely on the basis of archaeological evidence, that Machu Picchu was probably such a royal estate. This hypothesis appeared to be confirmed in 1986 when John Howland Rowe discovered a 1568 document, written only 36 years after Pizarro's arrival, that mentions a site Picchu, approximately where Machu Picchu is located today; the term Machu that precedes Picchu means old and was used by locals to differentiate it from the small hill behind it called Huayna Picchu, which means young.
The entire area, according to Rowe, apparently belonged to the Inca emperor Pachacuti (or Inca Yupanqui). Although the site itself is not mentioned, the documents imply that the archaeological site of Machu Picchu would have fallen within Pachacuti's estate. This fact is not surprising because it was under Pachacuti's leadership that the Inca armies conquered the Urubamba drainage in an effort to protect the Cuzco basin from a sneak attack by their principal adversaries, the Chancas.
Although the Machu Picchu area had only been lightly settled before the Inca conquest, it had strategic importance for the neighboring highland groups. It is generally believed that Pachacuti only conquered the middle and lower Urubamba after his conquest of the Chancas, probably sometime in the 1450s; in 1471 Topa Inca took over as emperor. Using these dates as boundaries, it seems reasonable to suggest that Machu Picchu was built sometime between 1450 and 1470, and had only been in use for some 80 years when Tawantinsuyu crumbled and the site was abandoned.
The Royal Haven Studies of the structure and the functioning of the royal household indicate that during clear cold weather of the Andean winter (May to August), members of the Incan royalty relaxed, hunted, and entertained foreign dignitaries and other guests in Machu Picchu's warmer and more pleasant climate. The land around the retreat was terraced and farmed and otherwise made delightful to the rulers, their families, and visiting Inca nobles. In modern American terms Machu Picchu, as well as the other royal estates, was a kind of Inca "Camp David," except that the estates did not pass to the king's successor upon his departure from office.
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Another major difference was in the style of rulership: the Inca traveled with his court, which consisted of hundreds of retainers and advisors: Even after his death, the Inca's mummy was cared for by hundreds of servants and, as during his lifetime, his body in mummified form was carefully tended, fed, and given a daily change of clothing.3
When the weather grew rainy, the mummy was carried on a litter to more pleasant climes.
What implications does the identification of Machu Picchu as a royal estate have for the interpretation of the archaeological remains? First of all, the general layout becomes comprehensible from a functional perspective. It would be expected that the site would have been used for part of each year, perhaps during May to August, when nightly frosts are common in Cuzco. During this period, a number of royal families linked to the Inca would have resided at the site along with a much larger number of retainers to serve them. In addition, a permanent population of caretakers must have lived at the site throughout the year.
Indeed, when we look at the layout of the site, we can immediately identify a sector of high-status households. In the classic form, called kancha by the Inca themselves, rectangular buildings used for sleeping, cooking and household storage were arranged within a walled compound around a central patio. Each kancha group has a
single entrance, and would have been used by a single family group. Bingham, aware of Inca custom, correctly identified these as ayllu households.
As one mig
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