Memory Landscapes of the Inka Carved Outcrops: From Past to Present

The precision-fitted masonry of Inca architecture has been celebrated for its beauty and advanced degree of engineering. However, the significance of carved outcrops in Inca religious ideology has received far less attention. Christie provides a welcome synthesis of information on modified stone while offering novel interpretations of the role of built environments in Inca imperial strategies. Her theoretical framework combines phenomenological approaches popular in British archaeology with practice and political landscapes perspectives. The latter recognizes that the interrelationships between peoples, places, and things set the parameters for political engagement and structured past power asymmetries. Christie contends that carving stone outcrops initially fostered private dialogues and reciprocal dependencies between animated landforms and imperial agents. However, the carved rock soon came to mark Inca sovereignty, territorial boundaries, and the direct intervention of the state. Christie's detailed examination of modified outcrops in the Cusco region and elsewhere reveals their multiple meanings and agencies, and she traces continuity and change in stone cults from the Inca period to the present. She even argues that certain groups of boulders were gridded like khipus and functioned as counting devices (yupanas). Should appeal to scholars interested in political landscape and the semiotic affordance of stone in the Andean context and beyond. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.