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Bray — Archaeological Perspective on the Andean Concept of
Camaquen
An Archaeological Perspective on the Andean Concept
of
Camaquen
: Thinking Through Late Pre-Columbian
Ofrendas
and
Huacas
Tamara L. Bray
Ethnohistoric sources suggest that the indigenous inhabitants of Andean South America
saw both people and things as animated or enlivened by a common vital force (
camaquen
).
In approaching the subject of
camaquen
archaeologically, I atempt to place objects and
their materiality at the analytical centre, rather than the normally privileged ethnohistoric
or ethnographic data, in order to see what new insights into the nature of Pre-Columbian
ontologies might be gained from ‘thinking through things’. In this, I follow recent theories
premised on the idea that the traditional segregation of concepts and things may hinder
understanding of alternative worlds. The study focuses speciically on the arrangements,
relationality and referentiality between and among objects found in sacred and ofering
contexts dating to the Inca period.
The earliest Spanish reports of initial encounters with
native Andean peoples render a sense of the profound
strangeness experienced but not yet digested by the
European invaders. The alien character of this new
world can be detected in such comments as those of
Miguel de Estete (1947) regarding the ‘ilthy wooden
pole’ worshipped as the great Andean oracle Pach-
acamac, or the reported wedding of a young girl to
a sacred blue stone ‘no bigger than the size of one’s
palm’ (Avila 1918, 69–70, cited in Salomon 1991), or
the confession that a ceramic pot dressed in female
garb was venerated as the ancestor of a particular
ayllu
(Polia 1999, 505). Such observations suggest a radically
diferent understanding of the nature and categories
of being on the part of indigenous people in the
Andes. Within the context of an emerging paradigm
in anthropology that seeks to move beyond the dual-
ist ontology of the subject/object–mind/mater split,
this article is an initial atempt to explore the various
hints ofered in the ethnohistoric record regarding
the existence of alternative, speciically Andean,
ontologies. As an archaeologist, I am most interested
in how the adoption of a diferent ontological footing
might afect our interpretations of the archaeological
record of the late Pre-Columbian Andes. Ater briely
discussing the signiicant features of this emergent
theoretical stance advocating the idea of ‘thinking
through things’, I highlight two key concepts brought
forth in the ethnohistoric documentation with regard
to Andean ontological assumptions, and then turn to
a consideration of late Pre-Columbian sacred objects
and oferings (
ofrendas
) in light of these. The reas-
sessment of these archaeological phenomena from
an ontological position that extends the notion of
personhood to non-human entities is then relected
back upon our common understanding of these key
indigenous concepts, enriching our reading of them
through a recognition of their necessarily material and
relational nature.
The ontological turn in anthropology:
thinking through things
‘What would an artifact-oriented anthropology look
like if it were not about material culture’ the authors of
a recently published volume entitled
Thinking Through
Things
ask? (Henare
et al.
2007, 1). Arguing against the
a
priori
distinction between mater and meaning, persons
and things, representation and reality, they question the
utility of this assumption from an anthropological point
Cambridge Archaeological Journal
19:3, 357–66
© 2009 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
doi:10.1017/S0959774309000547 Received 1 April 2009; Accepted 20 May 2009; Revised 23 July 2009
357
Special Section — Animating Archaeology
of view. They ofer instead the radical suggestion that
things might be treated
sui generis
as meanings (2007, 3)
and take as their starting point the identity of meaning
and thing, allowing that these may be one and the same,
e.g. that things don’t ‘carry’ meaning but
are
meaning.
The ultimate aim of this refusal of the Western dichot-
omization of the mental and the material is to explore
other ways of understanding and being in the world
— the presumed remit of anthropology — and to work
toward a reconiguration of the analytical framework
of the discipline.
The authors place their work on the continuum
of what they describe as a quiet revolution in anthropo-
logy, characterized as ‘the ontological turn’ (Henare
et
al.
2007, 7–12). This turn involves a movement away
from questions of knowledge and epistemology
towards those concerned with ontology (see also
Alberti & Marshall, this volume). More speciically,
they see it as a movement away from the habituation
of anthropology to the exigencies of Cartesian dual-
ism. From their perspective, the heuristic prescription
of ‘thinking through things’ is what will enable us
to go beyond the common sense assumption of ‘one
world, many worldviews’, or the axiom that nature
is one, while culture is many, which makes the job
of anthropologists, then, the ‘interpretation’ of those
other worldviews.
They derive the idea of multiple natural worlds
(as opposed to multiple cultural views of nature) from
the work of Viveiros de Castro (1998; 2004) and the
notion of ‘perspectival multinaturalism’ he developed
on the basis of research into Amazonian cosmologies
and ethno-metaphysics. As discussed by this author
(2004, 464–4), a foundational ontological premise of
many Amerindian peoples is that humanity, rather
than animality, constitutes the original condition of
all phenomena. From this, it follows that animals and
other non-human entities, having once been human
must still be; and while their bodily forms may conceal
their interior subjectivity or core humanness, this
aspect of their being is nonetheless understood to be
formally identical to human consciousness.
The ontological presumption here is one of spir-
itual unity and corporeal diversity such that culture, or
the subject, is the form of the universal, while nature,
or the object, is the form of the particular (Viveiros de
Castro 2004, 465). This difers profoundly from the
modern Western belief in the unity of nature, lead-
ing Viveiros de Castro to the label ‘multinaturalism’
in order to contrast the Amerindian position with
contemporary ‘multiculturalist’ ontologies (Viveiros
de Castro 2004, 466). The perspectival aspect of Amer-
indian ontology as described by this author involves
the understanding that every subject, whether human
or non-human, has its own point of view, and that
wherever there is a point of view, there is necessar-
ily a ‘subject position’. Rather than the subject being
construed as the ixed entity from which the point of
view emanates, however, in Amerindian theory, it is
the point of view which is understood to activate or
create the subject (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 467).
On the basis of such insights as those provided
by Viveiros de Castro, Hallowell (1960) and others,
Henare
et al.
(2007) argue that there may well be
diferent worlds, not just diferent worldviews, and
that it may be possible to access these by atending
to the ‘ontological anomalies’ that we encounter as
anthropologists in our engagement with others and
their understandings of the world. Here I extend these
ideas to the realm of archaeology.
Ethnohistoric insights into native Andean
ontologies: of persons and things
A key Andean concept for purposes of present discus-
sion is
camay
, a native Quechua term that has no clear
equivalent in Spanish or English. Salomon & Urioste
(1991, 45) translate
camay
as ‘to charge’ or ‘to charge
being with’, ‘to make’, ‘to give form and force’, or ‘to
animate’ (see also Taylor 1974–76; 1987).
Camay
is fun-
damentally understood as a speciic kind of essence,
force, or power rather than as something abstract
or generalized. Salomon (1991, 16) invokes the idea
of ‘species power’ with respect to this term, as, for
instance, in the case of the patron animals of shamans,
who infuse the later with their valued species traits,
such as visual acuity, speed, or strength.
Camay
also
carries the connotation of bringing something extant
into being through the energizing of existing mater
(as opposed to creating something from nothing). In
the later sixteenth century for instance, ecclesiastical
authorities who were intent upon precisely translating
the Christian doctrine for native Quechua speakers
rejected the use of the term
camay
in favour of the verb
‘
ruray
’ to refer to the creation of the universe, as the
former term would have suggested ‘a god that was the
soul (or hidden principle) of the world rather than its
creator’ (Mannheim 1991, 66).
1
Unlike the simple act
of creation, which once done is over,
camay
intends
something of continuity in sustaining the being, a con-
dition that involves an on-going relationship between
the
camac
(e.g. the ‘
camay
-er’) and its
camasca
(e.g. its
tangible instantiation) (Salomon 1991, 16–17).
Many other cultures share a similar notion of
a generative life force that infuses and animates all
mater. In fact, such
mana
-like concepts are ubiqui-
358
Bray — Archaeological Perspective on the Andean Concept of
Camaquen
tous in early ethnographic literature, though, as one
author recently commented, ‘
mana
does not animate
anthropological debate like it used to’ (Holbraad 2007,
190). Relegated to the realm of the mythical, local
concepts of life force, sacred power, etc. have been
out of anthropological fashion for decades. In line
with the ontological shit described above, the intent
here is to recuperate the signiicance of
camay,
the
Andean cousin of
mana
, for purposes of investigating
its potential presence and materiality in the archaeo-
logical context. Because the notion of
mana,
or in this
case —
camay,
cuts systematically across the Western
divide between mater and meaning, atending to
it anthropologically provides us with an analytical
purchase from which to challenge the commonplace
assumption that
things
must necessarily be considered
ontologically distinct from
concepts
(Holbraad 2007,
191). The suggestion here is that we take what appears
initially to us as an ontological anomaly, e.g. the notion
that
camay
is both a thing and a concept, to create a
new analytic frame in which an understanding that
camay
is both a stone and ritual eicacy, for instance,
is not impossible.
Another key Andean concept for the present
discussion is
huaca
. Garcilaso (1966, 76–7) atempted
to convey the meaning of this term by enumerating
the kinds of things called ‘
huaca
’ by native Andean
peoples. His list included ‘… idols, rocks, great stones
or trees’, as well as things made, such as ‘igures of
men, birds, and animals’ ofered to the Sun, as well
as places built, such as ‘any temple, large or small,
… sepulchers set up in the ields… and corners of
houses’. The term
huaca,
then, generally refers to ‘a
sacred thing’, be it a place, idol, or image (Garcilaso
1966, 76–7). Cobo (1990, 44) suggested that the things
Andean peoples worshipped, or
huacas
, could be
divided into two categories: works of nature unaltered
by human intervention, and ‘idols that did not rep-
resent anything other than the material from which
they were produced and the form given them by the
cratsman who made them’. He goes on to note that
‘all of these idols
were worshipped for their own sake
, and
[that] these simple people never thought to search or
use their imaginations
in order to ind what such idols
represented
’ (Cobo 1990, 45; emphasis added). Cobo’s
seventeenth-century observations are stunning with
regard to the uterly modernist buy-in
vis-à-vis
the
separation of mater and meaning, and in light of
the profound yet seemingly unconsidered insights
he had into native Andean ontologies. Karsten (1949,
187) echoes a similar thought in his observation that
‘(t)here have even been atempts to explain them
(e.g.
huacas
) in a “pre-animistic” way, not as seats of
spiritual beings, but as places from which impersonal
magical powers were emanating’.
Various indications in both ethnohistoric reports
and the ethnographic literature suggest that ‘
huacas
had vibrantly individual personalities’ (Salomon 1991,
18; see also Salomon 1998). The stories recounted
in the Huarochiri manuscript, for instance, lead
Salomon (1991, 19) to conclude that the
huacas
are
clearly living beings, ‘persons in fact’. He goes on
to note in his introduction to this manuscript that
the world imagined by the Checa does not seem to
have been made of two kinds of stuf — (e.g.) mater
and spirit — like that of Christians; (rather)
huacas
are made of energized mater, like everything else,
and they act within nature, not over and outside it as
Western supernaturals do (Salomon 1991, 19).
This insightful observation provides a segue to recent
discussion on the intersection of materiality, agency
and personhood.
Objects, agency and personhood
Much of the current theoretical work focusing on
objects, agency and personhood takes as its starting
point the inluential writings of Alfred Gell (1992;
1996; 1998). Gell’s basic thesis was that things, e.g.
works of art, images, icons, etc., must be treated as
‘person-like’ — that is, as targets for and sources of
social agency (1998, 96). In thinking through how
things may be construed as persons, he developed
a sophisticated conceptual framework outlining the
way in which objects come to possess social agency
— much like people. Within this framework, social
agency is deined not in terms of biological atributes
but rather relationally. In other words, it does not mat-
ter in ascribing social-agent status what a thing or a
person ‘is’ in itself — what maters is where it stands in
a network of social relations (Gell 1998, 123). Equally
important here is the conditional and transactional
nature of the relationship between persons and things
(or ‘patients and agents’ to use Gell’s terminology),
each being necessarily constitutive of the other’s
agency at diferent moments in time (Gell 1998, 22).
Key to this discussion of agency and personhood
is the shit of focus from the analysis of meaning to the
analysis of efect. In other words, the concern is not
so much with what objects mean — e.g. their semiotic
signiicance — as with what they
do
. In this regard,
objects are understood to act not with intentionality
but rather through their efects, e.g. their eicacy. This
approach is illustrated in Gell’s (1998, 69–71) analysis
of the ocean-going canoes involved in the Kula ring.
For the Trobrianders, the beautiful carved prows
359
Special Section — Animating Archaeology
To illustrate this, I turn now to two categories
of late Pre-Columbian artefact that most Andeanists
would be willing to classify as ‘
huaca
’ based on com-
mon associations and context of inds. I divide these
broadly into the categories of iconic and aniconic
and consider each in light of the extended notions of
personhood, animacy, agency and eicacy outlined
above to see what, if any, new insights might be gained
into native Andean ontologies by thinking through
these things.
Ofrendas
and
huacas
Iconic
huacas
The Inca are famous for their non-iconic approach to
visual imagery, art and aesthetics. The principal excep-
tion to the non-igural dictate of the Inca aesthetic are
the miniature human and camelid statues commonly
associated with the important state ceremonial of
capacocha
(Fig. 1). One of the most momentous of impe-
rial state occasions, the
capacocha
is understood from
ethnohistoric accounts as having been linked to major
events in the life history of Inca rulers — speciically
coronation, severe illness and death (Betanzos 1996,
46, 132; Molina 1989, 120–27; Sarmiento 1965). The
archaeological evidence, however, suggests that these
miniature igurines may have also, and perhaps more
importantly, been linked to the claiming or creation of
sacred space by and for the imperial state. This obser-
vation is made on the basis of archaeologically docu-
mented inds of such objects at the sites of Túcume
(Heyerdahl
et al.
1995), Choquepukio (McEwan &
Gibaja n.d.), Isla de la Plata (Dorsey 1901), Tiwanaku
(Yaeger pers. comm.), Lake Titicaca (Reinhard 1992a),
Saqsaywaman (Valcarcel 1935, 180) and in the central
plaza of Cuzco (Farrington & Raino 1996), among
others. None of these sites comprise the high-altitude
burial contexts with which we usually associate
capa-
cocha
sacriices or the miniature human and camelid
igurines (see Ceruti 1999; Reinhard 1992b; Reinhard &
Ceruti 2000). Instead, a common denominator among
these localities suggests a strong interest in physically
claiming sacred sites and spaces that once belonged
to powerful predecessors or rivals (but see Sillar, this
volume, for a slightly diferent interpretation). Within
this framework, the
capacocha
sacriices made on the
summits of important Andean peaks may be viewed
as a special subset of such imperial acts (see McEwan
& van de Guchte 1992).
At the coastal site of Túcume, for instance, ive
Inca igurines were recovered from three dedicatory
features situated around the entrance to the principal
temple at the site. This temple had been in use several
Figure 1.
Inca miniature igurines from Mt Llullaillaco
capacocha
ofering in Argentina. (Photograph courtesy
of Johan Reinhard.)
of these vessels are made to enchant one’s trading
partners and to (favourably) afect the terms of the
exchange. The canoes are thus seen as important
agents in their own right within the social network
of the Kula.
Archaeologically, the study of personhood poten-
tially has much to contribute to our general understand-
ing of what persons are and how personal identities
may be construed beyond the dominant notion of
Western individualism (e.g. Fowler 2004; Meskell 1999).
Recent work in this area has foregrounded a relational
view of personhood in which persons are seen as multi-
authored, plural entities deined on the basis of what
they do rather than on how they appear, and conformed
of their many and various interactions within a kalei-
doscopic ield of social relations involving humans,
animals, things and places (Brück 2001; Chapman 2000;
Fowler 2004). From this perspective, social relations
are seen to provide the grounds for and the context
within which persons take (temporary) shape, with
the nature of personhood consequently understood as
contextual and shiting. Within the Andean context,
the exploration of alternative forms of personhood
and types of persons articulates closely with notions
of power, agency, reciprocity and ethical obligation.
360
Bray — Archaeological Perspective on the Andean Concept of
Camaquen
centuries prior to the Inca occupation
(Heyerdahl
et al.
1995). The ritually
interred artefacts included one mini-
ature silver female igurine recovered
directly in front of the main entryway,
one male and one female igurine of
spondylus
in a pit to the east of the
doorway, and two female igurines,
one of
spondylus
and one of silver, in a
pit to the west. The large, canted stone
guanca
that constitutes the interior
focal point of the principal temple
at Túcume (Fig. 2) bears a striking
resemblance to a similarly enclosed
monolith uncovered by Gordon
McEwan at the site of Choquepukio
in the Cuzco basin, as do the reported
inds of gold, silver and
spondylus
male and female igurines from this
later site (McEwan & Gibaja n.d.).
The special nature of the canted
monoliths at these two sites, their
probable revered status, and the like-
lihood of their perceived potency is
suggested by the special enclosures within which they
were housed, the centrality of the stone and its hous-
ing
vis-à-vis
the rest of the site, and the fact that they
were the recipients of special oferings — implying an
expectation of reciprocity in the Andean context and
the subject positionality of these objects in a network
of social relations.
Similar observations can be made at various
other important pre-Incaic sites that subsequently
came to be dominated by the Inca. At Pachacamac,
for instance, one of the principal centres of regional
and religious power for at least a millennium prior
to the rise of the Inca, a number of miniature human
igurines were reportedly recovered (Baessler 1904).
Among these was an unusually large male statue
of silver that stands 24.3 cm tall, and another male
specimen with bands of horizontal inlay (see Dransart
2000, 78, 80). Further north, of the coast of Ecuador,
Dorsey (1901) excavated a double burial with ive
female igurines (three of gold, one of silver and one
of bronze), tupu pins and Inca ceramics on the island
of La Plata. Other archaeological material recovered
from this island (Dorsey 1901), as well as ethnohistoric
information (Cieza 1986), clearly indicate that La Plata
island had long been a sacred
huaca
of the local inhab-
itants of the coastal mainland. In the Andean Altiplano
to the south of Cuzco, Lake Titicaca was also the focus
of regional worship and ritual activity long before
the Inca incursion (Bauer & Stanish 2001). In 1991,
Figure 2.
Sacred stone, or
guanca
, inside Temple of the Sacred Stone at
Tucume. (Photograph courtesy of Dan Sandweiss, University of Maine.)
two small stone boxes recovered from an underwater
reef of an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca were
found to contain ive gold and silver male igurines
and one miniature silver camelid igurine (Reinhard
1992a).
2
In Cuzco, the ceremonial and political capital
of the Inca empire, similar inds of miniature people
and camelids suggest their role in the creation, as well
as appropriation, of sacred space. Valcárcel (1935,
18), for instance, recovered a pair of silver female
igurines during cleaning and excavation activities at
the fortress complex of Saqsaywaman directly above
Cuzco, while more recent archaeological work in the
main plaza of Cuzco yielded four miniature camelid
igurines — one of gold, two of silver and one of
spondylus
(Farrington & Raino 1996).
Two important aspects of these miniatures is that
they were usually made to be anatomically correct
and, though not all specimens have been equally well
preserved, the human igures were likely all originally
dressed in miniature versions of gender-appropriate
clothing (Dransart 2000). That these objects were meant
to be viewed as people seems unquestionable. Even
the Spanish apparently recognized this, as indicated
in one chronicler’s comment that children intended as
capacocha
sacriices were accompanied by ‘persons of
gold and silver’
3
(Molina 1989, 122). That such objects
were understood by the Inca as animate, person-like
beings in their own right, e.g. as targets for and sources
of social agency, also seems highly likely.
361
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