Water in Inca Cosmology and Statecraft

This chapter discusses the central importance of water in Inca cosmology. Their awareness that water is life frames their hydrological cosmology as a circulation system that involves the interior of the earth, its surface, and the spaces above it with a cosmic ocean underlying everything. This cosmology evolved as a branch of the cultural development of the peoples who inhabited the Lake Titicaca basin for millennia reaching its apex in the Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku) state (300 AD-1100 AD), the earliest and most powerful polity on the Altiplano (Berenguer in Tiwanaku: Lords of the Sacred Lake. Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, 2000; Janusek in J Archaeol Res 12, 2004; Plourde and Stanish in The Emergence of Complex Society in the Titicaca Basin: The View from the North, 2005; Stanish 2013). Lake Titicaca was revered as the place of origin of the ancestors of the Incas and they saw their own importance as a product of their origins in the lake. Water concerns were central to Inca history and policy as their initial decision to settle in Cuzco was based on the quality of the water and soils there. Subsequently, they organized the landscape and the population for the best management of waters in the Huatanay river drainage basin, where Cuzco is located. Water concerns regulated their ritual and agricultural calendar as it was their mode for maintaining the equilibrium of the universe.