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- Title
REMODELING THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE WARI EMPIRE.
- Authors
Earle, Timothy; Jennings, Justin
- Abstract
Extending Schreiber's mosaic model, we construct a political economy model for how the Wari Empire could have functioned based on available evidence. We argue that Wari administrators sought to create a broadly integrating inter-regional system without the benefit of markets through the creation of a staple-based mobilization of agricultural production in order to support state-managed ceremonies, corvée labor for construction projects, a warrior class, and craft and ritual specialists. The success of this staple-based mobilization, likely a precedent for the Inca imperial economy, was limited because it was a novel experiment in statecraft in a world of marked regionalism. Yet top-down wealth finance and bottom-up globalization managed to further integrate outlying regions by fueling the specialized production of high-end, symbolically charged goods that materialized a popular religious ideology that had coalesced at Huari. Although wealth finance and globalization are often seen as alternative explanations for Middle Horizon dynamics, we argue that they represent complementary, and often linked, strategies pursued by Wari bureaucrats, local leaders, and craftspeople to profit off of the surging interregional interactions of the period. Nothing like Wari had existed previously in the Andes -- it was the creation of a state struggling, and ultimately failing, to project itself over a vast region.
- Subjects
HUARI (South American people); INDIGENOUS peoples of Peru; PERUVIAN history; GLOBALIZATION; RITES &; ceremonies
- Publication
Boletín de Arqueología PUCP, 2012, Issue 16, p209
- ISSN
1029-2004
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.18800/boletindearqueologiapucp.201201.010