Heads are ubiquitous in Andean archaeology. On textiles, for example, vines grow out of the open mouths of disembodied heads, and caches of crania are sometime found buried at archaeological sites. For the most part, archaeologists have offered explanations that fit each of these individual contexts – the heads on the textiles might be linked to concerns with fertility on the arid coast and the crania seen as evidence for aggressive expansion by a state. While these answers often offer some insights, they fail to provide a compelling explanation for why the use of heads and head imagery was widespread over thousands of years in the Andes. In this pioneering volume, Arnold and Hastorf attempt to answer this ambitious question.
The authors' rich understanding of the role of heads comes largely from the work of Denise Arnold among the Qaqachaka, an ayllu located in Bolivia. Combining her ethnographic insights with a variety of social theory and historical data, they suggest that human heads likely played a pivotal role in ancient communities. Arnold and Hastorf argue that heads were conceived of as seeds that disseminated productive energies outward if taken care of properly. They suggest that the decomposition of a head placed in a chest released mist that created rain in a region, the victorious warrior gained intelligence and strength by sucking the brain out of the skull of his vanquished enemy, and a captured head that was wrapped up and given offerings would increase a woman's fertility. Since the energy found within heads was so potent, communities were deeply concerned about capturing (and controlling) this power.
Arnold and Hastorf suggest that heads were integral to the political process in two ways. On the one hand, the power of a community was maintained by the vertical relations between the living and the dead. Through rituals, the skulls of ancestors (along with other bones) were feted so that their energies worked for and not against the community. On the other hand, a community could gain power through the capturing of heads from outside groups. A captured head, either severed in battle or seized from a cache, increased the productive power of the community at the expense of its rival. For Arnold and Hastorf, heads were one of the key driving forces in the expansion of ancient Andean polities. They suggest that the rapid expansion of some polities, like the Incas and Wari, was propelled by an ongoing desire to capture the power of outside groups.
In demonstrating the relationship between heads and political structure, Arnold and Hastorf range widely in Heads of State. For example, they discuss how quipus, the recording devices made out of knotted strings, may derive from the braiding and knotting of the hair of trophy heads and they link the use of yupanas, or counting boards, with the assessment of the productive power captured from an enemy. They also show how weaving was the women's parallel to men's headhunting and how the vara, a staff of office, could have derived from lances used to impale a trophy head. In each case, the authors demonstrate how seemingly disparate aspects of Andean life were tied together through a desire to capture the power found in a head.
Heads of State takes us on an incredible journey from the rites of a modern Bolivian ayllu to the practices of some of the most famous ancient cultures of Peru and Bolivia. Of course, one should be cautious when making such a journey. In studies of the prehistoric Andes, we have sometimes been guilty of assuming a timeless Andean way of doing things. Sometimes called ‘Lo Andino’, this assumption can lead to the uncritical projection into the past of an array of political, economic and social arrangements from Inca, early Colonial, and modern examples. Arnold and Hastorf are cognisant of the dangers of peopling the past with the present, and build a strong case for the importance of the head through archaeological correlates to the modern practices witnessed by Arnold. While many of their assertions about the details of how these heads functioned in past cultures remain speculative, their book convinced me that a belief in the generative power of the head has been a long-term structure of meaning in the Andes since at least the Early Horizon period.
The demonstration of a long-term structure of meaning does not, however, mean that ideas remained unchanged. The authors note that changes occurred in the treatment of heads (both crania and in depictions on artwork), but more consideration of the implications of these changes is needed in future work. There have been shifts over time between the numbers of people buried in tombs, the accessibility of those remains, and the kinds of bones that were curated. These shifts, along with many other changes from how a textile were woven to how a human head was depicted on pots, speak to significant alterations in how the power of heads was mobilised through time. The practices of the Qaqachaka can only hint at some of the ways that heads were used in Chiripa, Tiwanaku, Chavín and other ancient cultures, and much more work needs to be done to test the ideas presented in this volume.
Heads of State is provocative. I suspect that anyone who reads this book will find something in it that they vehemently disagree with it. The authors push their ethnographic analogy to its breaking point and present such a wide array of new ideas that their argument can be difficult at times for the reader to follow. Yet this book is well worth reading because it provides a new perspective on the foundations of Andean political economy. Arnold and Hastorf have rescued the head from its banishment into the ritual realm by archaeologists and show that its associated powers were central to the political process. We should all be grateful.
