This article examines a new dataset of radiocarbon dates that provides insights into the progressive installation of Inca infrastructure in the Copiapo Valley, situated at the southern edge of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It shows that the Inca imperial expansion in this region was not a linear process and was likely shaped by local negotiations and conflicts. The findings describe three main stages of Inca expansion. The first is the construction of the North–South Inca Road and the establishment of high-altitude mountain shrines. The next stage consisted of a physical intervention in a local village located in the upper valley, including the construction of administrative buildings and public spaces. The last stage involved indirect intervention in local villages, characterized by the presence of isolated administrative buildings that were potentially used for diplomacy and negotiation. I argue that the Inca imperial expansion, characterized by evolving strategies across regions and time periods, not only demonstrates the state's capacity for learning but also suggests the pivotal role of local actors in positions of power who wielded agency to shape these developments.

Se presenta un análisis detallado de tres queros con las escenas “El Inca y la Coya” y “Guerra de los incas contra los chunchus o antis”. Cada pieza es individualizada mediante sutiles diferencias tanto en las escenas figurativas como en las bandas de signos tocapus. Esta característica es propia de los queros con escenas complejas y bandas de tocapus de más de seis signos. Llegamos a la conclusión de que el encargo al artesano/artista comprendía ciertos requisitos, que podemos denominar mensajes semánticos asociados directamente al futuro propietario de los objetos. En el caso de la escena “El Inca y la Coya” muy probablemente se trataba, en primer lugar, de hacer referencia a los verdaderos (o supuestos) ilustres ancestros del propietario del vaso. En el caso de la escena “Guerra de los incas contra los chunchus o antis” se trataba, muy probablemente, de resaltar una gesta sobresaliente del ancestro, algo que se conocía de la tradición oral inca. Resulta que el lenguaje visual andino expresado en los queros manifiesta una complejidad y una precisión en los mensajes trasmitidos por esta vía mucho mayor de lo que se solía pensar.

The Inca expansion to the southern Andes catalyzed important political and symbolic changes in local communities. In addition to economic changes in mining production and the installation of logistical and administrative infrastructure, new forms of ideological violence emerged in the Copiapó Valley, Chile. One new form was the display and discarding of human heads, a burial pattern unprecedented in the region. In this article, we present evidence of perforated heads buried without grave goods next to a local cemetery in a Late Horizon village. We argue that the performative use of modified severed heads from young individuals at the Iglesia Colorada site was part of Inca ritual practices. Their use represented an effort to ideologically rule over newly incorporated subjects by demonstrating power and ensuring their compliance.

Like archaeologists, linguists and geneticists too use the data and methods of their disciplines to open up their own windows onto our past. These disparate visions of human prehistory cry out to be reconciled into a coherent holistic scenario, yet progress has long been frustrated by interdisciplinary disputes and misunderstandings (not least about Indo-European). In this article, a comparative-historical linguist sets out, to his intended audience of archaeologists, the core principles and methods of his discipline that are of relevance to theirs. They are first exemplified for the better-known languages of Europe, before being put into practice in a lesser-known case-study. This turns to the New World, setting its greatest indigenous ‘Empire’, that of the Incas, alongside its greatest surviving language family today, Quechua. Most Andean archaeologists assume a straightforward association between these two. The linguistic evidence, however, exposes this as nothing but a popular myth, and writes instead a wholly new script for the prehistory of the Andes — which now awaits an archaeological story to match.