Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Incan History
I can't imagine trying to piece together the Incan past. With a lack of written records from the time along with their traditions of rewriting their own history to make themselves look better, it seems that nothing can be for certain. Learning about the other mesoamerican cultures, there seems to be more evidence to work with compared to the Incas. The Mayans left behind hieroglyphs which historians can now decipher and use to learn countless things about them and their way of life. This is not the case for the Incas. On top of not having much written evidence, the written documents that are available were written after the conquest. This seems to be a common thing with learning about the mesoamerican cultures. Knowing that the documents were written post-conquest poses yet another question on the credibility of the available information we have about the Incas. Learning about the Incas, compared to other cultures in mesoamerica around that time, seems to be more difficult and trickier to get to the truth.
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I agree that learning about the Incan past appears to be a very difficult task. As Conrad and Demarest state on pg. 96, all of the chronicles about early and pre-imperial Inca society were written after the Spanish Conquest. This does bring up the question of credibility, of what aspects of these chronicles may have been changed or lost through time and errors during rewriting. I also agree that this seems to be a common theme when attempting to learn about Mesoamerican cultures, that much of the written work occurs after the Spanish Conquest; the credibility is always in question to some degree.
ReplyDeleteAn example would be chronicles written about the reigns of the first seven rulers of the Inca Empire. Any that are written in the seventeenth century are full of inconsistencies or contradictions, while any accounts written in the sixteenth century are vague (Pg. 99).
It also seems to be a common tradition to rewrite their own history in order to make themselves look better or legitimize their rule. In the case of the Incas, this is even more troublesome because as Conrad and Demarest point out, not even archaeological evidence is extensive enough to provide much detail. All these issues coupled together must make it very difficult to piece together any sort of detailed or concrete history of the Incan past. Therefore any sort of history that can be called concrete must be vague.
The fact that this culture did not leave any written records behind from their time period makes the study of the Inca empire complicated. Brendan caught my attention with his last sentence, "Learning about the Incas, compared to other cultures in mesoamerica around that time, seems to be more difficult and trickier to get to the truth." This is a good point to consider, and I was struck by his use of the term 'truth.' As we have learned from Restall, there are instances when we can consider a fact one that is absolute or one that is historical. Conrad and Demarest use sources that include written works that occurred after the Spanish Conquest. From this, we can infer several things. One being that these works could have been influenced by the Spanish. In turn, these sources are not the absolute truth, but we can not rule them out when considering what happened because they present part of the historical truth. It is important to align the different historical truths to come to a conclusion of what truly transpired and to get a better account of that Inca empire.
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