Work and Household Production in the Inca World

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Inca communities worked across the central Andes, a region of western South America governed from Cusco in present-day Peru. Households combined cultivation, animal care, food preparation and textile production, the interlocking tasks of daily life in the Inca world; some skilled work also served local authorities or the Inca state.

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Fields and camelid work

Anthropologist John Howland Rowe describes a foot-plough called a taklya: a pole about six feet long, with a hard-wood or bronze point, a footrest near the point and a handle at the top. Using both hands and one foot on the rest, the plowman lifted the pole about twelve inches and drove its point into the soil. The tool loosened ground and opened planting holes; a bronze-bladed hoe broke clods and weeded, while a stone clod-breaker on a wooden handle broke up loosened earth.

Rowe’s account gives a seasonal sequence as well as tools. Plowing began in August on assigned fields, with workers lined across the land and each taxpayer working an assigned strip. Rowe describes the plowman driving his tool while his wife faced him with a hoe to break clods. Early maize was sown in August, most maize in September, and potatoes at the start of the rainy season. After the assigned work, householders cultivated their own fields and helped one another through ayni, a reciprocal work exchange.

Households also processed grain with a rocker mill. A kneeling operator poured grain onto a flat base and rocked a curved upper stone from side to side; small “ears” at its corners served as handgrips, and its weight crushed the grain without the operator pressing down. Rowe reports that girls around eight or ten often did this work. Where trees were scarce, households gathered hillside scrub for fuel and supplemented it with dried llama dung; wood-cutting areas were controlled.

Llamas and alpacas, domesticated Andean camelids, joined herding to food, fiber and transport. Rowe reports that llamas supplied meat and coarse wool, while alpaca wool was finer and suited to clothing; vicuñas, wild camelids, yielded fleece prized for fine textiles. Rowe reports that hunters drove vicuñas into narrow gorges with fences so they could be caught alive and shorn. In pack trains, llamas carried light loads in woolen saddle bags. Rowe estimates that about eight drivers accompanied a hundred animals; on a long journey, the animals traveled roughly fifteen to twenty kilometers and grazed along the road.

From fiber to cloth

Textile work joined gathered materials to several skilled operations. Rowe says the Jesuit chronicler Bernabé Cobo describes wool dyed with vegetable colors before spinning; the Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala depicts girls aged nine to twelve gathering dye plants. Women did most spinning, often while walking or between other tasks. They wound wool around the wrist or held it on a distaff, a short stick that kept unspun fibers together, drew out the fibers by hand and twisted them with a spindle: a straight stick weighted by a wooden or pottery whorl. The yarn was then doubled and twisted again for weaving, sometimes with older men helping prepare the thread.

On a belt loom, two rods held the lengthwise warp threads. One rod was fixed to a post or tree; the other was attached to a strap around the weaver’s waist. Sitting or kneeling, the weaver shifted her weight to tighten or relax the warp. A looped heddle lifted alternate threads to make room for the crosswise weft; a weaving sword packed it into place. Rowe traces the belt loom to the earlier Mochica society of Peru’s north coast and also cites Guaman Poma depicting it among Highland weavers. He distinguishes ordinary warp-pattern cloth from qompi, fine cloth with colored patterns woven into its surface, or tapestry, made on a standing, four-pole frame. Highland weavers used alpaca and llama wool, while cotton from the coast and lower valleys also entered the region through trade.

Rowe describes girls selected by officials at about age ten for a separate training path. At institutions in provincial capitals, they studied spinning and weaving for about four years alongside other household arts; some later served shrines, while others were married to nobles or warriors. Rowe also describes full-time male qompi specialists in imperial service, alongside household production.

Buildings and stonework

Rowe describes ordinary Cusco houses made from fieldstone laid in mud or adobe, sun-dried earthen blocks, with a pole-and-branch roof frame covered in cane and ichu grass thatch. At Machu Picchu, where building stone was abundant but good clay scarce, builders fitted stones closely; the thatched roofs had a steeper pitch to shed driving rain. Rowe says the settlement was planned as a unit and probably built by state labor working under professional architects. For major stonework, he reports that masons dressed blocks with heavy stone hammers; hammer marks remain on limestone at Sacsahuaman, the fortress near Cusco. Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León, in his sixteenth-century Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, describes ruler Huayna Capac’s order for communities around Cusco to drag stones by cable to Tumebamba, the Inca city at modern Cuenca in Ecuador, for major buildings, and to send stones and slabs onward to Quito.

Roads and transport

Cieza’s chronicle describes work on roads across steep and rocky terrain. Overseers first traced the route. People living beside it constructed the section in their own province, and the next province took over at the boundary; when a road was urgent, work could proceed in several sections at once. Workers cut paths through rock with fire and picks, cut steps into steep slopes, levelled loose earth and paved difficult stretches with stone. Cieza says that people from the nearest settlements brought tools and provisions when a route crossed uninhabited country. Elsewhere, he describes men sent ahead of ruler Inca Yupanqui’s departing army to clear grass and stones from its route.

Metalwork

The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates its hollow Inca female effigy, made of gold-rich silver sheet, to 1400–1535. Its conservators report that the maker hammered the face, arms and breasts into a flat sheet before shaping it, then engraved details from the front. Cuts in the sheet allowed the legs to be wrapped into narrow cylinders while remaining attached to the body; X-ray imaging shows the separate hair piece soldered along its edges.

Specialists and relocated work

Cieza uses mitimaes for people moved from one land to another and lists distinct work assigned among them: some tended flocks, others made cloth or worked silver, while others quarried stone, labored on building projects or carved images. He also reports that some were sent to warmer Andean forests to grow maize, coca and fruit for regions too cold to produce them.