| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Chinchero, Peru, January 9, 1999 I had awoken that morning full of excitement and anticipation. As I ate breakfast with Simeona and her children in the warm adobe kitchen, I could not wait to begin that day's work. The day before I had spotted in the distance what appeared to be a beautiful Inca wall. As I had found very little surviving Inca architecture in this portion of the town, I was thrilled. The wall could be a critical piece of the puzzle, help me to reconstruct what the Inca royal estate had looked like, and I began to envision the various possibilities. As Jacinto and I hiked over the hill from Simeona's house to the new wall, I felt my chest tighten, not only due to the altitude (11,000 feet) but also because of my own towering expectations. However, upon arriving at the wall, I was filled with disappointment. Although the wall had the formal elements of an Inca wall (which I had noticed from afar), up close the wall revealed some surprising evidence. Staring back at me on the stone blocks were the small, evenly distributed tool marks unmistakably left by a particular metal chisel, a tool that was brought to the Andes after the Spanish invasion in 1532 CE. This made the wall useless to my study of imperial Inca architecture. Since the wall was clearly erected after 1532, it could not have been part of the original Inca royal estate, which had been built for the ruler Thupa 'Inka sometime between 1480 and 1500 CE (Figure 1). Thus, at first I dismissed the wall as an anomaly of the colonial period and returned to study the architecture at Chinchero that was built during the imperial Inca period. Yet, in the next few months, more and more anomalous walls appeared, and the questions regarding their significance continued to grow in my mind as I measured and mapped the indigenous town. After a few months, the rainy season came full force to the south-central Andes, turning the steep, stone-lined streets in town into cascading fountains and mountain paths into muddy traps, rendering fieldwork impossible. I escaped to the archives and libraries of Cuzco and began to focus on the issue of the anomalous walls from the Spanish occupation. I searched the literature on Inca architecture built in the colonial period, only to discover that there was very little written on the topic. As I read further, I also realized that there was no actual place for Inca—or for that matter indigenous—architecture in the current definitions of Latin American architecture in the colonial period, at least not in any meaningful way. Instead, I found that any opportunities to allow for its existence seemed to disappear, occluded by rhetorical conventions (such as architectural categories and naming practices) and falling between disciplinary boundaries and scholarly assumptions (such as the relationship between style and ethnicity, as well as historical and cultural ruptures and periodizations). My discovery of these slips and occlusions not only revealed how a part of the architectural record had been overlooked, it also uncovered a larger problem of how colonial-era indigenous architecture has been seen or, more accurately, not seen by scholars. Architecture as a Product of Empire Inca architecture is ubiquitous in the Andes; its proliferation is understood as a visible manifestation of the power of the Inca Empire. The Incas were the last of a series of indigenous nations that ruled over most of the western rim of South America during the fifteenth century. The Incas rapidly built a powerful, well-organized empire that stretched from modern Colombia in the north to Argentina and Chile in the south. Along the way, they implemented an impressive building campaign in the newly colonized lands, one that incorporated a distinctive architecture, was easily recognizable, relatively simple and quick to build, and adapted to diverse environments and uses. As part of their conquest strategy, the Incas built. Their architecture was marked by its unique stone masonry, walls that had an inward batter and by an emphasis on single-room, rectangular structures with trapezoidal doorways, niches, and windows (Figure 2). While adapting skillfully to...
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