This chapter proposes a new and more coherent interdisciplinary prehistory of the Andes, based firstly on a long overdue re-examination of the relationships between the various regional ‘dialects’ within the Quechua language family; and secondly on a more satisfactory correlation with the archaeological record. The founding principle is that language families necessarily reflect past expansive processes, whose traces should also be clear in the archaeological record. It provides a logic by which to assess correspondences between archaeological and linguistic patterns, on (...) the three levels of when, where, and why particular language expansions occurred. In the Andes, the horizons thus offer the most natural explanations for the major Quechua and Aymara dispersals. With the Incas too late for the time-depth of either family, the Wari Middle Horizon emerges as the most plausible candidate for the first major expansion of Quechua, and not of the Aymara family, here tentatively associated with the Early Horizon instead. (shrink)

This volume is a collection which includes the text of papers presented at the September 2008 Cambridge Symposium on Archaeology and Linguistics in the Andes. The Cambridge symposium sought to bring together the disciplines of linguistics and archaeology, in order to dispel a number of popular myths about the language history of the Andes. This introductory chapter first sets out the structure of the book and introduces its component chapters. Thereafter it clarifies briefly a number of principles from historical linguistics (...) that are indispensable to an understanding of how language data can inform us about prehistory at all, as a general methodological background to the chapters that follow. Next, it reviews the traditional model for associating the linguistic and archaeological records in the Andes, and the problems that attend it. Finally, it looks at one particular cross-disciplinary proposal that has commanded much attention worldwide, but precious little hitherto in the Andes: the ‘farming/language dispersal’ hypothesis. (shrink)

This chapter sums up the new state of the cross-disciplinary art in Andean prehistory, as collectively represented by the foregoing chapters. Progress and new perspectives are explored first on key individual questions. Who, for instance, were the Incas, and whence and when did they come to Cuzco? How and when did Quechua, too, reach Cuzco, as well as its furthest-flung outposts in north-west Argentina, Ecuador, and northern Peru? The scope is then broadened to overall scenarios for how the main Andean (...) language families might correlate in time and space with archaeological horizons that could best account for their dispersals. Four basic hypotheses have emerged, whose respective strengths and weaknesses are assessed in turn: a traditional ‘Wari as Aymara’ model, revised and defended; alternative proposals of ‘Wari as both Aymara and Quechua’, or ‘both Chavín and Wari as Quechua’; and the most radical new departure, ‘Wari as Quechua, Chavín as Aymara’. (shrink)