R. Alan Covey
Heroy Hall, Room 413
(214)768-1194
racovey@smu.edu
The Inca state, called Tahuantinsuyo in Quechua,
was the largest native empire to develop in the Americas before the arrival of
Europeans in the sixteenth century. The Incas governed a territory stretching from
what is today southern Colombia to central Chile—a region encompassing
incredible ecological diversity and home to more than one hundred different ethnic
groups. Inca imperial expansion lasted for just over a century, and the question of
how one group could embark on sustained campaigns of territorial expansion of such
magnitude has captured the attention of scholars for centuries.
Since Spaniards conquered the Inca realm in the 1530s,
reconstructions of the Inca past have been dominated by Colonial Period documents
whose accuracy could not be independently determined—the Incas left no written
records, so all accounts of the Inca past were gathered in the first century following
the Conquest. Along with his Peruvian and American colleagues, R. Alan Covey has
collected a large body of new regional archaeological data from the Inca imperial
heartland, bringing archaeology to the fore as an interpretive equal in telling the
story of the rise of Inca civilization. Covey has directed two large field projects in
the region surrounding Cuzco, the Inca capital. The work, which has been funded by the
National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the American Museum of
Natural History, and other institutions, has resulted in the identification of more
than 1000 archaeological sites.
The new archaeological data have led Dr. Covey to propose a process-based reading
of the Colonial documents, looking at qualitative changes over time in the organization
of Inca society. This new perspective combines archaeology and ethnohistory to identify
how the Incas used marriage alliances, economic intensification, military conquest, and
hegemonic pressure to bring the many political and ethnic groups of the Cuzco region under
their control from AD 1250-1400. The strategies and policies developed in these early campaigns
formed the basis for Inca imperial expansion and provincial administration. Results of
Covey’s research have been published in peer-reviewed articles and books, and a paper
co-authored with Brian S. Bauer (University of Illinois, Chicago) in 2002 was recently awarded
the Gordon R. Willey Award for an outstanding archaeology article in the journal American
Anthropologist.
In addition to studying the origins of Inca civilization and how imperial expansion transformed the Inca heartland, Dr. Covey pursues interests in the
Spanish Conquest, early colonial administration of the Cuzco region, and issues of Inca
historiography. The archaeological database for the region surrounding the Inca capital
is being studied with reference to hundreds of Colonial Period documents housed in archives in Cuzco, Lima, London, and Seville. The documentary record provides valuable
insights into the Spanish Conquest, and aspects of native life (ethnicity, demography,
land tenure) in the last years of the Inca empire and the first years of Spanish
colonial government. Covey has already conducted extensive archival research and the
transcription of documents that describe Inca and early Colonial land use in the Cuzco
region. He is preparing a monograph on documents from Yucay, a royal Inca estate that
passed through the hands of the Pizarro family after the Spanish Conquest.
Covey's principal research focus is on
the Inca imperial heartland, but he has also worked in several Inca provincial
regions, including the coastal desert of far southern Peru, on islands in Lake
Titicaca, and with Craig Morris (American Museum of Natural History) on the
analysis and publication of data from important Inca sites in the central highlands
and the south coast. Covey has also conducted research on Roman civilization in
Italy and Spain, and has participated in excavations exploring the rise of Zapotec
civilization in Oaxaca, Mexico.
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