Killke Culture

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A few sherds tell the story before any wall does. Across the basin of Cusco and the valleys that drain toward it, archaeologists keep turning up a coarse, confident pottery: globular jars with vertical strap handles, their surfaces slipped white or buff and painted with spare black or black-on-red geometry — bands, triangles, hatched lozenges, dotted lines drawn with a steady economy. This ware does not announce an empire. It announces a people. Named for a locality near Cusco, the Killke style is the diagnostic signature of the culture that held the Cusco heartland in the centuries immediately before the Inca — the population from whom the Inca themselves most plausibly descend, and whose hands laid the first courses of a hill that a later dynasty would turn into one of the great stone works of the Andes.

Killke is, first and most exactly, a ceramic horizon. Cultures of the deep Andean past are read mainly through what they fired, buried, and broke, and it was through pottery that the Killke entered the modern record. The American archaeologist John Howland Rowe (1918–2004), working in and around Cusco in the early 1940s, isolated and described the style, fixing it as the marker of a distinct pre-Inca occupation of the region. The vessels are plainer than the burnished polychrome the Inca would later perfect, but the lineage between them is legible: the same vocabulary of geometric registers, the same domestic and ceremonial forms, refined and standardized rather than invented anew. To trace Killke pottery across the valley is to trace, in fired clay, the people who would become the Inca while they were still one highland society among many.

The diagnostic value of the ware lies in its consistency. Where the great coastal traditions of the central Andes had run to flamboyance — the modeled portrait vessels and fineline narrative of the Moche, the burial-bundle textiles and ceramics of the south-coast desert cultures, the bold polychrome of Nazca — the highland Killke worked in a restrained, repeatable idiom. Their painters favored a limited palette and a stock of motifs applied in horizontal bands around the shoulder of a jar or the interior of a bowl: opposed triangles, cross-hatched fields, pendant dots, stepped frets. The forms are domestic before they are ostentatious — cooking and storage jars, narrow-necked bottles, shallow plates and bowls, the strap-handled aríbalo-precursors whose silhouette the Inca would later stretch and refine into one of the most recognizable shapes in Andean art. It is precisely because the style is so steady, so geographically coherent, and so cleanly bracketed in time that it serves as a chronological fossil: where Killke sherds lie in the stratigraphy, the pre-Inca centuries lie with them.

A window in the Andean sequence

The Killke horizon is conventionally dated to roughly 900–1200 CE, with the broader Killke ceramic tradition persisting in attenuated forms into the early Inca centuries that followed. In the chronological scaffolding that governs Andean prehistory — the system of alternating Horizons and Intermediate Periods worked out by Rowe and Edward Lanning — this window opens at the close of the Middle Horizon and runs deep into the Late Intermediate Period, the long interval (about 1000–1476 CE) that separates the fall of the great Middle Horizon states from the rise of the last and largest Andean empire.

That placement is the whole drama of the Killke in miniature. They emerge precisely as two earlier orders dissolve. To the south, around Lake Titicaca, the ceremonial state of Tiwanaku was unwinding by about 1000 CE. To the west and north, the highland empire of Wari, which had carried a road-and-administrative apparatus across much of the central Andes, fragmented around the same time; its great planned colony in the Cusco region — the gridded administrative city of Pikillacta, in the Lucre basin southeast of Cusco — was abandoned around 1100 CE, deliberately and perhaps by fire, its storerooms emptied and its gates walled shut. Into the political vacuum left by these collapses, smaller, fiercely local polities rose across the southern highlands. The Killke of the Cusco basin were one of them.

The Cusco region had carried civilization for far longer than either of those collapsed empires, of course. The roots of monumental Andean culture reach back through the iconographic spread of Chavín in the first millennium BCE to the coastal and highland sequences before it, and the Middle Horizon that Wari and Tiwanaku dominated had laid down, across the southern Andes, the deep habits of terraced agriculture, llama herding, ancestor veneration, and reciprocal labor that the Killke inherited intact. What ended around 1000 CE was not Andean civilization but a particular scale of integration. The Killke worked within an old and continuous tradition of highland life; what was new was that, for the first time in centuries, no single power organized the southern highlands, and a local people could begin — slowly, on their own terms — to build one.

A landscape of small powers

The Late Intermediate Period was not, in the Cusco region, an empty interval awaiting the Inca. It was crowded. The Killke shared their valley and its margins with rival groups whose names survive in the Spanish-era chronicles and whose pottery and settlements survive in the ground: the Ayarmaca, who held territory close to Cusco itself; the Pinagua and Mohina of the Lucre basin, heirs to the country Wari had once governed; and, farther west, the Chanka, the confederation whose threat looms so large in Inca origin narrative. Contemporary or closely related ceramic styles — among them the Lucre ware of the basin to the southeast, and Colcha and other regional types — map this mosaic of competing communities. The Killke were not alone, and their eventual primacy was contested rather than given.

The Killke were a highland people, and their world was small by the standards of the coast. While they were consolidating a single mountain basin, the north coast of Peru was being organized by the kingdom of Chimor — the Chimú, whose vast adobe capital at Chan Chan and whose irrigation empire made them the largest Andean power of the entire Late Intermediate Period, far outweighing anything in the Cusco region for most of these centuries. That contrast is part of the Killke’s significance, not against it: the people who would ultimately absorb Chimor and every other Andean polity began as one of the more modest players of their age, a highland society defined by a plain pottery and a single contested valley.

What the archaeology of the Cusco Valley discloses is a long, uneven process of consolidation. Drawing on the systematic survey of the Cusco Valley Archaeological Project (which Brian Bauer directed from 1994 to 2000), Bauer and R. Alan Covey argued that between roughly 1000 and 1400 CE a centralized polity took shape in the valley around Cusco, drawing neighboring groups under direct administrative control well before any sudden military expansion. The survey mapped a thickening of settlement across the Killke centuries: a growing population, an increasingly hierarchical pattern of villages clustering around larger centers, and a steady extension of Killke ceramics outward from the basin into the surrounding country — the archaeological trace of one community absorbing or out-competing its rivals. By this reading the conventional founding-hero story — a small chiefdom transformed almost overnight by a single conquering generation — compresses what was in fact a slow gathering of regional power over four centuries. The Killke horizon is the material face of that gathering. The dramatic outward conquest that the chronicles credit to the ninth ruler in the line, in the years after about 1438 — the surge that would carry the road system, the storehouses, and the cult of the sun across the Andes under the polity remembered as Tawantinsuyu — rested on a heartland that the Killke and their successors had already knit together.

This is why the relationship between Killke and Inca is best described not as succession but as continuity. The pottery does not change hands between two unrelated peoples; it develops. On the strength of the ceramic distribution across the valley, read together with the early colonial accounts, scholars hold that the Killke style belonged to the Inca themselves while they were still only a regional power among the highland chiefdoms — the same population, the same valley, the same craft tradition, before the name Inca meant anything beyond Cusco. The line that later monumental masonry and gold-sheathed temples would make unmistakable is already present, faint and unglamorous, in a strap-handled jar.

The first builders on the hill

The most consequential thing the Killke left is not a pot but a place. On the steep limestone height above Cusco that the Inca would later raise into the cyclopean terraced complex of Sacsayhuamán, the earliest human occupation does not belong to the Inca at all. Surface collections of pottery from the hilltop carry the occupation back to about 900 CE — to the Killke. Radiocarbon determinations have placed Killke construction on the height in the twelfth century, and the archaeologist Oscar Rodriguez has argued that the Killke built small early sections of the complex during the 1100s, generations before the Inca undertook the megalithic rebuild that made the site famous.

Excavations completed in 2008 sharpened the picture considerably. On the periphery of the complex, archaeologists led by Rodriguez uncovered a temple of some 250 square meters with eleven rooms, structures interpreted as having held mummies and sacred images — together with a buried roadway and a hydraulic system. The roadway, sealed for centuries beneath roughly a meter of soil, appears to have been part of a network linking the buildings on the height; the water-supply works are thought to have been laid out by the Killke and later used and expanded by the Inca. Washington Camacho, then director of the Sacsayhuamán Archaeological Park, described the site to reporters as containing structures of both Inca and pre-Inca date — a sequence rather than a single foundation. The finding revised a long assumption that the height had been merely a fortress: even before the Inca, the place was a ceremonial center, and the Killke were its first temple-builders.

The same depth of occupation hides under Cusco’s other famous stones. The curved Killke-era and early walls beneath later construction in the city, and the early phases below the sun-temple that would become Qorikancha, all sit within this pre-imperial substrate. The cult of the sun and the creator that the Inca elaborated into a state religion — the order of Inti and Viracocha — drew on a far older Andean reverence for high places, water sources, and ancestral remains; the eleven-room temple on the Sacsayhuamán height, with its niches for the dead and the divine, is a Killke expression of that same instinct, two centuries before the sun-temple was sheathed in gold. The pattern repeats wherever the Inca later worked stone. The royal estates and ceremonial centers they raised in the Sacred Valley — the town and temple complex of Ollantaytambo, the ridge-top estate of Machu Picchu — stand on land that the Killke and their neighbors had farmed, terraced, and contested across the Late Intermediate centuries. The Inca did not arrive on bare ground. They built, repeatedly and deliberately, on the foundations of those who had held the valley before them — and in the Cusco basin those predecessors were the Killke.

Reading the Killke

Because the Killke left no writing, everything known of them is recovered through excavation, survey, and the careful seriation of pottery, read against the early Spanish chronicles that recorded Inca memory of the pre-imperial valley. The foundational description of the style is Rowe’s An Introduction to the Archaeology of Cuzco (Papers of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1944), which fixed Killke as the diagnostic pre-Inca ware of the region. The modern synthesis rests on regional survey. Brian Bauer’s Ancient Cuzco: Heartland of the Inca (University of Texas Press, 2004) presents the first general prehistory of the Cusco region from its earliest hunter-gatherers down to 1532, grounded in the Cusco Valley Archaeological Project; its publisher’s record is held by the University of Texas Press. The argument that the heartland was consolidated through a long Late Intermediate process — the frame within which the Killke acquire their full significance — is set out by Bauer and Covey in Processes of State Formation in the Inca Heartland (Cuzco, Peru), American Anthropologist 104(3), 2002, and developed at book length in Covey’s How the Incas Built Their Heartland (University of Michigan Press, 2006), available open access through the OAPEN library. Together these works moved the Killke from a footnote in Inca origins to the center of the question — the demonstration, in clay and stone and settlement, that the Inca state was not a sudden birth but the maturation of a culture already long resident in the valley.

There is a quiet justice in how the Killke survive. The dynasty that overshadowed them borrowed their valley, their craft, their road-lines and water-courses, and the very hill on which they had first built a shrine — and then drew the eye so completely that for centuries the earlier people were scarcely seen at all. They persist now in the layer beneath: in the foundation course under the famous wall, in the plain jar beneath the burnished one, in the carbon date that runs a hundred years too early for the empire it is supposed to belong to. The Inca rose from the Killke and stood on what the Killke had made. Cusco was their valley first.

→ Related: Inca Empire Tawantinsuyu · Sacsayhuaman · Qorikancha Temple Of The Sun · Inca Religion Inti Viracocha · Ollantaytambo · Machu Picchu · Wari · Tiwanaku · Chimu · Moche · Nazca · Chavin