Infrastructure and inequality: An archaeology of the Inka road through the Amaybamba cloud forests

Abstract

One of the most important ways in which material inequalities are reproduced is through state infrastructure projects. Although infrastructure has long been studied in archaeology, this has mainly been as an index of complexity and centralized government—and less so as a means to create social distinctions among human subjects. This article therefore examines a precolonial highway built under the auspices of the Inka Empire, located in the cloud forests of the eastern Andes. In particular, it emphasizes the radically divergent experiences of the elites, who mostly interacted with roads as instrument of travel and knowledge, as compared with nonelites, who encountered them as objects of maintenance, cleaning, and repair. Although ethnographic research centered on modern nation-states tends to focus on variable access to infrastructure as the basis for inequality, I argue that inequality is also manifest through radically different experiences of the same infrastructures, a fact which is particularly relevant in many nonmodern contexts.