The Inca context

The Inca Empire, in Quechua Tawantinsuyu, extended at its early sixteenth-century peak across the western flank of South America from southern Colombia through Peru and Bolivia into northern Chile and Argentina. The empire's productive capacity at its conquest in the 1530s included some of the most technologically advanced metallurgy and stoneworking traditions in the pre-Columbian Americas. The jewellery and ornament tradition was integral to the political, religious and social structures of the empire, and its destruction by Spanish conquest is one of the most documented and consequential cultural losses of the early modern period.

Materials and metallurgy

The Inca metallurgical tradition drew on the much older Andean traditions, particularly the Chimu, Mochica, Chavn and Tiwanaku predecessors, all of whom had developed sophisticated metalworking before being absorbed into the Inca empire. The principal metals were gold, silver, copper, and the various copper-gold-silver alloys collectively known as tumbaga. The Inca, like their predecessors, did not work iron and did not use casting techniques as extensively as Old World metalworking traditions; their work was principally hammered and worked from sheet, with sophisticated joining techniques including soldering and mechanical attachment.

Gold and silver carried symbolic weight beyond their material value. Gold was associated with the sun, the principal deity Inti, and with the Sapa Inca as the sun's earthly representative. Silver was associated with the moon, Mama Killa, and with the queen, the Coya. The pairing of gold and silver in major ceremonial pieces reflected the cosmological pairing of sun and moon. The Spanish chroniclers who accompanied the conquest, particularly Pedro Cieza de Len, documented the symbolism in their accounts.

The lapidary tradition

The Andean lapidary tradition included work in turquoise from the Atacama and northern Chilean sources, in lapis lazuli from the Ovalle source in central Chile, in spondylus shell from the warm-water Pacific coast off Ecuador (a material of profound religious significance, traded across vast distances), in mother-of-pearl, in jet, and in obsidian. Emerald from the Colombian sources entered the Inca tradition through trade and conquest of the northern provinces in present-day Ecuador and southern Colombia, although emerald was less central to Inca production than to the contemporary Muisca tradition further north.

The Inca did not work the harder gemstones (diamond, ruby, sapphire) that were unavailable in the Andean region. Their lapidary skill was applied to the medium-hard materials that were available: turquoise, lapis, and the various coloured stones of the Andes.

The principal forms

The principal Inca jewellery and ornament forms included the orejera, the large ear-spool or ear-cylinder that was the principal mark of nobility. Elite men wore large gold or silver orejeras that distended the earlobe substantially, a practice the Spanish conquerors found striking enough to call the Inca nobility orejones, the long-eared. The chest plates, called chapola, were worn by senior figures in religious and military contexts. The headbands and headdresses incorporated coloured feather work, gold sheet ornament, and gemstones. The pectorals were worn by both elite men and women, often incorporating spondylus shell as the central element.

The Sapa Inca's regalia, comprising a fringed headband called the llautu, a large gold ornament called the mascaipacha, ceremonial weapons, and a fringed mantle, was the most elaborate single ensemble. Eyewitness Spanish accounts of the captured Atahualpa describe the regalia in detail, although the actual physical objects were melted by the Spanish almost immediately upon capture.

The Cajamarca ransom and the great melting

The Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire, beginning in 1532, was the immediate cause of the greatest single destruction event in Inca art history. The capture of the Sapa Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca in November 1532 was followed by the negotiation of his ransom, in which the Inca authorities agreed to fill a designated room with gold and twice over with silver. The ransom was delivered between November 1532 and August 1533 and amounted to approximately twenty-four tons of metal, a sum exceeding by orders of magnitude the contemporary annual gold and silver production of the entire Old World combined.

The Spanish, lacking interest in the artistic value of the objects, melted essentially the entire ransom into ingots for shipment to Spain. The melting was conducted at Cajamarca and at Cuzco between 1533 and 1534. With the ransom destroyed, the broader stripping of the Inca temples, palaces and royal storehouses continued through the 1530s and 1540s, with the great majority of the imperial-period gold and silver work melted to ingots for shipment to Spain or for redistribution among the conquering soldiers.

The total melted across this period is estimated at between fifty and one hundred tons of gold and several hundred tons of silver. The objects destroyed represented a substantial fraction of the entire pre-Conquest gold and silver work of the Andean tradition, including pieces with hundreds or thousands of years of historical and ritual continuity behind them.

What survived

The surviving corpus of Inca jewellery and ornament is therefore small relative to what was produced. The principal sources of survival are: deliberate burial of objects by Inca officials before the Spanish reached particular sites; archaeological recovery from burial contexts that escaped Spanish attention, particularly the high-altitude burial sites in the Andes; pieces removed to Spain as personal effects of Spanish officials and now in European collections; and pieces preserved by post-Conquest indigenous communities, sometimes in adapted Catholic religious contexts, principally in Bolivia and Peru.

The principal archaeological collections are at the Museo Larco in Lima, the Museo Nacional de Arqueologa, Antropologa e Historia del Per (also in Lima), the Museo Inka in Cuzco, the Museo del Oro in Bogot (which holds principally Muisca and Quimbaya material but also some Inca pieces from the northern empire), and the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in Santiago. European holdings are at the Museum of the Americas in Madrid, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, and the British Museum in London. American holdings are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian collection in Washington.

Authenticity and the modern market

The market in pre-Columbian Inca jewellery is heavily regulated. The 1970 UNESCO Convention and the bilateral cultural property agreements between the United States and Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador restrict the import and trade of Inca-period material to objects with documented pre-1970 provenance. Major auction houses generally decline to handle Inca material without strong provenance documentation, and the legal market is therefore principally limited to old European and American collections with documented chain.

The illegal market in looted Inca material persists, principally for archaeological pieces extracted from grave sites in the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands. Major museums and auction houses cooperate with Peruvian and Bolivian cultural authorities in identification and repatriation of looted material, and the trend in the past two decades has been toward higher enforcement and faster repatriation. Buyers should require provenance documentation tracing pieces to before 1970 or to legal export permits, and should treat unprovenanced Inca material as legally and ethically problematic.

Modern revival and Andean indigenous artisanship

Modern Andean jewellery production by indigenous and mestizo artisans in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador draws extensively on Inca and broader Andean traditional vocabularies. The contemporary work is not pre-Columbian and trades as contemporary craft rather than antiquity, with prices reflecting the labour and material content rather than archaeological provenance. The major centres are Cuzco, Lima, La Paz and Quito, with regional traditions including the silver work of Potos and the gold work of the Ecuadorian highlands.

The Sumaq Wasi cooperative in Cuzco and various indigenous artisan collectives produce work that revives pre-Conquest motifs in modern wearable forms, often in silver with semi-precious stones. The work is sold both regionally and through international fair-trade and ethnographic-craft channels.

Place in the canon

For the working trade, Inca jewellery represents both an extraordinary historical legacy and a cautionary tale about the consequences of conquest, looting and meltdown. The melted Cajamarca ransom is one of the most consequential single losses in jewellery history. The surviving corpus, while small, demonstrates a metallurgical and lapidary skill comparable to the major Old World traditions of the same period, working with materials that the Old World did not have access to (spondylus, the particular Andean turquoise sources) and developing techniques that did not parallel Old World practice.

The category is significant for any working understanding of pre-Columbian art and metallurgy, and for the broader question of how colonial conquest reshapes the material legacy of conquered cultures. The British, Russian and Iranian imperial regalia preserve themselves through the political continuity of their successor states; the Inca regalia were destroyed because the conquering power had no interest in preserving them as cultural objects.