government, but the paying
of them is subject to considerable manipulation. Therefore, Inca imperial
revenues are best reviewed in a general form, as the lords of Cuzco would
have liked to have seen their income. by Michael Mosley - The Incas and Their Ancestors
pages 65-74
Thames and Hudson Publishing 1992
The institutions of statecraft that
culminated in Tahuantinsuyu were ancient ones employed by earlier states,
drawn from the principles of ayllu and community organization. Taxes and
tithes, in civil or religious form, are vital to government, but the paying
of them is subject to considerable manipulation. Therefore, Inca imperial
revenues are best reviewed in a general form, as the lords of Cuzco would
have liked to have seen their income.
Money was rarely used in prehistoric Peru, nor were taxes paid in kind. Instead the imperial economy was based on extracting taxes in the form of labor. The local community was the basic unit upon which taxes were levied, and obligations were distributed among households by the karaka principale and his segunda persona down hierarchical lines. Labor taxation required accurate inventorying of people, resources, and conditions. When Tahuantinsuyu incorporated a new province into its realm, people were counted according to sex, age and marital status, along with their livestock, fields, and pastures. Topographic models of the region were made, and the corpus of data sent to Cuzco to be acted upon. Males and heads of households were graded by age and decimally organized. The smallest unit comprised IO tax payers overseen by a foreman. In turn, IO such units were overseen by a Pachaka Karaka, or Chief of I 00, and continued in multiples of IO to a Hona Karaka, or lord of IO,000, who reported directly to the Inca provincial governor. Through this organization three types of levies were extracted, which can be called agricultural taxation, mit'a service, and textile taxation.
The greatest bulk of Tahuantinsuyu's
agrarian staples were budgeted for feeding the millions who worked for the
state. Many more people worked for the 
government on a temporary basis than on a permanent
one, and the largest expenditures presumably supported vast numbers of males
rendering mit'a service. A small portion of the population, perhaps ten
per cent, was permanently subsidized because it occupied the highest ranks
of local and national government. There were two tiers: the upper, decision-making
one was occupied with rule and administration, while a lower technical tier
was occupied with the implementation of rule and the support of governmental
institutions. At the apex stood the royal families of hanan and hurin Cuzco,
then the people of the Cuzco Basin, who were Inca by appointment and honor
but not by ancestry. From the royal families came the heads of state and
the heads of Inti's imperial church. From the body of Incas by birth or
honor came the military and gubernatorial heads of the empire, and, it is
assumed, the heads
Of all branches of the imperial bureaucracy. Allied with this apex by forced and voluntary allegiance, and by the exchange of sons and daughters in marriage, were the noble families and hereditary rulers of subject states. These ranks ranged from the conquered potentates of Chimor down to the karakas of formerly independent ayllus.
Beneath those enjoying great power and prestige was a significantly larger tier of people who were subsidized because of their occupations, hereditary knowledge or training relating to technical matters. The profusion of professional accountants, the quipakamaks, drew considerable attention from early chroniclers. Other technicians must have included agronomists, architects, surveyors, engineers, hydrologists, and the like. Another large body of support personnel comprised skilled artisans and craft specialists. Entire colonies of specialists - from ceramicists, through lapidarists, to metallurgists and jewelers - were removed from subject provinces and resettled in the Cuzco environs to serve the lords of the sacred city. These professionals were both numerous and important because 'wealth' finance, as opposed to 'staple' finance, depended not only upon textiles, but upon multitudes of other valued commodities culminating in finely wrought artworks of gold and silver.
At Cuzco's great rival capital of Chan Chan the vast majority of residents were artisans. Women were weavers of fine cloth, while men were predominantly metalsmiths and jewelers. By supporting tens of thousands of skilled
craft personnel the government used staple finance to generate commodities for wealth finance, which made artisans essential to the national economy. Thus at Chan Chan artisans enjoyed the privilege of wearing earspools, albeit very simple wooden ones, a privilege otherwise reserved for the governing elite, who wore elaborate earspools as the hallmark of their status and rank. (Indeed, the Spanish referred to the Inca elite as orejones, or 'big ears', because of the large, round earspools that set them apart from the masses.)
In the Cordillera the storing of food surpluses was a critical adaptation at the household level, and a major component of risk management. Without reserves of charqui and chuno there would be no means of mitigating stress from frequent poor harvests in different ecological tiers. Storage was no less crucial at the imperial level in the mountains, where famine was not uncommon and disasters of tectonic or El Nino origin were recurrent, and could well trigger revolt. If bountiful harvests occasioned the replacement of older stock with fresh reserves the Emperor might order dispensation to local subjects. Yet, good harvests are less common than bad ones at high altitudes, and this may explain the grandiose nature of Inca warehousing. Excessive labor was lavished on the construction of qollqa, and their consistent placement in highly visible locations was not necessary for mundane storage. Qollqa were designed, constructed, and positioned to impress people, and it seems that the state wanted to reassure its subjects that it could adequately manage the risks and uncertainties common to mountain agropastoralism.