User:Sagegreen04/Inca society

Article body
(Example for Wikipedia Training): As the colors of silver and gold symbolized status and power, one of the main applications of Andean metallurgy was to use non-silver or non-gold metals to recreate metallic gold and silver surfaces.

Intended Edits (Raymond Kim) - 'Cloth' & 'Ceramics and metalwork' sections
Note that based on what counts for full 25 pts, not everything in the list below might be included in the final revisions.


 * Creating Additional Sections (25 pts)
 * Split ‘Ceramics and metalwork’ section into two separate ‘Ceramics’ and ‘Metallurgy’ sections
 * Reasoning: Section in initial article is extremely disorganized, going back and forth between two topics for no apparent reason, with arbitrary mentions of cloth
 * Creating original graphical content (?) (25 pts)
 * Remove duplicate cloth image (copied from Inca Empire article), replace with original example
 * Add more specific examples of ceramic pottery
 * Add specific examples of metal workings/usage (for architectural decoration & armor/weaponry)
 * (?): Does this count as "original" content? Images to be added are not manually created infographics, but images uploaded by reputable sources to public domain
 * Elaborating on Points (25 pts)
 * Reasoning: Both ‘Clothing’ and ‘‘Ceramics and metalwork' sections lack concrete examples (just generic descriptions), and mainly focuses on style of textiles/pottery/metals with no mention of societal/political/economic importance. Also lacks any citations.
 * Cloth
 * Remove unnecessary sentences/points
 * Remove all claims without citations (basically the entire section), add citations to relevant points if necessary
 * Emphasize importance of cloth in politics & economics of Inca society
 * Explain usage of cloth in: (paragraph for each)
 * signifying societal position/status
 * as currency & rewards for loyalty
 * cultural rites of passage
 * (Need to find more sources for cloth)
 * Ceramics
 * Remove unnecessary sentences/points
 * Remove mentions of cloth or quips
 * Remove speculative claims (‘seem to be’, ‘they were perhaps the most’, ‘many historians’, etc)
 * Explain introduction of ceramic production & distribution
 * Explain usage of pottery in: (paragraph for each)
 * maintaining the staple wealth of Inca empire
 * facilitating political relations through feasts & tributes
 * Explain status of craft workers (especially regarding gender)
 * Add specific ceramic pieces & contextual implications for society
 * Metallurgy
 * Fix sentences that lack clarity or contain grammatical errors
 * Reorganize (perhaps split) paragraph regarding introduction and process of metalworking, add citations
 * Explain importance of gold and silver in Inca society
 * Explain usage of metals in: (paragraph for each)
 * architecture, royalty, and its symbolic implications in Inca society
 * attempts by majority of metal craftsmen to recreate gold/silver
 * weaponry/armor: focus on relatively sparse usage of metals for warfare compared to other societies
 * (Main content of edits will be specified once access to entirety of selected sources is granted)
 * Add specific metalworking evidence & theories behind symbolic meaning for royalty
 * Adding external references (25 pts)
 * Mujica, Sonia Alconini, and R. Alan Covey. The Oxford Handbook of the Incas. Oxford University Press, 2018.
 * Cloth, Ceramics, Mining/Metallurgy
 * Bray, Tamara L., and Leah Minc. “Imperial Inca-style pottery from Ecuador: Insights into provenance and production using INAA and ceramic petrography.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, vol. 34, 6 Oct. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2020.102628.
 * Ceramics
 * Bray, Tamara L. “Partnering with Pots: The Work of Objects in the Imperial Inca Project.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28.2 (2018): 243–257, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774317000828.
 * Ceramics
 * Lechtman, Heather. “The Significance of Metals in Pre-Columbian Andean Culture.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 38, no. 5, 1985, pp. 9–37. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20171767.
 * Cloth, Metallurgy
 * Lechtman, Heather. "Andean Value Systems and the Development of Prehistoric Metallurgy." Technology and Culture, vol. 25 no. 1, 1984, p. 1-36. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/890078.
 * Metallurgy

Inca Society: Infrastructure Section edits - Cristian

 * Split and break down the two current paragraphs located in the Infrastructure section of the article
 * The first paragraph can be further broken down into certain sections of information regarding the Incan road
 * A smaller section of the first paragraph can convey how the Incan road constructed and used and by who along with any relevant citations (since this section of the article only has 4)
 * Keep most of the second paragraph intact and expand upon their use of water for both religious and infrastructure purposes and how they were intertwined along with adding any relevant citations.
 * Make a new paragraph about the Incas use of water in their own infrastructure with the usage of canals, sanitation, and agriculture.


 * Create new paragraph about fishing infrastructure
 * Following the paragraph(s) regarding the Incas use of water, a paragraph conveying the Incas infrastructure put in place for fishing.
 * Expand on the overall complexity of fishing in the Inca state from actually catching the fish near the coast to transporting fish utilizing the Inca road network (tie it together/ cohesion)
 * Create new paragraph to tie everything together
 * A general paragraph explaining and tying everything together relating to Incan infrastructure and how it served and benefited them.
 * Allows us to better understand how the Inca dominated for a time with the help of their infrastructure.
 * Improve the grammar of the article section
 * Rephrase certain sentences for a better reading experience
 * Help the simple sentences in some way because they seem to not really add anything
 * Add new citations (more needed)
 * Include pictures for visual representation

Cloth/Textiles
Cloth is one of Inca society’s most highly valued items and was used in a variety of contexts within the Inca empire. Different types of woolen cloth were used as garments by people of different social classes. The coarsest cloth, avasco (also called ahuasca), was used by the common people, whereas a finer cloth called compi (also spelled cumbi or qompi) was worn by nobility of both the bureaucracy and military. Compi was made with various colors and patterns, and woven to a higher finish than avasco, with characteristically sewn seams on both sides. Particular care was taken when weaving cloth for royal usage, which utilized expert tapestry weaving to make densely woven fabric that could be pictorially designed.

One of the largest consumers of cloth was the Inca military. All active soldiers were rewarded with two shirts annually, and were also given blanket and tent material during service. Huge quantities of cloth were also distributed to civilians in all social classes as items of payment; civilian elites would wear fine, elaborate cloth to shirts, tunics, cloaks, and belts, and would often gift them to lower nobles as tokens of favor or reward. Cloth was commonly woven into unqu, an Andean male garment akin to a tunic. Men would also wear llauutu, a cloth band wrapped four or five times around the head. Women wore aqsu, a long rectangular cloth wrapped around the body and held with a woven waist belt. Fine quality colorful cloth was also used as sacrificial offerings, often provided by the royal lineage to be burned in honor of their deities. Some rituals would also require certain cloths or tapestries to be worn by key figures during the proceedings.

Inca cloth was decorated with insignias of rank, prestige, and societal status. Studies of surviving compi suggest Inca-style tunics use a grid of squares or rectangles. Simple checkerboard patterns are associated with military personnel, with usage of colors into a red and white checkerboard pattern signifying higher military rank. More complex expressions of the grid, called t’oqapu, were made of abstract geometric motifs and were worn by bureaucrats, nobles, and royalty. Specific patterns signify certain social identities; for instance, a zig-zag band at the bottom-edge of checkerboard tunics would differentiate Inka royalty and nobility, and other patterns would visually distinguish the 12 royal lineages. In this sense, individuals of higher status and more societal roles likely owned several tunics with differing designs, representing different aspects of their social identities. Transitions in social identities were also reflected in cloth; people would be buried with multiple tunics representing their journey up the social hierarchy, and defeated warriors were stripped of their garments and given new ones to indicate their conquered status.

Metallurgy
Although not as much as textiles, metals were valued in the Andes for their color, reflectivity, and brilliance. The Inca do not appear to have their own metallurgical tradition before their imperial expansion, as no evidence of pre-imperial Inca metal production has been discovered to date. Instead, as they expanded, the Inca mainly relied on various conquered cultures’ skills and knowledge of technology and artistry into their culture. In particular, the Inca appreciated the Chimu culture’s practice of metallurgy, both in extraction and production of metal objects. Chimu artisans were thus taken to the Cuzco capital where they created art for the Incan empire. Consequently, there is notable archaeological difficulty in discerning between Incan and Chimu metalwork, and many pieces are misattributed. Other cultures’ metalworkers were similarly relocated to Cuzco or other isolated communities to produce objects for the state, or assigned as servants to Inca lords.

Mines were among the most productive resources that the Incas gained from imperial conquest, and some mines became personal property of the Incan emperor, while others were used for resource extraction. In the latter case, populations in mineral-rich areas with strong metallurgical traditions would have been responsible for mining ores and extracting metals as a form of labor tribute. The mining was often overseen by one of the emperor’s clan subordinates, who would ensure the extracted metal were received by the emperor. In line with Andean and Incan values of reciprocity, the miners were provided food, housing, and tools by the Inca state.

Gold and silver held particular importance in Incan society as they were symbols of status and spiritual power. In Inca cosmology, gold represented the sweat of the sun, and silver the tears of the moon, the two deities whom the Inca believed they were the offspring of. Thus gold and silver were closely associated with the origin of the ruling clan, and their value as visible indexes of wealth and spiritual power were second only to cloth. Consequently, Inca’s cultural value system was dominated by political symbolism around the colors of silver and gold, and hence a substantial application of Andean metallurgy was to use non-silver or non-gold metals to recreate metallic gold and silver surfaces, for usage in architecture and metal objects. Status and politics thus became Andean metallurgy’s main stimulus for growth.

A practical route of development for metals is its usage in warfare, whether it be for armor, weapons, or transport. However, metals did not play a significant part in Andean warfare, and although gold, silver, and bronze were extensively used throughout the Inca empire, iron metallurgy was never developed. This often gives rise to the impression that the Inca had an underdeveloped military; in fact, the Spanish conquest of the Inca is often misattributed to the Inca’s supposedly inferior military strength. However, unlike eastern Mediterranean societies which required iron weapons to cut and pierce for hand-to-hand combat, the Inca military relied on the crushing force of a blow from sling projectiles, and thus mainly utilized cloth for both production of slings and quilted cotton tunics for protection. In fact, most Spanish soldiers adopted quilted armor from the Inca as they regarded it superior to European steel breastplates in the humid sierra.