Within twenty years of Pizarro's landfall on the west coast of South America, the word “huaca” was applied to native religious monuments by Spanish speakers throughout the Americas. Derived from the Quechua waka the first written use of the word was in Juan de Betanzos' Suma y narración de los Incas completed in 1551, and ‘huaca’ eventually was incorporated into the dialects of Spanish spoken in Central America and the Caribbean (Corominas 1974: 800). Betanzos (1987 [1551]) used waka to refer to a sacred place or temple or a priestly residence, but by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the word's meaning had loosened considerably. With the onslaught of extirpation, the definitional boundaries widened to include any burial place, any shrine, any object or construction that materially marked the indigenous concepts of sacred. As the word spread, its definition stretched. The laxity of categories is paralleled in archaeological approaches to ancient Andean monuments. The word huaca has been attached to enormous pyramids (Huaca del Sol at Moche), tell-like accumulations of midden (Huaca Prieta in the Chicama Valley), and burial crypts (Huaca las Avispas at Chan Chan). Only two concepts unify such different structures – they are artificial and they are large – and a moment's reflection suggests such a classification obscures more than it illuminates.

Yet how can one begin to classify and to understand the differing social uses and meanings that prehistoric monuments had for Andean people? First, there is the issue of defining what a monument is.