The Andean world was populated by gods and ancestors. Throughout the colonial period, Spanish priests learned of the vast array of shrines and altars, the many feast days, and the numerous acts of devotion, small and large, with which Andean peoples honored the deities and the dead. Catholicism responded with the rough hand of righteousness, directed by guidebooks for persecution, like Pablo Joseph de Arriaga's (1968 [1621]) The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru or Cristobal de Albornoz' 1555 Instructions for the Discovery of All the Guacas of Peru … (Duviols 1967). In spite of that effort, elements of native Andean religion persisted. One reason was the omnipresence of the sacred; as Sabine MacCormack (1991: 146) notes, “everywhere in the Andes, the plains and the mountains, the sky and the waters were both the theatre and the dramatis personae of divine action.” The indivisible interweaving of the natural and spiritual worlds is expressed in Father Arriaga's (1968 [1621]: 115) simple, elegant observation that “Some of the huacas are hills and high places which time cannot consume.”

And yet the archaeological perspective on the Andean past has taken an uneven view of ritual. On the one hand, there is a body of archaeological literature on Inca temples, shrines, and ceques which draws heavily on ethnohistoric literature, identifying specific places and ceremonial functions described in the colonial chronicles (e.g., Niles 1987; Rowe 1979; Urton 1981, 1990; Zuidema 1964, 1990a).