Breaking out of the stale vision of Andean war as either “real” (secular, territorial, severe conflict against external enemies) or “ritual” (religiously motivated, choreographed, low-casualty combat between social segments) means coming up with ways of recognizing and exploring the true complexity of Andean wars, and the full humanity of their participants. This chapter offers one way. It is grounded in a comparative tradition of archaeological scholarship, one that assumes there are meaningful cross-cultural patterns, and draws heavily on cross-cultural ethnography and ethnohistory to inform the archaeological imagination. My premise is that some situations of war, though distant in time and space, bear a sort of family resemblance. This is not to negate specifically Andean meanings and practices in war. Nor is it to deny the finer-grained story – the specific military norms and expectations of a cultural milieu, the varied motives of fighters and leaders, and the local histories of hostility. That is, I am not trying to explain something as complex and tangled as a single war. This chapter aims for the low-hanging fruit, the patterns at the large scale.