Culture of Stone

A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers sophisticated new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and played a vital role in the unfolding of Inka history. Examining the multiple uses of stone, she argues that the Inka understood building in stone as a way of ordering the chaos of unordered nature, converting untamed spaces into domesticated places, and laying claim to new territories. Dean contends that understanding what the rocks signified requires seeing them as the Inka saw them: as potentially animate, sentient, and sacred. Through careful analysis of Inka stonework, colonial-period accounts of the Inka, and contemporary ethnographic and folkloric studies of indigenous Andean culture, Dean reconstructs the relationships between stonework and other aspects of Inka life, including imperial expansion, worship, and agriculture. She also scrutinizes meanings imposed on Inka stone by the colonial Spanish and, later, by tourism and the tourist industry. A Culture of Stone is a compelling multidisciplinary argument for rethinking how we see and comprehend the Inka past.

“Art historian Dean has provided perhaps the best interpretation of how theInkas saw their environment, particularly their lithic one, and how this motivated their actions. . . . Her judicious use of historical documents, combined with thoughtful and critical analysis of contemporary Andean concepts that appear rooted in their pre-Hispanic ancestry, provides a new and refreshing perspective for understanding the Inkas’ culture of stone.” - Michael Malpass, Comparative Studies in Society and History, “A Culture of Stone is beautifully written. . . . As a study of ancient rocks, their material texture, location and relationship to other features in the landscape, as well as their social agency during Inka times, A Culture of Stone is a welcome intervention and will be of interest to students of material worlds, anthropologists, archaeologists, as well as scholars of Peru and Latin America.” - Haidy L Geismar, Material Worlds blog, “As a study of the rocks themselves, their material texture, location and relationship to other features in the landscape, as well as their social agency, A Culture of Stone is a welcome intervention in art history, and will also be of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, and scholars of Peru and Latin America.” - Sandra Rozental, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, “In her exquisitely researched, articulate, and annotated book, Carolyn Dean explores the Inka love affair with stone and demonstrates the near-universal role played by the material in Inka cultural and spiritual life. . . . Dean has made a strong contribution to the field of Andean studies, one well presented and worth reading.” - Vincent R. Lee, American Historical Review, “[Dean’s] book has implications far beyond its locus in Latin America. ... [I]t represents an intervention into current debates about world art history. Dean suggests a way in which the interpretation of human interactions with nature that in the European tradition are called art and architecture may be imaginatively reconstructed with terms and concepts that are not Eurocentric.” - Thomas DeCosta Kaufmann, CAA Reviews

Carolyn Dean is Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru, also published by Duke University Press.