The splendor of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire, and its superficial likeness to European empires, made it for centuries the main and usually the only focus of historical research on Andean peoples. But it has become clear that focusing on the apical institutions of the short-lived empire leads into an ideological blind alley unless one also studies the smaller, more diverse and resilient, formations which preceded, supported, and finally outlived it. It is no longer the allegedly utopian achievements of the lords from Cuzco that interest politically-minded anthropologists, but the question of how a state with no marked technical or demographic advantage over its neighbors so quickly worked innumerable native polities into a web of dependencies over thousands of kilometers.

How, then, did Tawantinsuyu propose to make autonomous chiefdoms over into components of a state whose very principles of organization were alien to them? By concentrating on the means the Cuzco lords used in grappling with native polities, and by looking for clues to the native reaction, it should be possible to describe the Quito area as an example of the intra-Andean imperializing process as it stood when frozen in midadvance by the Spanish invasion.