Wari Empire

The Wari (or Huari) were an Andean civilisation of highland and coastal Peru, widely regarded by archaeologists as the first true expansionist state, and arguably the first empire, of South America, predating the Inca by several centuries.

The Wari emerged around 600 CE out of the earlier Huarpa culture in the Ayacucho Basin of the south-central Peruvian highlands, where they built a large urban capital, the city of Wari, after which the culture is named. Because the Wari left no written records, much about their political organisation remains debated, including the degree to which they constituted a centralised empire as opposed to a looser hegemonic network, and the names of their rulers are entirely unknown. What is clear from archaeology is that Wari influence spread across much of Peru, administered through a series of planned provincial centres, such as Pikillacta near Cusco and Viracochapampa in the north, built to a distinctive rectangular, orthogonal plan and linked by a road network that foreshadowed the later Inca system. The Wari appear to have expanded through a mixture of strategies: outright military force and the taking of captives in some regions, and economic incorporation through agricultural and irrigation works, along with the sharing of a common religious and artistic tradition, in others. They were skilled in terraced agriculture and the construction of irrigation canals, and they produced fine polychrome ceramics and exceptional tapestry-woven textiles, much of it bearing the iconography of a deity sometimes called the Staff God, an image shared with the contemporary Tiwanaku culture to the south. From around 1000 to 1100 CE the Wari state collapsed: ceramic production ceased, and the capital along with its provincial colonies was abandoned over a few decades. The causes remain uncertain and debated among scholars, with explanations ranging from prolonged drought to internal political conflict, and the collapse ushered in the fragmented era known as the Late Intermediate Period.