From around 400 BC, the Andean zone was broken up into a number of relatively small cultural groups, of which the major ones were Nazca on the southern coast and Moche in the northern highlands.
After about AD 400 new and larger states were emerging: Huari and Tiwanaku. All these states seem to have had a religious component to their control.
Moche and later Huari clearly backed up their authority by military force; the extent to which this was also true of Nazca and Tiwanaku is not clear. Nazca art shows warriors and severed heads, but there is no other evidence of militarism.
What is probably common to them all, however, is a stratified society in which construction of communal monuments, roads and sophisticated systems for water control and irrigation were undertaken under elite supervision by peasants paying taxes in labour as well as in food and textiles.
Control of trade and craft production was also probably in the hands of the elite.
