The Incas

The Incas is a captivating exploration of the greatest civilization ever seen in the indigenous Americas. Seamlessly drawing on history, archaeology, and ethnography, the book investigates its extraordinary progress from a small Andean society in southern Peru to its rapid demise little more than a century later at the hands of the Spanish conquerors. This thoroughly updated edition integrates advances made in hundreds of new studies covering pre–imperial Inca society; the royal capital of Cuzco; the sacred landscape; royal estates including an extended discussion of Machu Picchu; provincial relations; the khipu information–recording technology; languages, time frames, gender relations, effects on human biology, and daily life. New to this edition is a fascinating investigation of Inca notions of life and death, space–time, causality, philosophy, knowledge, and human relations with non–human beings of the landscape. These insights shed light on how the Incas believed the world and cosmos worked and therefore how they could most effectively carve out their grand civilization. Covering Inca history, politics, economy, ideology, society, and military organization, this text balances information about the Cuzco heartland with the vast provincial regions, which took in lands from Colombia to central Chile, to provide a wide–ranging account.

Terence N. D’Altroy is Loubat Professor of American Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology and founding Director of the Center for Archaeology at Columbia University in the City of New York. During more than 40 years of archaeological research, he has worked in the central highlands, Cuzco region and coast of Peru, in Argentina, the United States, and Mexico. His publications include Provincial Power in the Inka Empire (1992), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (co–editor, 2001), and The Incas: Inside an American Empire (2004).