THE INCAS

The great empire of the Incas at its height encompassed an area of western South America comparable in size to the Roman Empire in Europe. This book describes and explains 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. The Incas provides the first book to fully synthesize history and archeology in an exploration of the entire empire from Chile to Ecuador. Drawing from commentaries and research by hundreds of chroniclers, explorers, and scholars, the author explains how the Incas drew from millennia of cultural developments to mould a diverse land into a dynamic, powerful, and yet fragile polity. From this integrated perspective, The Incas profoundly rethinks the nature of imperial formation, ideology, and social, economic, and political relations in Inca society. Illustrated with numerous maps and photographs, this scholarly yet accessible book should become the new standard account of the most impressive of the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas.