Bibliogr()hic(l ,--(.

Full bibliographical citations for the texts mentioned here can be found in the
Bibliography.
/e study of the Inca has excited popular and scholarly interest ever since
European landfall and the conquest of the Kingdom of Birú or Pirú (as it was
known to the early Spanish conquistadors) by Francisco Pizzaro and his erstwhile
companions in the 1530s. /is means that the corpus of Inca books is extremely
large, and still growing. Nevertheless, it is possible to winnow this down to a
number of important texts for those interested in delving deeper into the world
of the Inca.
In this sense, among the early tracts a number stand out due to their attention
to detail and the quality of the material presented, some of it based on interviews
with then-surviving indigenous witnesses. Of these, Juan de Betanzos’s Narrative
of the Incas, and Sarmiento de Gamboa’s History of the Incas, are very interesting,
given that they take, respectively, a more pro-Inca and pro-Spanish perspective
on the proceedings. While Betanzos, married to an Inca princess, exalts the Inca
and their style of government, Sarmiento, sponsored by the newly established
Spanish viceroyalty, is at pains to show that the Inca Empire was a usurpers’ realm
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and, as such, held little or no legitimacy in the Andes – in turn justifying Spanish
takeover. Among these early texts, that by Titu Cusi Yupanqui (History of How
the Spaniards Arrived in Peru), grandson of the eleventh and last undisputed Inca,
Huayna Cápac, is perhaps the most interesting, providing a wholly indigenous
perspective on the arrival of the Spanish and their conquest of the empire.
Slightly later come the first important texts by indigenous or mestizo writ-
ers. Of these, two are particularly exemplary: Inga Garcilaso de la Vega’s The
Royal Commentaries of the Incas, and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva
Corónica y Buen Gobierno. /e latter is especially informative due to its stylized
two-dimensional drawings of life under the Inca and the early Spanish colony,
as well as its use of a florid hybrid Spanish–Quechua language as text. Dating
to this late seventeenth century period are also Bernabé Cobo’s two volumes on
Inca religion, customs and history of the empire. Cobo’s books borrow heavily

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 the inca

from then-existing texts, including Polo de Ondegardo’s lost book on Inca reli-
gion, and is an indispensable introduction into the intricacies of the empire as
understood by the Spanish during the early colonial period.
Possibly the best modern recompilation of Inca imperial history based on
ethnohistoric sources is María Rostworowski’s splendid turn of the twenty-first
century History of the Inca Realm. Her book makes important reading into the
duality at the heart of Andean society and Inca kingship, while expanding on
the little-known aspect of yanacona lords. /at said, it is her interpretation of
the foundational matrilineal nature of the panacas which is the real standout.
/is is a theme that is developed by other authors, although none more so than
Francisco Hernández Astete in his brilliant Los Incas y el poder de sus ancestros.
Both authors attest to the power and influence of women in the the Andean past.
In this sense, the best concise, yet lucid, volume on the role of women in the Inca
Empire, also by Francisco Hernández Astete, is La mujer en el Tahuantinsuyo. It
reveals the power and agency of women in the Andes and within the Inca state,
especially that of principal wives, or coyas.
More academic modern texts on the Inca also exist, among which is the sub-
lime and simply entitled The Incas, by Terry D’Altroy, now in its second iteration.
It is by far the most comprehensive, scholarly single volume on the Inca Empire
out there, and a must for anyone wishing to expand their knowledge at a more
academic level. An interesting companion volume to D’Altroy’s book is Gary
Urton and Adriana von Hagen’s Encyclopedia of the Incas, which showcases con-
cise essays on a variety of themes and topics by today’s foremost Inca historians
and archaeologists. For those wishing to delve into past Inca studies, perusing
the giants of Andean studies, such as Wendell C. Bennett and Junius B. Bird’s
Andean Culture History or Philip Ainsworth Means’s Ancient Civilizations of the
Andes, is a must. Specific to the Inca themselves is John H. Rowe’s insightful An
Introduction to the Archaeology of Cuzco.
A more historical take on the Incas, and their demise in particular, is found
in the still brilliant and eminently readable The Conquest of the Incas by John
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Hemming. /is book was the first modern take on the collapse of the Inca since
William Hickling Prescott’s equally magnificent nineteenth-century History of the
Conquest of Peru, written very much in the tradition of Edward Gibbon’s Rise and
Fall of the Roman Empire. John Hemming’s seminal text uses many historical texts
that had only come to light after Prescott’s own book. In turn, Hemming’s book
has only recently been eclipsed by Alan Covey’s Inca Apocalypse. /is is a theme
that is also addressed by Franklin G. Pease and his Los Ultimos Incas del Cuzco.
Turning to Inca specifics, the long article by John H. Rowe written in 1946
entitled ‘Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest’ remains a classic,
succinctly distilling a large amount of ethnohistoric information. For a recent
take it is worthwhile consulting Martti Pärssinen’s Tawantinsuyu: El Estado Inca y
Su Organización Política. A closer perspective on the development of Cuzco and
the rise of the Incas is to be had from Brian S. Bauer’s Ancient Cuzco, while his

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 Bibliogr aphic a l E ssay

volume entitled The Sacred Landscape of the Inca doubles up with Tom Zuidema’s
The Ceque System of Cuzco to explain the intricacies of shrine worship and ritual
pilgrimage in the immediacies of Cuzco.
Inca religion, and especially the centrality of huacas to Andean cosmol-
ogy, is also explored in Marco Curatola Petrocchi and Mariusz S. Zió:kowski’s
edited volume entitled Adivinación y oraculos en el mundo andino antiguo, and
in Tamara Bray’s edited volume The Archaeology of Wak’as. /e denouement of
Andean belief systems is scrutinized by Sabine MacCormack in her Religion in
the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru, and from a Cuzco (and
Lima) perspective by Gabriela Ramos in Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima
and Cuzco, 1532–16(). /e role of the human capacocha in Inca ritual practice is
dealt with in greater detail by /omas Besom in his Of Summits and Sacrifice,
and in Johan Reinhard and María Constanza Ceruti’s Inca Rituals and Sacred
Mountains, although the brevity and lucidity of Pierre Duviol’s eponymous 19;6
article still makes it a must-read.
Returning to Cuzco, Ian S. Farrington has written in Cusco: Urbanism and
Archaeology in the Inka World the definite volume on the Incas’ ancient capital.
In the 19;0s Graziano Gasparini and Luise Margolies wrote Arquitectura Inka,
which was subsequently translated into English. Its treatment of Inca architec-
ture has endured the test of time, supported by more specific studies such as
Inca Architecture and Construction at Ollantaytambo, by Jean-Pierre Protzen,
and Stella Nair’s At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy
at Chinchero. Equally, John Hyslop’s The Inka Road System and Inka Settlement
Planning remain to this day the go-to volumes on these particular themes.
Likewise, Terry LeVine’s Inka Storage Systems is still a benchmark study on this
topic.
Inca provincial life has been the subject of numerous works, although an
edited volume by Michael A. Malpass and another one by the same author in con-
junction with Sonia Alconini, entitled, respectively, Provincial Inca and Distant
Provinces in the Inka Empire, provide an excellent introduction to this subject.
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A veritable page-turner on provincial life under the early Spanish colony can
be found in Steve J. Stern’s Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish
Conquest: Huamanga to 164), while Noble David Cook remains the authority on
how disease and epidemics ravaged the New World in his Born to Die: Disease
and New World Conquest, 14,2–165). /e financial running of the Inca Empire
is best explained in Terry D’Altroy’s article ‘Funding the Inca Empire’, found
in Izumi Shimada’s excellent edited volume simply named The Inka Empire. A
detailed examination of the role of specialists or camayocs in the empire can be
found in Julian Yates’s article on the matter in the Journal of Historical Geography.
Inca suspension bridges are given a detailed overview in Brian S. Bauer’s
important 2006 article on the topic, found in Andean Archaeology ---, edited
by William H. Isbell and Helaine Silverman, while Gary Urton’s Inka History in
Knots provides the latest state-of-the-art treatise on the subject of quipu, the Inca

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 the inca

knots-on-string ‘writing’ system. /is book distils the results of years of research
by the Harvard Khipu Database Project, especially the work of scholars such
as Carrie Brezine and colleagues. In a similar vein, Frank Salomon’s The Cord
Keepers brings quipu studies up to the present day.
/e complex issue of the timing of Inca expansion has yet to be the subject
of a book, although John H. Rowe’s original views on the issue and his short chro-
nology for the rise of empire can be found in his seminal 1945 article ‘Absolute
Chronology in the Andean Area’. A cogent and robust defence of Rowe’s Inca
chronology from the perspective of Huayna Cápac’s reign can be found in Susan
Niles’s excellent The Shape of Inca History. Pushback in the form of a longer
timeline for expansion has recently been the subject of a number of articles
in peer-reviewed journals; two in particular are worth mentioning: Dennis E.
Ogburn’s ‘Reconceiving the Chronology of the Inca Imperial Expansion’ and
Erik Marsh et al., ‘Dating the Expansion of the Inca Empire’. It is interesting to
note the similarities the conclusions to these two articles bear with what Philip
Ainsworth Means originally proposed regarding Inca expansion in his 1931 book.
For a modern assessment of the development of the Inca state, two articles
stand out. /e first, by Brian Bauer and Alan Covey, entitled ‘/e Development of
the Inca State ((d 1000–1400)’, provides a broad brush treatment to the eventual
rise of the Inca, while Steve Kosiba’s ‘/e Politics of Locality: Pre-Inka Social
Landscapes of the Cusco Region’ makes a fascinating case for how the intrica-
cies of localism led to a commonly shared set of social and physical norms that
opened the route to subsequent Inca consolidation.
/e convoluted case for Inca rulership has been undertaken by many emi-
nent scholars such as Tom Zuidema, Pierre Duviols, John Rowe, Peter Gose,
Catherine Julien, Kerstin Nowack, María Rostworowski, Franklin Pease, Martti
Pärssinnen and, recently, Shinya Watanabe. In these the orthodox view of a
single-ruler monarchy has been posited by the likes of Gose, Julien and Rowe,
while the various non-orthodox views – diarchy and triarchy – have been pre-
sented by Duviols, Nowack, Pease, Rostworowski and Zuidema, and Pärssinnen
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and Watanabe, respectively. In this case, it is interesting to note that it has mainly
been North American researchers at the forefront of expounding the orthodox
view (Gose, Julien, Rowe), while academics from other countries (Duviols,
French; Nowack, German; Rostworowski and Pease, Peruvian; Zuidema, Dutch;
Pärssinnen, Finnish; Watanabe, Japanese) have been more willing to interpret the
available evidence in a different light.
While the ethnohistoric evidence is often contradictory and hard to dis-
entangle, the fact that North American scholars tend to expound one view speaks
volumes about how research and interpretation have been traditionally consti-
tuted, especially in as young a subject as Andean archaeology. In North America,
and especially the United States, there has been a propensity towards the creation
of hegemonic interpretative schools and narratives. In this case John H. Rowe

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 Bibliogr aphic a l E ssay

and John V. Murra (with his Vertical Archipelago concept), among others, have
cast a long shadow, and through their adherents they have dominated certain
discourses within Andean archaeology to the present day. As with the discussion
on the chronology of Inca Imperial expansion, it has often been hard to go against
these dominant paradigms.
Outside of North America, the Andean archaeological scene has been much
more fragmented and eclectic. While this has been construed as a weakness at
the moment of establishing interpretations on various Andean themes, it has also
meant that more often than not it has been more radical and willing to engage
with a diverse range of models and concepts given its unfettered relationship
with the dominant orthodoxy. We should caution, nevertheless, that this does
not mean that they have not got it wrong in the past. On this theme, including
the enduring controversy over whether the Inca was a unitary monarchy, diarchy
or something even more complex, the best recent summary of all the different
positions on this argument is Shinya Watanabe’s Estructura en los Andes Antiguos.
It provides an excellent introduction to this complex, though enthralling, subject.
Perhaps the best account of the horrors of Spanish (and Republican) colo-
nial and post-colonial exploitation of Latin America can be found in Eduardo
Galeano’s visceral Open Veins of Latin America. Finally, on the perseverance and
enduring nature of Andean culture, The Hold that Life Has by Catherine Allen
is hard to beat, although there are numerous other excellent ethnographies by
the likes of /omas Abercombie, Inge Bolin and Penny Dransart, among many
others. Finally, Francisco Ferreira and Billie Jean Isbell’s edited volume A Return
to the Village examines Andean culture in the present day, looking at how moder-
nity and globalization have impacted on Andean village life. It is an excellent
volume.
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185

Lane, Kevin. The Inca : Lost Civilizations, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/southcarolina/detail.action?docID=6798564.
Created from southcarolina on 2025-03-13 12:39:29.
Copyright © 2022. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Lane, Kevin. The Inca : Lost Civilizations, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/southcarolina/detail.action?docID=6798564.
Created from southcarolina on 2025-03-13 12:39:29.