The Inca Empire in South America, one of the most powerful pre-Columbian societies, was known for many innovations — such as the architecture of Machu Picchu, an extensive road network, and a system ...

ANTH copy 39088019656784 gift from Paul R. Julian. Introduction -- Discovering the Incas and their predecessors -- Native and Spanish sources -- Explorers and the first archaeologists -- 20th-century ...

In A Nutshell Between 1250 and 1400 CE, Peru’s Chincha Kingdom mastered seabird guano fertilization, enabling agriculture in one of Earth’s driest deserts centuries before the Inca Empire arrived ...

"Land of the Four Quarters" or Tahuantinsuyu is the name the Inca gave to their empire. It stretched north to south some 2,500 miles along the high mountainous Andean range from Colombia to Chile and ...

Inca bureaucrats recorded all the goings-on in their bustling empire using knotted cords called khipu, where the position and order of the knots represented numbers. They relied on the khipu system to ...

The heaps of khipus emerged from garbage bags in the back of the tiny, one-room museum—clumps of tangled ropes the size of beach balls. Sabine Hyland smiled as she gazed down at them and said, “Qué ...

The seeds of the Inca Empire were planted about 2,700 years ago when a warm spell combined with piles of llama excrement allowed maize agriculture to take root high up in the South American Andes, ...