San Antonio College Library

Annotation In the year 1572, the Spanish chronicler Sarmiento de Gamboa completed one of the earliest official versions of the history of the Inka empire. In his account, he stated that the ancestors of the Inkas originated from a cave at a place to the south of the imperial city of Cuzco called Pacariqtambo. The History of a Mythexplores how and why this version of the origin myth (there were others) came to form the basis of an official history....

"Tipon: Water Engineering Masterpiece of the Inca Empire reveals the beauty and the ingenuity of this little-known jewel of the Inca Empire." "Located down the Huatanay River Valley by the Inca capital of Cusco, Tipon is a 500-acre, self-contained, walled settlement that served as an estate for Inca nobility. This historic agricultural site, which has been farmed and partially irrigated for more than 450 years, is a stunning civil engineering achievement...

An annotated translation of seventeenth-century missionary Father Bernabe Cobo's descriptions of the Incas' customs, legends, history, and social institutions.

"Massive yet elegantly executed masonry architecture and andenes (agricultural terraces) set against majestic and seemingly boundless Andean landscapes, roads built in defiance of rugged terrains, and fine textiles with orderly geometric designs--all were created within the largest political system in the ancient New World, a system headed, paradoxically, by a single, small minority group without wheeled vehicles, markets, or a writing system, the...

"Looks at everyday life in the Inca empire, based on current research. Reconstructs Inca way of life using information on life-cycle events, food and drink, dress and ornaments, recreation, religious rituals, the calendar, and the labor tax. Timeline of Inca history, glossary of terms, and bibliography make the work appropriate for classroom use"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

"Terence N. D'Altroy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and one of the world's leading Inca specialists."--Jacket.

Detailed account of the causes, events, and aftermath of the Inca Indians uprising against oppressive Spanish rule, from Tucuman in northwestern Argentina to Ecuador.

"The Incas emerged in the fourteenth century to build one of the largest empires of the ancient world. At its zenith, it extended northwards from the Inca capital Cusco to include parts of modern Peru and Ecuador, and southwards into Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. The sheer scale of the empire the Incas controlled, coupled with the challenges of the varied and rugged landscape, makes their achievement truly remarkable. This new survey provides an...

"Ever since Pizarro and his small band of followers toppled the Inca Empire in 1532, scholars have been both fascinated and perplexed by this great Andean civilization. The largest empire of the New World, it stretched for over 2500 miles from northern Chile to Ecuador, linked by a remarkable network of roads along which the Inca armies and relays of messengers could travel. Autocratic control was exercised from the capital Cuzco by a divine despot,...

"In How the Incas Built Their Heartland R. Alan Covey supplements an archaeological approach with the tools of a historian, forming an interdisciplinary study of how the Incas became sufficiently powerful to embark on an unprecedented campaign of territorial expansion and how such developments related to earlier patterns of Andean statecraft"--Jacket.