INCA POWER POLITICS

THE ABANDONED INCA CITY of Huanuco Pampa sprawls across a bleak plateau in the Andes some 12,000 feet above sea level. Its miles of stone ruins, remains of structures built by the Inca at the height of their empire, rise above waves of overgrown golden ichu grass. Huanuco Pampa is “the most completely preserved of the cities built by the Inca,” wrote the late Craig Morris of the American Museum of Natural History, who excavated the site for more than 20 years beginning in 1964. It may lack the sublime setting of Machu Picchu or the imperial grandeur of the Inca capital at Cuzco, but Huanuco Pampa bears witness like no other site to the twin conquests that convulsed the central Andes within less than a century—the Inca state’s subjugation of the region’s warring tribes in the mid-1400s, and the invasion of the Spanish conquistadores in the 1530s.

The Inca were the last of a long succession of pre-Hispanic civilizations that extended their power and their culture throughout the Andes and along Peru’s Pacific coast. They left no written records of their history. Thus, to tell the story of their rise from a pastoral tribe based near Cuzco to a formidable people who established the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas, historians have relied largely on Spaniards’ accounts of testimonies given to them by Inca elders in the sixteenth century. These texts are secondhand and colored by the Spaniards’ own assumptions about the Indians. They nevertheless reveal how the Inca folded the inhabitants of conquered regions into their empire through a combination of military aggression, reciprocal trading relationships, and marriages between their own elite and the leaders of other ethnic groups. Civilizations across the Andes fell under Inca rule, and while some accepted