The Incas is a captivating exploration of the greatest civilization ever seen in the indigenous Americas. Seamlessly drawing on history, archaeology, and ethnography, the book investigates 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.

This thoroughly updated edition integrates advances made in hundreds of new studies covering pre-imperial Inca society; the royal capital of Cuzco; the sacred landscape; royal estates including an extended discussion of Machu Picchu; provincial relations; the khipu information-recording technology; languages, time frames, gender relations, effects on human biology, and daily life.

New to this edition is a fascinating investigation of Inca notions of life and death, space-time, causality, philosophy, knowledge, and human relations with non-human beings of the landscape. These insights shed light on how the Incas believed the world and cosmos worked and therefore how they could most effectively carve out their grand civilization. Covering Inca history, politics, economy, ideology, society, and military organization, this text balances information about the Cuzco heartland with the vast provincial regions, which took in lands from Colombia to central Chile, to provide a wide-ranging account.