Oxford Handbook of the Incas

When Spaniards invaded their realm in 1532, the Incas ruled the largest empire of the pre-Columbian Americas. Just over a century earlier, military campaigns began to extend power across a broad swath of the Andean region, bringing local societies into new relationships with colonists and officials who represented the Inca state. With Cuzco as its capital, the Inca empire encompassed a multitude of peoples of diverse geographic origins and cultural traditionsdwelling in the outlying provinces and frontier regions. Bringing together an international group of well-established scholars and emerging researchers, this handbook is dedicated to revealing the origins of this empire, as well as its evolution and aftermath. Chapters break new ground using innovativemultidisciplinary research from the areas of archaeology, ethnohistory and art history.The scope of this handbook is comprehensive. It places the century of Inca imperial expansion within a broader historical and archaeological context, and then turns from Inca origins to the imperial political economy and institutions that facilitated expansion. Provincial and frontier case studies explore the negotiation and implementation of state policies and institutions, and their effects on the communities and individuals that made up the bulk of the population. Several chapters describereligious power in the Andes, as well as the special statuses that staffed the state religion, maintained records, served royal households, and produced fine craft goods to support state activities. The Incas did not disappear in 1532, and the volume continues into the Colonial and later periods, exploring not only the effects of the Spanish conquest on the lives of the indigenous populations, but also the cultural continuities and discontinuities. Moving into the present, the volume ends will an overview of the ways in which the image of the Inca and the pre-Columbian past is memorialized and reinterpreted by contemporary Andeans.

The book includes input from many of the leading researchers in the field of Andean studies, a multidisciplinary group including archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, architects and biochemists, among others. They provide the reader with a comprehensive discussion of the Inca polity, its empire, administration and management of the many ethnic groups under its control, from Argentina, Bolivia and Chile in the south across Peru, to Ecuador in the north., Alconini and Covey's book, the outcome of an intellectual ayni—the Quechua word for a collective effort—captures in detail the current state of knowledge about Tawantinsuyu, and it arrives at a time of renewed academic and public dialogue on the past and present of Andean countries., Alconini and Covey have put together an important and enduring volume that certainly will form an important baseline for future synthetic approaches to the Inca and their legacies., This impressive handbook on the Incas has 47 articles by 48 international scholars... The Inca Empire ranks among the great civilizations of the world, as this comprehensive volume admirably demonstrates., The Oxford Handbook of the Incas makes an important contribution to Inca and Andean studies that utilizes a multidisciplinary, multiscale approach. The book is thoroughly researched and richly illustrated with more than forty articles and two hundred illustrations. Chapters break new ground using innovative multidisciplinary research from the areas of archaeology, ethnohistory and art history.

Sonia Alconini is David A. Harrison III Professor of Archaeology at University of Virginia.R. Alan Covey is Professor of Anthropology at University of Texas at Austin.