The Incas (Peoples of America) | 
 enlarge | Author: Terence N. D'altroy
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 273676
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 408
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 1405116765
Dewey Decimal Number: 980
EAN: 9781405116763
ASIN: 1405116765
Publication Date: August 8, 2003
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Product Description
The great empire of the Incas at its height encompassed an area of western South America comparable in size to the Roman Empire in Europe. This book describes and explains its extraordinary progress from a remote Andean settlement near Lake Titicaca to its rapid demise six centuries later at the hands of the Spanish conquerors.
- A bold new history by the world's leading expert on Incan civilization.
- Covers the entire Andean region, five countries and ten million people.
- Heavily illustrated with maps, figures, and photographs.
Book Description
The great empire of the Incas at its height encompassed an area of western South America comparable in size to the Roman Empire in Europe. This book describes and explains 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.The Incas is the first book fully to synthesize history and archaeology in a sweeping exploration of the entire empire from Chile to Ecuador. The author explains how the Incas drew from millennia of cultural developments to mould a diverse land into a dynamic, powerful, and yet fragile polity. From this integrated perspective, The Incas profoundly rethinks the nature of imperial formation, ideology, and social, economic, and political relations in Inca society.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Not bedtime reading... May 10, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Eager to learn more about the Incas, I found out the hard way that this book is not for the casual enthusiast. If you are working on graduate studies on the Incas, yes, this might be a useful book. If you are traveling to Peru and/or simply interested in learning about the Incas, I'd avoid this book.
 The Incas May 13, 2007
I have a great interest in the Inca tribes and wished to find out more about them. It was very good study material for my studies.
Excellent source for all the information you need on the Incas December 15, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I'm preparing to travel to Peru in a month so i bought this book to get myself aquainted with the Incas and the book didnt dissapoint me.The authors do a very good job in presenting the Incas in a very interesting manner using terms that were easy to follow and understand.The part of the book that deals with their cult of the dead was very interesting and informative.Also it is very well explained how the Incas governed themselves and how do they managed to form a very impressive empire despite the fact that it was formed by a lot of different tribes and peoples from the Andean Plateau.This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand and, very important,to enjoy reading about such an amazing culture.
The most complete source about the Incas August 2, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book provides all the information needed to understand many aspects of the Inca empire. Comparing recent archaeological findings with Spanish cronicles and with many Inca narratives about their lifestyle, Terence D'altroy offers a scientific point of view about this magnificent realm. The Incas constitute a major guide that must be readed before traveling to Peru.
Thorough August 25, 2004
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
Professor D'Altroy, a UCLA graduate in 1981, is director of the Columbia Center for Archaeology and professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His specialty is the Inca, and this volume is a cumulative description of current research on that topic.
The Incas is a thorough description of the land and people of the region, including groups and empires that preceded the Inca. Written sources for the information are analyzed for their contemporaneity, reliability, and bias, while archaeological data are used to clarify these accounts where possible. The author discusses not only the rise and fall of the empire but the social order and political and religious ideology as well.
The notes to the chapters are interesting in themselves, as they provide additional information that addresses questions that seem to arise from natural curiosity about the details of events. My favorites had to do with the claimed ages of witnesses to events and those claimed for various emperors. The bibliography is truly amazing and contains entries of almost every copyright date, many annotated, recently printed volumes of early explorers' accounts. A casual perusal of the entries suggests that most of these date to 1558 and later. Some of the secondary entries and most of the primary sources are in Spanish, although there are more than enough in English to answer to the needs of the interested. Periodicals are a significant portion of the bibliography, however, and some of these may be difficult to find unless one has access to a large university library. Most of the modern book entries date to the late 1970's, although some of historical interest or significance date to the earlier years of the 20th Century.
The book is easily accessible to the average reader with an interest in Native Americans, the Incas, anthropology, archaeology, political history, social history, Spain in the New World, and cultures in conflict.
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