Rethinking the Inka

Rethinking the Inka Empire brings us new insights into the expansionary motives and methods of the last and largest indigenous state in the Americas as seen from the perspective of the south—the imperial realm known as Qullasuyu—where some of the most exciting research in Inka studies is happening today. In this volume, leading scholars from South America provide a cohesive set of studies that foreground contemporary theoretical concerns with sacred landscapes, material agencies, and social ecologies.

~Tamara Bray, Wayne State University, author of The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes

This important and engaging volume brings together recent scholarship regarding the largest sector of the Inca Empire:  Qullasuyu, the vast southern suyu of the Empire of the Four Quarters, Tawantinsuyu. Summarizing recent and extensive archaeological and ethnohistorical research, the contributors explore the dynamic interactions between an expanding empire and indigenous elites and communities, as well as the relations between humans and nonhuman agents such as mountain peaks, sacred shrines, and mines. The result is an invaluable contribution to South American prehistory and a stimulating model for thinking about the global archaeology of empires.

~Jerry D. Moore, California State University Dominguez Hills, author of Ancient Andean Houses: Making, Inhabiting, Studying

In a famous poem on the Inkas, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda asked, “Stone upon stone, but where are the people?” Rethinking the Inka answers his challenge with richly documented studies of Inka culture and life in the southern quadrant of Qullasuyu, showing the people to be extraordinarily diverse—culturally, materially, and economically—marking a turning point in the archaeology of pre-Columbian America. These studies represent a watershed moment in which archaeologists of the Southern Cone of South America have taken a leadership role in world archaeology.

~Bruce Mannheim, University of Michigan, author of The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion