The Inca: Lost Civilizations

The Inca: Lost Civilizations by Kevin Lane

The Inca are an intriguing population. They had built up a great empire that only seemed to last a short time before it succumbed to the Spaniard guns and germs. The Inca had very little intercourse with other populations (in part due to their geography). Thus they developed many of the hallmarks of humanity (such as writing) in their own fashion. With the vast elevation changes in an equatorial region, they had a variety of climatic regions in a small geographic area.

This book on the Inca is written from a very academic style. Anthropologists and archeologists are given abundant credit for their insights. There is little concrete narrative on the life of Inca, but rather a scientific dissection of the various aspects of their society. This leads to some repetition with parts that fit in multiple categorizations.

Some areas that I found interesting included the fact that the Inca empire was relatively short lived. There were other civilizations that had grown up before. The Inca unified some close regions and had a strong empire for only a few generations. They also used means of moving people around to keep them in order. Road networks were fairly well established as was agriculture (especially potatoes).  The religion seems to not be very well understood, but it did include some human sacrifice. Dynastic leadership was quite complex with multiple aspects of inheritance and old clans "hanging on".