or improved agricultural productivity. Among them were raised fields (to prevent
crops from rotting in poorly drained ground); lagoons (to store water for
irrigation); and sunken fields on the desert coast (dug down to the groundwater
table). Large engineering projects not only aided agriculture, but also modified
the habitat. In the Urubamba valley near Cuzco, the Inca straightened the river’s
meander plain, reconfiguring the valley floor to create more agricultural land and
control flooding.
A complement of hardy crops and domesticated camelids made it possible for
more people to live above 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) in the Andes than anywhere
else in the world. That was true in the Inca period and remains so today. The
Incas did not avoid even extremely high elevations; they mined gold from quartz
veins above 5,000 meters (16,404 feet) on the flanks of Ananea and Illimani, two
snowcapped mountains in the eastern cordillera.
The Inca incorporated the arid coastal region into their imperial design and yet,
for all their manifold accomplishments, they did not effectively colonize the hot
jungle valleys to the east. The cultivation of coca—the mildly narcotic leaf over
which the Incas held a quasi monopoly—emerged only in the fifteenth century,
under a controlled regime in which most workers were brought in on temporary
work stints. Poor soils, vector-borne infectious disease, and an unwillingness to
adapt to local exigencies discouraged Inca settlement in that region.
Through the millennia and starting well before the Incas, inhabitants of the
Andean highlands ingeniously dealt with the drought, frost, soil erosion,
landslides, and earthquakes that made life so unpredictable. Overcoming an
unusually difficult terrain, the Incas put into place a road network of ca. 40,000
kilometers (25,000 miles).
In short, the Incas welded together a vast, sophisticated polity in spite of
manifold disadvantages of human life in a fractious and disaster-prone mountain
domain. At the same time, however, the mountains provided enough of a buffer
from most outside influences for the Incas to have created a civilization that, by
any world standard, was truly unique.
Further Reading
Gade, Daniel W. Nature and Culture in the Andes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
Pulgar Vidal, Javier. Geografía del Perú. Las ocho regiones naturales. 9th ed. Lima: Peisa, 1987.
■DANIEL W. GADE