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Introduction

he Inca Empire was the largest state of the Pre-Columbian New World,
greater by far in extent and number of subjects than either
Mesoamerica’s Aztec Triple Alliance or the Maya city-states. The
territorial boundaries of the Inca Empire at its height extended almost 5,
kilometers (3,000 miles) from just north of the present-day border between
Colombia and Ecuador; southward along the spine of the Andes through Peru,
Bolivia, and northwest Argentina; and down to the Maule River, about 100
kilometers south of Santiago, Chile. The Pacific Ocean formed the western
boundary along this vast stretch of territory, while to the east, the frontier
generally coincided with the Andean foothills that formed the upper watershed
of the Amazon River (in the northern half of the empire) and the Paraná River
(in the southern half). Within this extensive and ecologically highly diverse
territory—from the flat, desert, coastal plain eastward, rising to soaring
mountains and then dropping sharply down to dense tropical forests—the Incas
exercised an unstable, contested suzerainty over myriad ethnic groups speaking a
host of different languages and dialects.
How did a single ethnic group, even one that claimed divine ancestry, subdue
the many different peoples who occupied this vast territory and maintain some
degree of control over them, even for the empire’s short life span, ca. AD 1450–
1532? This is the challenge that we take up in the Encyclopedia of the Incas, the
first encyclopedia ever produced on this great autochthonous American empire.
To meet this challenge, the editors have drawn on 35 highly knowledgeable Inca
specialists, each of whom has contributed one or more entries dealing with a
topic on which they have special knowledge and expertise. We will have more to
say later about the selection of authors and the general rationale for the
organization of the encyclopedia.
The purpose of this introduction is two-fold: to provide readers with an
understanding of the principal challenges faced by scholars who study Inca
civilization and to introduce the Incas to nonspecialists by providing a broad
overview of the Incas and their empire through which the specific entries in this
encyclopedia may be understood in their larger context.