THE INCAS OF PERU 29
fore him. Barefoot, with their eyes on the ground,
they approached the basketry throne of their king.
Moctezuma dined in solitary magnifi cence, sepa-
rated by a wooden screen from his servitors and
the four great lords with whom he conversed.
This wealth, luxury, and ceremony revealed
the great social and economic changes that had
taken place in the small, despised Aztec tribe that
had come to live in the marshes of Lake Texcoco
less than two centuries before. The Aztec Empire
had reached a peak of pride and power. Yet the
Aztec leaders lived in fear, as evidenced by the Az-
tec chronicles. The mounting demands of the Az-
tec tribute collectors caused revolts on the part of
tributary towns. Though repressed, they broke out
afresh. The haunted Aztec imagination saw por-
tents of evil on earth and in the troubled air. A child
was born with two heads; the volcano Popocatepetl
became unusually active; a comet streamed across
the sky. The year 1519 approached, the year in
which, according to Aztec lore, the god-king Quet-
zalcóatl might return to reclaim the realm from
which he had been driven centuries before by the
forces of evil.
The Incas of Peru
In the highlands of modern Peru in the mid-
fourteenth century, a small tribe rose from ob-
scurity to create by 1500 the mightiest empire of
Ancient America. Since the time of Pizarro’s dis-
covery and conquest of Peru, Inca achievements
in political and social organization have attracted
intense interest. Soon after the Conquest, a debate
began on the nature of Inca society that has con-
tinued almost to the present day. For some it was a
“socialist empire”; others viewed it as a forerunner
of the “welfare state” of our own time, and for still
others, the Inca realm anticipated the totalitarian
tyrannies of the twentieth century. Only recently
has more careful study of evidence from colonial
provincial records—offi cial economic and social
inquiries, litigation, wills, and the like—provided a
more correct picture of Inca society and banished
the traditional labels.
The physical environment of the central An-
dean area offers a key to the remarkable cultural
development of this region. In Peru, high moun-
tains rise steeply from the sea, leaving a narrow
coastal plain that is a true desert. The Humboldt
Current runs north along the coast from the Ant-
arctic, making the ocean much colder than the land
so the rains fall at sea. Lack of rainfall, however,
is compensated for by short rivers that make their
precipitous way down from the high snowfi elds.
These rivers create oases at intervals along the
coast and provide water for systems of canal irriga-
tion. The aridity of the climate preserves the great
natural wealth of the soil, which can be leached
away in areas of heavy rainfall. The coastal wa-
ters of Peru are rich in fi sh, and its offshore islands,
laden in Inca times with millions of tons of guano,
made available an inexhaustible source of fertilizer
for agriculture.
To be sure, the rugged highlands of modern
Peru and Bolivia offer relatively little arable land,
but the valleys are fertile and well watered and
support a large variety of crops. Maize is grown
at lower levels (up to about eleven thousand feet),
potatoes and quinoa at higher altitudes. Above the
agricultural zone, the puna (plateau) provides fod-
der for herds of llamas and alpacas, domesticated
members of the camel family that were important
in Inca times as a source of meat and wool. Poten-
tially, this environment offered a basis for large
food production and a dense population.ORIGINS OF INCA CULTURE
Like the Aztecs of ancient Mexico, the Incas of Peru
were heirs to a cultural tradition of great antiquity.
This tradition had its origin not in the highlands
but on the coast. By 2500 BCE, a village life, based
chiefl y on fi shing and food gathering and supple-
mented by the cultivation of squash, lima beans, and
a few other plants, had arisen around the mouths
of rivers in the coastal area. Maize, introduced into
Peruvian agriculture about 1500 BCE, did not be-
come important until many centuries later.
The transition from the Archaic to the Preclassic
period seems to have come later and more suddenly
in Peru than in Mesoamerica. After long centuries
of the simple village life just described, a strong ad-
vance of culture began on the coast about 900 BCE.