The Incas did not abolish the religions of the peoples they took. A conquered province kept its huacas and its priesthoods, and was required to add the state cult of the Sun, to yield land and herds for its support, and to send its principal idol to Cusco, where it was housed with honour and also held as a hostage: a province that rebelled could expect its god to suffer for it. Terence D'Altroy's survey describes this alongside the resettlement of populations and the state's obligation to feed those it mobilised, as instruments of one policy.
The empire's most demanding rite was the capacocha, in which selected children were sent from the provinces to Cusco, honoured, and then taken to high summits and left. Preserved bodies recovered from the peaks, including three found on Llullaillaco in 1999, have made this one of the best documented sacrificial practices in the ancient world, and hair analysis has shown a change of diet in the months before, indicating a long preparation.
Atahualpa was seized at Cajamarca in 1532 and the empire fell within a year, but Andean religion did not. The extirpation of idolatry campaigns of the seventeenth century, which catalogued shrines in order to destroy them, are now the historian's best evidence of how many there were; the Taki Onqoy movement of the 1560s preached that the huacas would return and drive the Spanish out; and mountain and spring veneration continues inside Andean Catholicism today.