Inca Empire

The Sapa Inca ruled as the son of Inti, the Sun, and the empire's ceremonial centre was the Qorikancha at Cusco, the golden enclosure, whose walls the Spanish found plated in gold and whose courtyard held images of the Sun, the Moon, the thunder and the stars. Above and behind Inti stood Viracocha, the creator, whose worship the sources associate especially with the ruler of that name.

Radiating from the Qorikancha ran the ceque system, more than forty lines of sighting along which over three hundred huacas, shrines, were arranged: springs, stones, mountain peaks, tombs, battlefields. Each line was assigned to a particular kin group of Cusco, which was responsible for the offerings made along it, so that the calendar, the ritual duties and the social order of the capital were all inscribed on the landscape at once. Brian Bauer's field survey relocated a large number of these shrines and showed that the arrangement, described by the seventeenth century Jesuit Bernabe Cobo, corresponds to real places.

Death did not remove a ruler from politics. Each dead Sapa Inca was mummified, kept in his own palace with his estates and servants, brought out to festivals, consulted and fed. Since the mummy retained the property, each new ruler had to conquer his own, which is one explanation historians offer for the empire's extraordinary speed of expansion.

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.