The great empire of the Incas at its height encompassed an area of western South America comparable in size to the Roman Empire in Europe. This book describes and explains its extraordinary progress from a small Andean society in southern Peru to its rapid demise little more than a century later at the hands of the Spanish conquerors. The Incas is the first book fully to synthesize history and archaeology in a sweeping exploration of the entire empire from Chile to Ecuador. The author explains how the Incas drew from millennia of cultural developments to mould a diverse land into a dynamic, powerful, and yet fragile polity. From this integrated perspective, The Incas profoundly rethinks the nature of imperial formation, ideology, and social, economic, and political relations in Inca society.