Ten things
people get wrong
about the Inca.

The Inca were one Quechua-speaking ethnic group among many Andean peoples (Aymara, Cañari, Chimú, Chanca, Lupaqa, and a dozen others) and one Andean civilisation among the long sequence of Andean cultures (Chavín, Moche, Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimú, and the Inca themselves). The lumping of all pre-Columbian American peoples into a single "Indian" identity is a Spanish colonial convenience that has little to do with the pre-conquest reality. The Inca state was, in its own self-understanding, ethnically and linguistically Quechua, with a ruling lineage that traced its descent from the Sun deity Inti through the founder Manco Cápac. The conquered peoples were not "fellow Indians" but distinct nations with distinct languages, religions, and political traditions.

The Inca did not have alphabetic or syllabic writing. They did have the khipu — a knotted-cord record system that encoded numerical information in a decimal positional system, with cord colour, spin direction, and attachment carrying categorical information. Recent decipherment work, particularly by Sabine Hyland on the village khipus of Collata, has demonstrated that at least some khipus encoded phonetic information sufficient to identify individuals and lineages. The Inca state was therefore not in any meaningful sense "illiterate"; it had a non-alphabetic written-record system that we are still learning to read. The standard formulation "the Inca did not have writing" is, while technically correct in the conventional alphabetic sense, substantially misleading about the actual administrative capabilities of the state.

Pizarro's expedition at Cajamarca in November 1532 numbered 168 men. Within months, that force had been substantially reinforced (Almagro arrived with more men, additional Panamanian expeditions arrived, indigenous allies joined). More importantly, the "conquest" of the Inca Empire was not a contest in which 168 Spaniards defeated an army of millions in pitched battle. The empire was already half-destroyed by smallpox (which had killed perhaps a third of the population, including most of the senior leadership) and by the civil war (which had left the imperial army exhausted and the various conquered populations resentful of the Quito faction). Many indigenous groups — the Cañari, the Wanka, the Chanka, the Chachapoyas, parts of the Cuzco aristocracy itself — actively allied with the Spaniards against the Inca government. The Spanish-allied indigenous troops at major battles substantially outnumbered the Spaniards themselves. The conquest was an Andean civil war in which a small Spanish force tipped the strategic balance and then, over the following decades, absorbed the resulting state. The "168 Spaniards" framing is technically correct but politically simplistic.

Machu Picchu was never lost. The local Quechua-speaking population around the site knew of its existence continuously from the time of its construction. Several documented Western visitors reached the site before Bingham — the German engineer Augusto Berns in the 1880s (with substantial commercial activity at the site); the British missionary Thomas Payne; the Peruvian agriculturalist Agustín Lizárraga, who left a 1902 inscription on one of the walls. What Hiram Bingham did, in 1911, was bring the site to the attention of international academic archaeology through his National Geographic publications of 1912 and 1913. He did not "discover" or "rediscover" it. The framing of him as the discoverer is a piece of early-twentieth-century Anglo-American mythologising that is now substantially corrected by the contemporary scholarly literature, although it has persisted in popular accounts.

The Inca state provided substantial material security to its subjects through the qollqa storehouse system; built and maintained extensive infrastructure that benefited the population; suppressed inter-tribal warfare across most of its territory; supported large-scale agricultural development that benefited the rural majority; and operated through indigenous local institutions (the ayllus and the kurakas) rather than through wholesale destruction of local culture. By the standards of comparable pre-modern empires (the Roman, the Han Chinese, the various Old World imperial states), it was unusually focused on the welfare of its subject population, in a literal as well as a rhetorical sense.

It was also an empire that practised forced population resettlement on a massive scale (the mitma system); imposed the imperial Sun cult on subject populations through the requirement of state ceremonial worship; conducted child sacrifice on the highest mountain peaks (the capacocha rituals); operated a substantial human-labour conscription system that conscripted years of labour from each subject household; and pursued sustained territorial expansion through military conquest, with the standard violence of pre-modern warfare. The romanticised "Inca socialism" interpretation — popular in early-twentieth-century writings — substantially overstates the case. The Inca state was a complex institution that did some things well by modern standards and some things badly.

The Inca had a substantial and technically sophisticated metallurgical tradition, inherited principally from the pre-Inca cultures of the coast and altiplano (particularly the Moche, the Chimú, and the Tiwanaku traditions). Inca-period metalworkers produced gold and silver ceremonial objects of extraordinary technical quality, including the great gold sun discs of the Coricancha (melted down by the Spaniards for bullion), the bronze artefacts that the Inca army used for weapons (axes, mace-heads, spear-points) and tools (chisels for masonry, agricultural implements), and the copper coinage-substitute money-tokens used in certain restricted contexts. What the Inca did not have was iron metallurgy — none of the pre-Columbian American cultures developed iron working — which was the principal metallurgical advantage of the Spanish conquerors. The "no metallurgy" framing is, on the broader picture, wrong; the Inca had metallurgy and used it extensively.

The Spanish military advantages — steel armour and weapons, crossbows and arquebuses, cavalry, the trained discipline of professional Spanish veterans — were real but not, by themselves, decisive. The conquest succeeded because of a specific concatenation of factors: the smallpox epidemic that had preceded the Spanish arrival and had killed perhaps a third of the indigenous population, including most of the senior leadership; the civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa that had left the imperial army exhausted; the substantial indigenous-American military assistance that the Spaniards received from groups (Cañari, Chachapoyas, parts of the Cuzco aristocracy) hostile to Atahualpa's faction; the strategic gambit at Cajamarca that captured Atahualpa as a hostage; and the institutional fact that the Sapa Inca's orders were obeyed even when he was a captive, which gave Pizarro effective control of the imperial administration. In a hypothetical case where the Inca state was at full strength under a competent ruler and had not been ravaged by smallpox, the Spanish military advantages would not have been sufficient. The actual conquest was as much a political opportunity as a military victory.

The Atahualpa ransom of 1532-1533 — about 5,500 kg of gold and 11,000 kg of silver — was the largest single seizure of pre-Columbian American precious-metal wealth in any documented episode. Substantial additional amounts were collected by Pizarro's expedition during the occupation of Cuzco in 1533-1534. However, contemporary Spanish reports (and later indigenous Andean traditions) describe the active concealment by Inca officials of additional gold and silver treasures — particularly the gold and silver llama-mummy figures, the additional sun-discs, and the regalia of various non-Cuzco regional temples. The treasure-locations have been the subject of treasure-hunting expeditions for four centuries. None of the major caches have been recovered. Some of them probably never existed; some were probably consumed or dispersed during the post-conquest disorders; some may indeed still exist somewhere in the Andes, though after four centuries the probability of recovery is low.

Machu Picchu was, on the current scholarly interpretation, a royal estate of the Pachacuti lineage — a private residential and ceremonial complex for the Sapa Inca and his immediate court. It was not the imperial capital (that was Cuzco), the principal religious centre (that was also Cuzco), the lost final capital (that was Vilcabamba), or the secret refuge city of post-conquest Inca resistance (Vilcabamba again). The early-twentieth-century romantic interpretation of Machu Picchu as some kind of mystical lost capital — which has shaped much of its popular reception — is not supported by the documentary or archaeological evidence. It is a beautiful place. It is not a national lost capital.

Quechua is spoken by approximately eight to ten million people across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. It is the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas. It is an official language in Peru and Bolivia, with formal education at the primary level mandatory in some regions. It has substantial media presence (radio, television, newspapers, internet) in the principal Andean countries. The intergenerational transmission of Quechua has been weakening in some urban contexts under pressure from Spanish, and the language faces the same difficulties as most minority languages in the modern world. But the framing of Quechua as a "dying language" is not accurate. It has, on present trends, every prospect of continued use as a living language for the foreseeable future, particularly in the rural highland regions where its position has been most stable.