FRANKLIN PEASE
In The Incas, Peruvian historian Franklin Pease García-Yrigoyen explores all aspects of life in the Tawantinsuyu, the great Inca empire that stretched for thousands of miles along the Andes of modern-day Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. Pease does so by reexamining the sources of most of our knowledge of this complex society, the chronicles written during and after the Spanish conquest by a disparate group of soldiers, priests, colonial administrators and the descendants of its protagonists, often themselves of mixed Andean-Spanish blood. This account opens a window into the Inca universe, vividly explaining everything from the Inca polity and economic structures to its agriculture, transportation infrastructure, creation myths and religious beliefs. It also takes great care to avoid the common historiographical error of projecting onto the Incas, arguably the last great civilization to have existed without contact with the Old World, western ways of seeing and imagining the universe.
