The Inca imperium extended along 5,500 kilometers of the rugged Andean cordillera to form the largest native American state and the biggest empire of world antiquity ever to arise south of the equator. The political infrastructure included a vast highway network, which John Hyslop traversed for his innovative companion study The Inca Road System (Academic Press, 1984). From southern Colombia through central Chile, highways linked multitudes of state installations and Inca settlements. Having examined a wider array of these far-flung imperial facilities than other scholars, Hyslop now marshals an enormous amount of archaeological and ethnohistorical information to explore the principles underlying the organization and planning of Inca settlements.
Hyslop proceeds from the justifiable premise that those principles of planning must be explained in terms of their native Andean meaning and symbolism. This leads to very original, if not controversial, insights, because modern scholars have come to little agreement on how to go about second-guessing the Inca mindset and cosmology.
Though Hyslop summarizes well the canons of Inca architecture, he concentrates on the location, distribution, and arrangement of structures. Taking the ancient capital, Cuzco, as an organizational key to understanding other imperial settlements, Hyslop’s second chapter provides an excellent synthesis of what is known about the composition of the Andean metropolis. This is followed by chapter 3 on plazas as centers of ceremony, 4 on rocks and outcroppings, 5 on water, 6 on military settlements, 7 on orthogonal and radial patterns, 8 on astronomical orientations, 9 on mixed Inca-local settlements, and 10 on environmental influences. The concluding chapter, 11, skillfully contrasts imperial administrative centers, royal estates, and religious sanctuaries. It then examines sources of organizational variations and the imperial role of state settlements. Clearly written, with extensive references and excellent maps and illustrations, this fine book is a major contribution to Inca studies and to the study of ancient statecraft.