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Andenes in the Sacred Valley at Pisac, Peru Diagram of Inca engineering of andenes. An andén (plural andenes), Spanish for "platform", [1] is a stair-step like terrace dug into the slope of a hillside for agricultural purposes. The term is most often used to refer to the terraces built by pre-Columbian cultures in the Andes mountains of South ...
Inca agriculture was the culmination of thousands of years of farming and herding in the high-elevation Andes mountains of South America, the coastal deserts, and the rainforests of the Amazon basin. These three radically different environments were all part of the Inca Empire (1438-1533 CE) and required different technologies for agriculture .
Diagram showing Inca terrace engineering for agriculture. In the South American Andes, farmers have used terraces, known as andenes, for over a thousand years to farm potatoes, maize, and other native crops. Terraced farming was developed by the Wari culture and other peoples of the south-central Andes before 1000 AD, centuries before they were ...
Changes in farming unit types within the Andean region has also had indirect effects on downstream ecosystems. Specifically within Colombia, with the expansion of Ox Area units causing deforestation, over 63% of the land cover has been replaced by agriculture indirectly increasing the concentration of NH3-N in the water as well as sedimentation ...
In dry periods only the mountains had enough rainfall for agriculture while the desert coast was empty. In wet periods many cultures thrived along the rivers. The Inca were a mountain-based culture that expanded when the climate became wetter, often sending conquered peoples down from the mountains into fallow but farmable lowlands.
The earliest civilizations were on the hyper-arid desert coast of Peru. Agriculture was possible only with irrigation in valleys crossed by rivers coming from the high Andes, plus in a few fog oases called lomas. In the Andes, agriculture was limited by thin soils, cold climate, low or seasonal precipitation, and a scarcity of flat land.
Agriculture terraces were (and are) common in the austere, high-elevation environment of the Andes. Inca farmers using a human-powered foot plough. The earliest known areas of possible agriculture in the Americas dating to about 9000 BC are in Colombia, near present-day Pereira, and by the Las Vegas culture in Ecuador on the Santa Elena peninsula.
These terraces allowed the Inca to utilize the land for farming that they never could in the past. [6] Everything about how the terrace functions, looks, its geometric alignment, etc. all depend on the slope of the land. [6] The different layering of materials is part of what makes the terraces so successful.