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Behind the retaining wall, the bottom one metre (3.3 ft) was filled with large stones, overlaid by a layer about 1 metre (3.3 ft) thick of sand or gravel. Capping the top of the terrace was a layer of topsoil about 1 metre (3.3 ft) thick. The result was a terrace providing "well-drained rich soil and a level surface for growing crops."
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 .
In agriculture, a terrace is a piece of sloped plane that has been cut into a series of successively receding flat surfaces or platforms, which resemble steps, for the purposes of more effective farming. This type of landscaping is therefore called terracing. Graduated terrace steps are commonly used to farm on hilly or mountainous terrain.
The Inca faced many problems with living in areas with steep terrain. Two large issues were soil erosion and area to grow crops. [5] [6] The solution to these problems was the development of terraces, called Andenes. These terraces allowed the Inca to utilize the land for farming that they never could in the past. [6]
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 Inca state drew its taxes through both tax in kind and corvée labor drawn from lineages and administered through a bureaucracy composed largely of local nobility. The corvée labor force was used for military operations as well as public works projects, such as roads, aqueducts, and storage buildings known as tampu and qollqa .
Inca rule extended to nearly a hundred linguistic or ethnic communities, some 9 to 14 million people connected by a 40,000-kilometer road system. Cities were built with precise stonework, constructed over many levels of mountain terrain. Terrace farming was a useful form of agriculture.
The Inca complex at Pisac is a large Incan complex of agricultural terraces, residences, guard posts, watchtowers and a ceremonial/religious centre located along a mountain ridge above the modern town of Pisac in the Sacred Valley of Peru. In 1983 the Pisac National Archeological Park was established to recognize the importance of and to ...