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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 .
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 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.
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.
Even the first Quechua dictionaries by Santo Tomás [7] and González Holguín [8] have different words for open spaces: panpa to describe an open, common space translated into Spanish as 'plaza' or a place where there are no houses or a space for eating, drinking and merrymaking; pata normally referred to a terrace, an andén or an elevated ...
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The incursion caused a number of the valley's existing villages to be abandoned, with one partially destroyed to make room for a Wari administrative center known as Jincamocco. The Wari introduced terracing agriculture to the area, shifting the staple crops of the valley from tubers to both tubers and maize. Wari storage structures have been ...