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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 ...
Inca officials received two-thirds of a farmer's crops (over 20 varieties of corn and 240 varieties of potatoes). [17] This system of work was organized within the framework of institutionalized reciprocity, the Inca emperor was united by personal relations to the regional rulers. [8]
Inca animal husbandry refers to how in the pre-Hispanic andes, camelids played a truly important role in the economy. In particular, the llama and alpaca —the only camelids domesticated by Andean people— [ 1 ] which were raised in large-scale houses and used for different purposes within the production system of the Incas .
An important objective in constructing andenes was to permit maize to be grown at elevations above its usual climatic limit of 3,200 metres (10,500 ft) up to 3,500 metres (11,500 ft). Maize was a prestige crop for the Incas and earlier cultures, but of the crops cultivated in the Andes, it is the most demanding of water and nutrients. [15] [16]
The Inca Empire, or Incan Empire [35] (Quechua: Tawantinsuyu), was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. [36] The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cusco .
Vicuñas and guanacos, though undomesticated, were used for their fine and much-prized wool. Little agriculture is performed in the puna, though in the Bolivian altiplano intensive agriculture was possible through the use of waru waru raised bed agriculture, which used specialized irrigation techniques to prevent frost from destroying crops.
The terraces were built to make the most efficient use of shallow soil and to enable irrigation of crops by allowing runoff to occur through the outlet. [9] The Inca people built on these, developing a system of canals, aqueducts, and puquios to direct water through dry land and increase fertility levels and growth. [10]
The Inca referred to their empire as Tawantinsuyu, [13] "the suyu of four [parts]". In Quechua, tawa is four and -ntin is a suffix naming a group, so that a tawantin is a quartet, a group of four things taken together, in this case the four suyu ("regions" or "provinces") whose corners met at the capital.