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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 ...
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 used by the Inca, who adopted them. The terraces were ...
Agricultural Andenes or terraces in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, close to Pisac, Peru.. 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 crops are arranged within the mountains and plateaus of the Andes in four distinct landscape-based units described as Hill, Ox Area, Early Planting, and Valley which overlap one another in a patchwork-styles of plateau surfaces, steep slopes, and wetland patches. [3]
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.
Noted American archeologist Ephraim George Squier noted several aqueducts during his exploration of Peru in the late 1800s, including those that watered gardens on the terraces of the Yucay or Sacred Valley, north of Cuzco. He also recorded an account of the ruins of a sixty-foot-high aqueduct in the foothills of the Andes near Lima. [4]
Each year, in the valleys around Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, Acción Andina hosts Queuña Raymi, a tree-growing festival. The celebration begins with ancestral rituals, such as dances and ...
The plateau is located at the latitude of the widest part of the north–south-trending Andes. The bulk of the Altiplano lies in Bolivia, but its northern parts lie in Peru, and its southwestern fringes lie in Chile. There are on the plateau many towns and several cities, including El Alto and Oruro in Bolivia, Juliaca and Puno in Peru.