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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 administration constructed and renovated very complex ancient networks of roads and bridges, known as Qhapaq Ñan, in order to improve the ability of the Inca to exert imperial authority. Inca engineers improved upon earlier cultures' highways, such as those built by the Chimu, Wari, and Tiwanaku, among others. [5]
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. In contrast, the Moche were a lowland culture that died out after a strong El Niño , which caused abnormally high rainfall and floods followed by a long drought .
The Inca referred to their empire as Tawantinsuyu, [14] "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.
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 .
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.
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.
A water channel to drain and irrigate andenes. Andenes were complicated to build, requiring provisions for drainage and irrigation. The first step in constructing an andén was to lay an underground or bedrock foundation about 1 metre (3.3 ft) deep to lend strength and stability to the retaining wall, which might rise about 2 metres (6.6 ft) above the slope of the ground.