The Indians' appearance in this European city surely caused a stir. Not long before, Shakespeare had griped in The Tempest that the populace of the much bigger city of London "would not give a doit [a small coin] to a lame beggar, [but] will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." Hunt managed to sell only a few of his captives before local Roman Catholic priests seized the rest-the Spanish Church vehemently opposed brutality toward Indians. (In 1537 Pope Paul III proclaimed that "Indians themselves indeed are true men" and should not be "deprived of their liberty" and "reduced to our service like brute animals.") The priests intended to save both Tisquantum's body, by preventing his enslavement, and his soul, by converting him to Christianity. It is unlikely that Tisquantum was converted, though it's possible that he allowed the friars to think he had been. In any case, this resourceful man convinced them to let him return home-or, rather, to try to return. He got to London, where he stayed with John Slany, a shipbuilder with investments in Newfoundland. Slany apparently taught Tisquantum English while maintaining him as a curiosity in his townhouse. Meanwhile, Tisquantum persuaded him to arrange for passage to North America on a fishing vessel. He ended up in a tiny British fishing camp on the southern edge of Newfoundland. It was on the same continent as Patuxet, but between them were a thousand miles of rocky coastline and the Mi'Kmac and Abenaki alliances, which were at war with one another.

Because traversing this unfriendly territory would be difficult, Tisquantum began looking for a ride to Patuxet. He extolled the bounty of New England to Thomas Dermer, one of Smith's subordinates, who was then staying in the same camp. Dermer, excited by Tisquantum's promise of easy wealth, contacted Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges, a longtime, slightly dotty enthusiast about the Americas, promised to send over a ship with the men, supplies, and legal papers necessary for Dermer to take a crack at establishing a colony in New England. Dermer, with Tisquantum, was supposed to meet the ship when it arrived in New England.

One Edward Rowcraft captained the ship sent by Gorges from England. According to Gorges's principal biographer, Rowcraft "appears to have been unfit for such an enterprise." This was an understatement. In a bizarre episode, Rowcraft sailed to the Maine coast in early 1619; promptly spotted a French fishing boat; seized it for supposedly trespassing on British property (North America); placed its crew in chains aboard his own ship; sent that ship back to Gorges with the prisoners; continued his journey on the smaller French vessel, which led to a mutiny; quelled the mutiny; stranded the mutineers on the Maine coast; discovered that a) without the mutineers he didn't have enough people to operate the captured ship and b) it was slowly filling up with water from leaks; and decided to sail immediately for Britain's colony in Jamestown, Virginia, which had the facilities to repair the hull-a course that entailed skipping the promised rendezvous with Dermer. At Jamestown, Rowcraft managed, through inattentiveness, to sink his ship. Not long afterward he was killed in a brawl.

Incredibly, Dermer failed to execute his part of the plan, too. In orthodox comedy-of-errors style, he did not wait for Rowcraft in Maine, as he was supposed to, but sailed back to England, Tisquantum in tow. (The two ships more or less crossed paths in the Atlantic.) Dermer and Tisquantum met personally with Gorges.*6 Evidently they made an excellent impression, for despite Dermer's proven inability to follow instructions Gorges sent him back with Tisquantum and a fresh ship to meet Rowcraft, who was supposed to be waiting for them in New England. Dermer touched land in Maine and discovered that Rowcraft had already left. On May 19, 1619, still accompanied by Tisquantum, he set out for Massachusetts, hoping to catch up with Rowcraft (he didn't know that Rowcraft had sunk his own ship).

What Tisquantum saw on his return home was unimaginable. From southern Maine to Narragansett Bay, the coast was empty-"utterly void," Dermer reported. What had once been a line of busy communities was now a mass of tumbledown homes and untended fields overrun by blackberries. Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun. Slowly Dermer's crew realized they were sailing along the border of a cemetery two hundred miles long and forty miles deep. Patuxet had been hit with special force. Not a single person remained. Tisquantum's entire social world had vanished.

Looking for his kinsfolk, he led Dermer on a melancholy march inland. The settlements they passed lay empty to the sky but full of untended dead. Tisquantum's party finally encountered some survivors, a handful of families in a shattered village. These people sent for Massasoit, who appeared, Dermer wrote, "with a guard of fiftie armed men"-and a captive French sailor, a survivor of the shipwreck on Cape Cod. Massasoit asked Dermer to send back the Frenchman. And then he told Tisquantum what had happened.

One of the French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia. (In their view, the strain was, like hepatitis A, probably spread by contaminated food, rather than by sexual contact, like hepatitis B or C.) Whatever the cause, the results were ruinous. The Indians "died in heapes as they lay in their houses," the merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the healthy fled from the sick, carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them remained the dying, "left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon." Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle," Morton wrote, that the Massachusetts woodlands seemed to be "a new-found Golgotha," the Place of the Skull, where executions took place in Roman Jerusalem.

The religious overtones in Morton's metaphor are well placed. Neither the Indians nor the Pilgrims had our contemporary understanding of infectious disease. Each believed that sickness reflected the will of celestial forces. As the writer and historian Paula Gunn Allen put it, The idea that the realm of the spirits or the supernatural was powerfully engaged in the day-to-day life of nations as well as of villagers was commonly held on both sides of the Atlantic.... Both [Indians and Europeans] predicted events by the position of certain stars on the ecliptic plane around earth as much as by visionary techniques, and both assumed the reality of malicious as well as beneficent supernaturals.

The only real question in the minds of either side was whether Indian spiritual forces could affect Europeans, and vice versa. (As an experiment, Cotton Mather, a celebrated New England minister, tried to exorcise the "daemons in a possessed young woman" with incantations in Massachusett. To his satisfaction, the results demonstrated empirically that Indian magic had no effect on Christian devils.) Until the sickness Massasoit had directly ruled a community of several thousand and held sway over a confederation of as many as twenty thousand. Now his group was reduced to sixty people and the entire confederation to fewer than a thousand. The Wampanoag, wrote Salisbury, the Smith historian, came to the obvious logical conclusion: "their deities had allied against them."

The Pilgrims held similar views. Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to "the good hand of God," which "favored our beginnings" by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives...that he might make room for us." Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease. The epidemic, Gorges said, left the land "without any [people] to disturb or appease our free and peaceable possession thereof, from when we may justly conclude, that GOD made the way to effect his work."

Much as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands in one of Europe's richest cities, prompted spiritual malaise across Europe, the New England epidemic shattered the Wampanoag's sense that they lived in balance with an intelligible world. On top of that, the massive death toll created a political crisis. Because the hostility between the Wampanoag and the neighboring Narragansett had restricted contact between them, the disease had not spread to the latter. Massasoit's people were not only beset by loss, they were in danger of subjugation.

In this engraving taken from a John White watercolor of an East Coast village, the palisaded wall suggests that warfare was common enough to merit the considerable labor of cutting down many trees with stone tools, but the forces were not large enough to require moats, stone walls, earthen embankments, or any other big defensive fortification.

After learning about the epidemic, the distraught Tisquantum first returned with Dermer to southern Maine. Apparently concluding he was never going to meet Rowcraft, Dermer decided in 1620 to make another pass at New England. Tisquantum returned, too, but not with Dermer. Instead he walked home-the long, risky journey he had wanted to avoid. In the interim, yet another English expedition had attacked the Wampanoag, killing several without apparent provocation. Understandably enraged, Indians attacked Dermer several times on his journey south; he was eventually slain on Martha's Vineyard by another former Indian abductee. For his part, Tisquantum was seized on his journey home, perhaps because of his association with the hated English, and sent to Massasoit as a captive.

As he had before, Tisquantum talked his way out of a jam. This time he extolled the English, filling Massasoit's ears with tales of their cities, their great numbers, their powerful technology. Tisquantum said, according to a colonist who knew him, that if the sachem "Could make [the] English his Friends then [any] Enemies yt weare to[o] strong for him"-in other words, the Narragansett-"would be Constrained to bowe to him." The sachem listened without trust. Within a few months, word came that a party of English had set up shop at Patuxet. The Wampanoag observed them suffer through the first punishing winter. Eventually Massasoit concluded that he possibly should ally with them-compared to the Narragansett, they were the lesser of two evils. Still, only when the need for a translator became unavoidable did he allow Tisquantum to meet the Pilgrims.

Massasoit had considerable experience with Europeans-his father had sent Martin Pring on his way seventeen years before. But that was before the epidemic, when Massasoit had the option of expelling them. Now he told the Pilgrims that he was willing to leave them in peace (a bluff, one assumes, since driving them away would have taxed his limited resources). But in return he wanted the colonists' assistance with the Narragansett.

To the Pilgrims, the Indians' motives for the deal were obvious. They wanted European technology on their side. In particular, they wanted guns. "He thinks we may be [of] some strength to him," Winslow said later, "for our pieces [guns] are terrible to them."

In fact Massasoit had a subtler plan. It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British-or, rather, that terms like "superior" and "inferior" do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.

Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice-their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists' dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, "which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it." To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer "burst his arrow all to pieces." The Indian was "in a great rage"; he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors "the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly."

At the same time, Europeans were impressed by American technology. The foreigners, coming from a land plagued by famine, were awed by maize, which yields more grain per acre than any other cereal. Indian moccasins were so much more comfortable and waterproof than stiff, moldering English boots that when colonists had to walk for long distances their Indian companions often pitied their discomfort and gave them new footwear. Indian birchbark canoes were faster and more maneuverable than any small European boat. In 1605 three laughing Indians in a canoe literally paddled circles round the lumbering dory paddled by traveler George Weymouth and seven other men. Despite official disapproval, the stunned British eagerly exchanged knives and guns for Indian canoes. Bigger European ships with sails had some advantages. Indians got hold of them through trade and shipwreck, and trained themselves to be excellent sailors. By the time of the epidemic, a rising proportion of the shipping traffic along the New England coast was of indigenous origin.

Reading Massasoit's motives at this distance is a chancy business. But it seems likely that he did not want to ally with the foreigners primarily for their guns, as they believed. Although the sachem doubtless relished the possibility of additional firepower, he probably wanted more to confront the Narragansett with the unappetizing prospect of attacking one group of English people at the same time that their main trading partners were other English people. Faced with the possibility of disrupting their favored position as middlemen, the Narragansett might think twice before staging an incursion. Massasoit, if this interpretation is correct, was trying to incorporate the Pilgrims into the web of native politics. Not long before Massasoit had expelled foreigners who stayed too long in Wampanoag territory. But with the entire confederation now smaller than one of its former communities, the best option seemed to be allowing the Pilgrims to remain. It was a drastic, even fatal, decision.

MACHINATIONS.

Tisquantum worked to prove his value to the Pilgrims. He was so successful that when some anti-British Indians abducted him the colonists sent out a military expedition to get him back. They did not stop to ask themselves why he might be making himself essential, given how difficult it must have been to live in the ghost of his childhood home. In retrospect, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.

Recognizing that the Pilgrims would be unlikely to keep him around forever, Tisquantum decided to gather together the few survivors of Patuxet and reconstitute the old community at a site near Plymouth. More ambitious still, he hoped to use his influence on the English to make this new Patuxet the center of the Wampanoag confederation, thereby stripping the sachemship from Massasoit, who had held him captive. To accomplish these goals, he intended to play the Indians and English against each other.

The scheme was risky, not least because the ever-suspicious Massasoit sent one of his pniese, Hobamok, to Plymouth as a monitor. (Hobamok, like Tisquantum, apparently adopted a new name in his dealings with the British; "Hobamok" was the source of evil in Wampanoag cosmology.) Sometimes the two men were able to work together, as when Hobamok and Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims negotiate a treaty with the Massachusett to the north. They also helped establish a truce with the Nauset of Cape Cod after Bradford promised to pay back the losses caused by their earlier grave robbing.

By fall the settlers' situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.

All the while, Tisquantum covertly tried to persuade other Wampanoag that he was better able to protect them against the Narragansett than Massasoit. In case of attack, Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with an equal number of Indian troops-and the Pilgrims, who might be able to intimidate the enemy. He evidently believed that the Narragansett did not have enough experience with European guns to know that they were not as fearsome as they first appeared. To advance his case, Tisquantum told other Indians that the foreigners had hidden away casefuls of the agent that caused the epidemic, and that he could manipulate them into unleashing it.

Even as Tisquantum attempted to foment Indian distrust of Massasoit, he told the colonists that Massasoit was going to double-cross them by leading a joint attack on Plymouth with the Narragansett. And he attempted to trick the Pilgrims into attacking the sachem.

In the spring of 1622 Tisquantum accompanied a delegation to the Massachusett in Boston Harbor. Minutes after they left, Bradford later recalled, one of the surviving Patuxet "came running in seeming great fear" to inform the settlers that the Narragansett "and he thought also Massasoit" were planning to attack. The idea clearly was that the colonists, enraged by the putative assault, would rise up and smite Massasoit. Tisquantum would be away, so his hands would seem clean. Instead everything went awry. In Indian villages people could only be summoned by shouting; once a canoe had gone a few hundred yards, it could not readily be called back. But when the news came of the impending attack, Bradford ordered the Pilgrims to fire a cannon to order back the expedition and Tisquantum. Meanwhile Hobamok, who had acquired some English, indignantly denied the story. In a move that Tisquantum apparently had not anticipated, Bradford dispatched Hobamok's wife to Massasoit's home to find out what the sachem was doing. She reported that "all was quiet." Actually, this wasn't entirely true. Massasoit was furious-at Tisquantum. He demanded that the Pilgrims send their translator to him for a quick execution.

Bradford refused; Tisquantum's language skills were too vital. Tisquantum is one of my subjects, Massasoit said. You Pilgrims have no jurisdiction over him. And he offered a cache of fur to sweeten the deal. When the colony still would not surrender Tisquantum, Massasoit sent a messenger with a knife and told Bradford to lop off Tisquantum's hands and head. To make his displeasure manifest, he summoned Hobamok home and cut off contact with the Pilgrims. Nervous, the colonists began building defensive fortifications. Worse, almost no rain fell between mid-May and mid-July, withering their crops. Because the Wampanoag had stopped trading with them, the Pilgrims would not be able to supplement their harvest.

Tisquantum, afraid of Massasoit's wrath, was unable to take a step outside of Plymouth without an escort. Nonetheless, he accompanied Bradford on a trip to southeast Cape Cod to negotiate another pact. They were on the way home when Tisquantum suddenly became sick. He died in a few days, his hopes in ruins. In the next decade tens of thousands of Europeans came to Massachusetts. Massasoit shepherded his people through the wave of settlement, and the pact he signed with Plymouth lasted for more than fifty years. Only in 1675 did one of his sons, angered at being pushed around by colonists' laws, launch what was perhaps an inevitable attack. Indians from dozens of groups joined in. The conflict, brutal and sad, tore through New England.

The Europeans won. Historians attribute part of the victory to Indian unwillingness to match the European tactic of massacring whole villages. Another reason for the newcomers' triumph was that by that time they outnumbered the natives. Groups like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic in 1633. A third to half of the remaining Indians in New England died. The People of the First Light could avoid or adapt to European technology but not European disease. Their societies were destroyed by weapons their opponents could not control and did not even know they had.

In the Land of Four Quarters.

"LIKE A CLUB RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES"

In the early 1960s, Henry F. Dobyns, a young anthropologist working on a rural-aid project in Peru, dispatched assistants to storehouses of old records throughout the country. Dobyns himself traveled to the central cathedral in Lima. Entering the nave, visitors passed by a chapel on the right-hand side that contained the mummified body of Francisco Pizarro, the romantic, thuggish Spaniard who conquered Peru in the sixteenth century. Or, rather, they passed by a chapel that was thought to contain the conqueror's mummified body; the actual remains turned up years later, stashed inside two metal boxes beneath the main altar. Dobyns was not visiting the cathedral as a sightseer. Instead, he descended into the structure's basement-cold, dank, poorly lighted-to inspect birth and death registers kept there.

Dobyns belonged to a research team led by his doctoral advisor, Allan R. Holmberg of Cornell, the Holmberg after whom I have unkindly named Holmberg's Mistake. Holmberg had persuaded Cornell to let him lease an old colonial estate in rural Peru (the Carnegie Corporation, a charitable foundation despite its name, provided the funds). The estate included an entire village, whose inhabitants, most of them Indian, were its sharecroppers. "It was really a form of serfdom," Dobyns told me. "The villagers were just heartbreakingly poor." Holmberg planned to test strategies for raising their incomes. Because land tenure was a contentious issue in Peru, he had asked Dobyns to finalize the lease and learn more about the estate's history. With his adjutants, Dobyns visited a dozen archives, including those in the cathedral.

Dobyns had been dipping his toe into archival research for more than a decade, with results he found intriguing. His first foray into the past occurred in 1953, while he was visiting his parents in Phoenix, Arizona, during a school break. A friend, Paul H. Ezell, asked him for some help with his doctoral thesis. The thesis concerned the adoption of Spanish culture by the Pima Indians, who occupy a 372,000-acre reservation south of Phoenix. Many of the region's colonial-era records survived in the Mexican town of Altar, in the border state of Sonora. Ezell wanted to examine those records, and asked Dobyns to come along. One weekend the two men drove from Phoenix to Nogales, on the border. From Nogales, they went south, west, and up into the highlands, often on dirt roads, to Altar.

Then a huddle of small houses surrounding a dozen little stores, Altar was, Dobyns said, "the end of the earth." Local women still covered their heads with shawls. Gringo visitors, few in number, tended to be prospectors chasing rumors of lost gold mines in the mountains.

After surprising the parish priest by their interest in his records, the two young men hauled into the church their principal research tool: a Contura portable copier, an ancestor to the Xerox photocopier that required freshly stirred chemicals for each use. The machine strained the technological infrastructure of Altar, which had electricity for only six hours a day. Under flickering light, the two men pored through centuries-old ledgers, the pages beautifully preserved by the dry desert air. Dobyns was struck by the disparity between the large number of burials recorded at the parish and the far smaller number of baptisms. Almost all the deaths were from diseases brought by Europeans. The Spaniards arrived and then Indians died-in huge numbers, at incredible rates. It hit him, Dobyns told me, "like a club right between the eyes."

At first he did nothing about his observation. Historical demography was not supposed to be his field. Six years later, in 1959, he surveyed more archives in Hermosilla and found the same disparity. By this point he had almost finished his doctorate at Cornell and had been selected for Holmberg's project. The choice was almost haphazard: Dobyns had never been to Peru.

Peru, Dobyns learned, was one of the world's cultural wellsprings, a place as important to the human saga as the Fertile Crescent. Yet the area's significance had been scarcely appreciated outside the Andes, partly because the Spaniards so thoroughly ravaged Inka culture, and partly because the Inka themselves, wanting to puff up their own importance, had actively concealed the glories of the cultures before them. Incredibly, the first full history of the fall of the Inka empire did not appear until more than three hundred years after the events it chronicled: William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru, published in 1847. Prescott's thunderous cadences remain a pleasure to read, despite the author's firmly stated belief, typical for his time, in the moral inferiority of the natives. But the book had no successor. More than a century later, when Dobyns went to Lima, Prescott's was still the only complete account. (A fine history, John Hemming's Conquest of the Incas, appeared in 1970. But it, too, has had no successor, despite a wealth of new information.) "The Inka were largely ignored because the entire continent of South America was largely ignored," Patricia Lyon, an anthropologist at the Institute for Andean Studies, in Berkeley, California, explained to me. Until the end of colonialism, she suggested, researchers tended to work in their own countries' possessions. "The British were in Africa, along with the Germans and French. The Dutch were in Asia, and nobody was in South America," because most of its nations were independent. The few researchers who did examine Andean societies were often sidetracked into ideological warfare. The Inka practiced a form of central planning, which led scholars into a sterile Cold War squabble about whether they were actually socialists avant la lettre in a communal Utopia or a dire precursor to Stalinist Russia.

Given the lack of previous investigation, it may have been inevitable that when Dobyns traced births and deaths in Lima he would be staking out new ground. He collected every book on Peruvian demography he could find. And he dipped into his own money to pay Cornell project workers to explore the cathedral archives and the national archives of Peru and the municipal archives of Lima. Slowly tallying mortality and natality figures, Dobyns continued to be impressed by what he found. Like any scholar, he eventually wrote an article about what he had learned. But by the time his article came out, in 1963, he had realized that his findings applied far beyond Peru.

The Inka and the Wampanoag were as different as Turks and Swedes. But Dobyns discovered, in effect, that their separate battles with Spain and England followed a similar biocultural template, one that explained the otherwise perplexing fact that every Indian culture, large or small, eventually succumbed to Europe. (Shouldn't there have been some exceptions?) And then, reasoning backward in time from this master narrative, he proposed a new way to think about Native American societies, one that transformed not only our understanding of life before Columbus arrived, but our picture of the continents themselves.

TAWANTINSUYU.

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude-as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. "If imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptability," wrote the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, "the Inka were the most impressive empire builders of their day."

The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South America-some as rich as the Inka themselves, some poor and disorganized, all speaking different languages-into a single bureaucratic framework under the direct rule of the emperor. The unity was not merely political: the Inka wanted to meld together the area's religion, economics, and arts. Their methods were audacious, brutal, and efficient: they removed entire populations from their homelands; shuttled them around the biggest road system on the planet, a mesh of stone-paved thoroughfares totaling as much as 25,000 miles; and forced them to work with other groups, using only Runa Sumi, the Inka language, on massive, faraway state farms and construction projects.*7 To monitor this cyclopean enterprise, the Inka developed a form of writing unlike any other, sequences of knots on strings that formed a binary code reminiscent of today's computer languages (see Appendix B, "Talking Knots"). So successful were the Inka at remolding their domain, according to the late John H. Rowe, an eminent archaeologist at the University of California at Berkeley, that Andean history "begins, not with the Wars of [South American] Independence or with the Spanish Conquest, but with the organizing genius of [empire founder] Pachakuti in the fifteenth century."

TAWANTINSUYU The Land of the Four Quarters, 1527 A.D.

Highland Peru is as extraordinary as the Inka themselves. It is the only place on earth, the Cornell anthropologist John Murra wrote, "where millions [of people] insist, against all apparent logic, on living at 10,000 or even 14,000 feet above sea level. Nowhere else have people lived for so many thousands of years in such visibly vulnerable circumstances." And nowhere else have people living at such heights-in places where most crops won't grow, earthquakes and landslides are frequent, and extremes of weather are the norm-repeatedly created technically advanced, long-lasting civilizations. The Inka homeland, uniquely high, was also uniquely steep, with slopes of more than sixty-five degrees from the horizontal. (The steepest street in San Francisco, famed for its nearly undrivable hills, is thirty-one-and-a-half degrees.) And it was uniquely narrow; the distance from the Pacific shore to the mountaintops is in most places less than seventy-five miles and in many less than fifty. Ecologists postulate that the first large-scale human societies tended to arise where, as Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles put it, geography provided "a wide range of altitudes and topographies within a short distance." One such place is the Fertile Crescent, where the mountains of western Iran and the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, bracket the Tigris and Euphrates river systems. Another is Peru. In the short traverse from mountain to ocean, travelers pass through twenty of the world's thirty-four principal types of environment.

Highland Peru, captured in this image of the Inka ruin Winay Wayna by the indigenous Andean photographer Martin Chambi (18911973), is the only place on earth where people living at such inhospitable altitudes repeatedly created materially sophisticated societies.

To survive in this steep, narrow hodgepodge of ecosystems, Andean communities usually sent out representatives and colonies to live up- or downslope in places with resources unavailable at home. Fish and shellfish from the ocean; beans, squash, and cotton from coastal river valleys; maize, potatoes, and the Andean grain quinoa from the foothills; llamas and alpacas for wool and meat in the heights-each area had something to contribute. Villagers in the satellite settlements exchanged products with the center, sending beans uphill and obtaining llama jerky in return, all the while retaining their citizenship in a homeland they rarely saw. Combining the fruits of many ecosystems, Andean cultures both enjoyed a better life than they could have wrested from any single place and spread out the risk from the area's frequent natural catastrophes. Murra invented a name for this mode of existence: "vertical archipelagoes."

Verticality helped Andean cultures survive but also pushed them to stay small. Because the mountains impeded north-south communication, it was much easier to coordinate the flow of goods and services east to west. As a result the region for most of its history was a jumble of small- and medium-scale cultures, isolated from all but their neighbors. Three times, though, cultures rose to dominate the Andes, uniting previously separate groups under a common banner. The first period of hegemony was that of Chavin, which from about 700 B.C. to the dawn of the Christian era controlled the central coast of Peru and the adjacent mountains. The next, beginning after Chavin's decline, was the time of two great powers: the technologically expert empire of Wari, which held sway over the coastline previously under Chavin; and Tiwanaku, centered on Lake Titicaca, the great alpine lake on the Peru-Bolivia border. (I briefly discussed Wari and Tiwanaku earlier, and will return to them-and to the rest of the immense pre-Inka tradition-later.) After Wari and Tiwanaku collapsed, at the end of the first millennium, the Andes split into sociopolitical fragments and with one major exception remained that way for more than three centuries. Then came the Inka.

The Inka empire, the greatest state ever seen in the Andes, was also the shortest lived. It began in the fifteenth century and lasted barely a hundred years before being smashed by Spain.

As conquerors, the Inka were unlikely. Even in 1350 they were still an unimportant part of the political scene in the central Andes, and newcomers at that. In one of the oral tales recorded by the Spanish Jesuit Bernabe Cobo, the Inka originated with a family of four brothers and four sisters who left Lake Titicaca for reasons unknown and wandered until they came upon what would become the future Inka capital, Qosqo (Cusco, in Spanish). Cobo, who sighed over the "extreme ignorance and barbarity" of the Indians, dismissed such stories as "ludicrous." Nonetheless, archaeological investigation has generally borne them out: the Inka seem indeed to have migrated to Qosqo from somewhere else, perhaps Lake Titicaca, around 1200 A.D.

The colonial account of Inka history closest to indigenous sources is by Juan de Betanzos, a Spanish commoner who rose to marry an Inka princess and become the most prominent translator for the colonial government. Based on interviews with his in-laws, Betanzos estimated that when the Inka showed up in the Qosqo region "more than two hundred" small groups were already there. Qosqo itself, where they settled, was a hamlet "of about thirty small, humble straw houses."

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Inka gradually became more powerful. The apparent turning point in their fortunes occurred when they somehow made enemies of another group, the Chanka, who eventually attacked them. This unremarkable provincial squabble had momentous consequences.

According to a widely quoted chronology by the sixteenth-century cleric Miguel Cabello Balboa, the Chanka offensive took place in 1438. The Inka leader at that time was Wiraqocha Inka.*8 "A valiant prince," according to Cobo, Wiraqocha Inka had a "warlike" nature even as a young man and vowed that after taking the throne "he would conquer half the world." Perhaps so, but he fled the Chanka attack with three of his four sons, including his designated successor, Inka Urqon. A younger son, Inka Cusi Yupanki, refused to run. Instead he fought the Chanka with such bravery that (according to the legend) the very stones rose up to join the fray. Inka Yupanki won the battle, capturing many Chanka leaders. Later he skinned them in celebration-Pizarro saw the trophies on display. But first Inka Yupanki presented the captives to his father, so that Wiraqocha Inka could perform the victory ritual of wiping his feet on their bodies.

Fearing that Inka Yupanki was becoming too big for his britches, Wiraqocha Inka chose that moment to remind his younger son of his subordinate status. The foot-wiping honor, he proclaimed, actually belonged to the next Inka: Inka Urqon. "To this," Betanzos wrote, "Inka Yupanki answered that he was begging his father to tread on the prisoners, that he had not won the victory so that such women as Inka Urqon and the rest of his brothers could step on them." A heated argument led to a standoff. In a Shakespearian move, Wiraqocha Inka decided to settle the issue by murdering his inconvenient younger son. (It was "a crazy impulse," one of Wiraqocha Inka's generals later explained.) Inka Yupanki was tipped off and the scheme failed. The humiliated Wiraqocha Inka went into exile while Inka Yupanki returned in triumph to Qosqo, renamed himself Pachakuti ("World-shaker"), and proclaimed that the ruling Inka families were descended from the sun. Then he went about conquering everything in sight.

Hey, wait a minute! the reader may be saying. This family story makes such terrific melodrama that it seems reasonable to wonder whether it actually happened. After all, every known written account of the Inka was set down after the conquest, a century or more after Pachakuti's rise. And these differ from each other, sometimes dramatically, reflecting the authors' biases and ignorance, and their informants' manipulation of history to cast a flattering light on their family lines. For these reasons, some scholars dismiss the chronicles entirely. Others note that both the Inka and the Spaniards had long traditions of record-keeping. By and large the chroniclers seem to have been conscious of their roles as witnesses and tried to live up to them. Their versions of events broadly agree with each other. As a result, most scholars judiciously use the colonial accounts, as I try to do here.

After taking the reins of state, Pachakuti spent the next twenty-five years expanding the empire from central highland Peru to Lake Titicaca and beyond. His methods were subtler and more economical with direct force than one might expect, as exemplified by the slow takeover of the coastal valley of Chincha. In about 1450 Pachakuti dispatched an army to Chincha under Qhapaq Yupanki (Ka-pok Yu-panki, meaning roughly "Munificent Honored One"), a kind of adopted brother. Marching into the valley with thousands of troops, Qhapaq Yupanki informed the fearful local gentry that he wanted nothing from Chincha whatsoever. "He said that he was the son of the Sun," according to the report of two Spanish priests who investigated the valley's history in the 1550s. "And that he had come for their good and for everyone's and that he did not want their silver nor their gold nor their daughters." Far from taking the land by force, in fact, the Inka general would give them "all that he was carrying." And he practically buried the Chincha leadership under piles of valuables. In return for his generosity, the general asked only for a little appreciation, preferably in the form of a large house from which the Inka could operate, and a staff of servants to cook, clean, and make the things needed by the outpost. And when Qhapaq Yupanki left, he asked Chincha to keep expressing its gratitude by sending craftspeople and goods to Qosqo.

A decade later Pachakuti sent out another army to the valley, this one led by his son and heir, Thupa Inka Yupanki ("Royal Honored Inka"). Thupa Inka closeted himself with the local leadership and laid out many inspired ideas for the valley's betterment, all of which were gratefully endorsed. Following the Inka template, the local leaders drafted the entire populace into service, dividing households by sex and age into cohorts, each with its own leader who reported to the leader of the next larger group. "Everything was in order for the people to know who was in control," the Spanish priests wrote. Thupa Inka delegated tasks to the mobilized population: hewing roads to link Chincha to other areas controlled by the Inka, building a new palace for the Inka, and tending the fields set aside for the Inka. Thupa Inka apparently left the area in charge of his brother, who continued managing its gratitude.

The next visit came from Pachakuti's grandson, probably in the 1490s. With him came escalating demands for land and service-the veneer of reciprocity was fading. By that point the Chincha had little alternative but to submit. They were surrounded by Inka satrapies; their economy was enmeshed with the imperial machinery; they had hundreds or thousands of people doing the empire's bidding. The Chincha elite, afraid to take on the Inka army, always chose compliance over valor, and were rewarded with plum positions in the colonial government. But their domain had ceased to exist as an independent entity.

In 1976 Edward N. Luttwak, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., published a short, provocative book about imperial Rome that distinguished between territorial and hegemonic empires. Territorial empires directly occupy territories with their armies, throw out the old rulers, and annex the land. In hegemonic empires, the internal affairs of conquered areas remain in the hands of their original rulers, who become vassals. Territorial empires are tightly controlled but costly to maintain; hegemonic empires are inexpensive to maintain, because the original local rulers incur the costs of administration, but the loose tie between master and vassal encourages rebellion. Every conquest-minded state is a mixture of both, but all Native American empires leaned toward the hegemonic. Without horses, Indian soldiers unavoidably traveled slower than European or Asian soldiers. If brigades were tied up as occupiers, they could not be reassigned quickly. As a result, the Inka were almost forced to co-opt local rulers instead of displacing them. They did so with a vengeance.

Pachakuti gave command of the military to his son Thupa Inka in 1463 and turned his attention to totally rebuilding Qosqo in imperial style, in the process becoming one of history's great urban planners. Although he drew on Andean aesthetic traditions, Pachakuti put his own stamp on Inka art and architecture. Whereas the buildings of Sumer and Assyria were covered with brilliant mosaics and splendid pictorial murals, the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms-startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic Cesar Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.) Inka masonry amazed the conquistadors, who could not understand how they put together such enormous stones without mortar or draft animals. And it was astonishingly durable-the U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham photographed the citadel of Machu Piqchu in 1913, and found it in near-perfect condition despite four centuries of neglect.

At the heart of the new Qosqo was the plaza of Awkaypata, 625 feet by 550 feet, carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the Pacific and raked daily by the city's army of workers. Monumental villas and temples surrounded the space on three sides, their walls made from immense blocks of stone so precisely cut and fit that Pizarro's younger cousin Pedro, who accompanied the conqueror as a page, reported "that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints." Across their facades ran enormous plates of polished gold. When the alpine sun filled Awkaypata, with its boldly delineated horizontal plain of white sand and sloping sheets of gold, the space became an amphitheater for the exaltation of light.

In Pachakuti's grand design, Awkaypata was the center of the empire-and the cosmos. From the great plaza radiated four highways that demarcated the four asymmetrical sectors into which he divided the empire, Tawantinsuyu, "Land of the Four Quarters." To the Inka, the quarters echoed the heavenly order. The Milky Way, a vast celestial river in Andean cosmology, crosses the Peruvian sky at an angle of about twenty-eight degrees to the earth's orbit. For six months the stream of stars slants across the sky from, so to speak, northeast to southwest; the other six months it slants from southeast to northwest. The transition roughly coincides with the transition between dry and wet seasons-the time when the Milky Way releases life-giving water to PachaMama, Mother Earth-and divides the heavens into four quarters. Awkaypata, reflecting this pattern, was the axis of the universe.

Not only that, Qosqo was the center of a second spiritual pattern. Radiating out from Awkaypata was a drunken spiderweb of forty-one crooked, spiritually powerful lines, known as zeq'e, that linked holy features of the landscape: springs, tombs, caves, shrines, fields, stones. About four hundred of these wak'a (shrines, more or less) existed around Qosqo-the landscape around the capital was charged with telluric power. (The zeq'e also played a role in the Inka calendar, which apparently consisted of forty-one eight-day weeks.) So complexly interrelated was the network of wak'a and zeq'e, Columbia University archaeologist Terence D'Altroy has written, "that many otherwise diligent scholars have been reduced to scratching their heads and trusting someone else's judgement." Each wak'a had its own meaning, relative status, social affiliation, and set of ceremonial uses. One big stone outside town was believed to be the petrified body of one of the original Inka brothers; Inka armies often carried it with them, dressed in fine togs, as a kind of good-luck talisman. To keep track of the florid abundance of shrines and lines, Cobo observed, the empire "had more than a thousand men in the city of Qosqo who did nothing but remember these things."

Around the Inka capital of Qosqo (modern Cusco) were more than four hundred wak'a, places in the landscape charged with spiritual power. Many of these were stones, some carved in elaborate representations, perhaps of the areas they influenced.

Not only did Pachakuti reconfigure the capital, he laid out the institutions that characterized Tawantinsuyu itself. For centuries, villagers had spent part of their time working in teams on community projects. Alternately bullying and cajoling, Pachakuti expanded the service obligation unrecognizably. In Tawantinsuyu, he decreed, all land and property belonged to the state (indeed, to the Inka himself). Peasants thus had to work periodically for the empire as farmers, herders, weavers, masons, artisans, miners, or soldiers. Often crews spent months away from home. While they were on the road, the state fed, clothed, and housed them-all from goods supplied by other work crews. Conscripts built dams, terraces, and irrigation canals; they grew crops on state land and raised herds on state pastures and made pots in state factories and stocked hundreds of state warehouses; they paved the highways and supplied the runners and llamas carrying messages and goods along them. Dictatorially extending Andean verticality, the imperium shuttled people and materiel in and out of every Andean crevice.

Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned without money. True, the lack of currency did not surprise the Spanish invaders-much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth century. But the Inka did not even have markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket economy-vertical socialism, it has been called-should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu "managed to eradicate hunger," the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though no fan of the Inka, he conceded that "only a very small number of empires throughout the whole world have succeeded in achieving this feat."

When Tawantinsuyu swallowed a new area, the Inka forcibly imported settlers from other, faraway areas, often in large numbers, and gave them land. The newcomers were encouraged to keep their own dress and customs rather than integrate into the host population. To communicate, both groups were forced to use Ruma Suni, the language of their conquerors. In the short run this practice created political tensions that the Inka manipulated to control both groups. In the long term it would have (if successful) eroded the distinctions among cultures and forged a homogeneous new nation in the imprint of Tawantinsuyu. Five centuries later the wholesale reshuffling of populations became an infamous trademark of Stalin and Mao. But the scale on which the Inka moved the pieces around the ethnic checkerboard would have excited their admiration. Incredibly, foreigners came to outnumber natives in many places. It is possible that ethnic clashes would eventually have caused Tawantinsuyu to implode, Yugoslavia-style. But if Pizarro had not interrupted, the Inka might have created a monolithic culture as enduring as China.

THE GILDED LITTER OF THE INKA.

How did Pizarro do it? Sooner or later, everyone who studies the Inka confronts this question. Henry Dobyns wondered about it, too. The empire was as populous, rich, and well organized as any in history. But no other fell before such a small force: Pizarro had only 168 men and 62 horses. Researchers have often wondered whether the Inka collapse betokens a major historical lesson. The answer is yes, but the lesson was not grasped until recently.

The basic history of the empire was known well enough by the time Dobyns began reading the old colonial accounts. According to Cabello Balboa's chronology, Pachakuti died peacefully in 1471. His son Thupa Inka, long the military commander, now took the imperial "crown"-a multicolored braid, twisted around the skull like a headband, from which hung a red tasseled fringe that fell across the forehead. Carried on a golden litter-the Inka did not walk in public-Thupa Inka appeared with such majesty, according to the voyager Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, that "people left the roads along which he had to pass and, ascending the hills on either side, worshipped and adored" him by "pulling out their eyebrows and eyelashes." Minions collected and stored every object he touched, food waste included, to ensure that no lesser persons could profane these objects with their touch. The ground was too dirty to receive the Inka's saliva so he always spat into the hand of a courtier. The courtier wiped the spittle with a special cloth and stored it for safekeeping. Once a year everything touched by the Inka-clothing, garbage, bedding, saliva-was ceremonially burned.

Thupa Inka inaugurated the Inka custom of marrying his sister. In fact, Thupa Inka may have married two of his sisters. The practice was genetically unsound but logically consistent. Only close relatives of the Inka were seen as of sufficient purity to produce his heir. As Inkas grew in grandeur, more purity was required. Finally only a sister would do. The Inka's sister-wives accompanied him on military forays, along with a few hundred or thousand of his subordinate wives. The massive scale of these domestic arrangements seems not to have impeded his imperial progress. By his death in 1493, Thupa Inka had sent his armies deep into Ecuador and Chile, doubling the size of Tawantinsuyu again. In terms of area conquered during his lifetime, he was in the league of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.

TAWANTINSUYU.

Expansion of the Inka Empire, 14381527 A.D.

Tawantinsuyu is known to have risen and fallen with breathtaking rapidity, but the exact chronology of its trajectory is disputed. Most researchers regard the account of Miguel Cabello Balboa as approximately correct. It is the source for this map, though the reader is cautioned against regarding it as either exact or universally accepted.

Thupa Inka's death set off a fight for the royal fringe. Tawantinsuyu did not have strict succession rules. Instead the Inka selected the son he thought most qualified. Thupa Inka had more than sixty sons from all of his wives, according to Sarmiento de Gamboa, so he had a lot of choice. Alas, Thupa Inka apparently selected one son but then changed his mind on his deathbed and selected another. Factions formed around each son, leading to a melee. The first son was banished or killed and the second took the name Wayna Qhapaq (Why-na Ka-pok) and became the Inka. Because the new Inka was still a teenager (his name means "Munificent Youth"), two of his uncles served as regents. One uncle tried to usurp power but was killed by the other. Eventually the Inka grew old enough to take the reins. Among his first official acts was killing two of his own brothers to avoid future family problems. Then he, like his father, married his sister.

Wayna Qhapaq was not a military adventurer like his father. He initially seems to have viewed his role mainly as one of consolidation, rather than conquest, perhaps because Tawantinsuyu was approaching the geographic limits of governability-communication down the long north-south spine of the empire was stretched to the limit. Much of Wayna Qhapaq's time was devoted to organizing the empire's public works projects. Often these were more political than practical. Because the Inka believed that idleness fomented rebellion, the Spanish traveler Pedro Cieza de Leon reported, he ordered unemployed work brigades "to move a mountain from one spot to another" for no practical purpose. Cieza de Leon once came upon three different highways running between the same two towns, each built by a different Inka.

Consolidation was completed in about 1520. Wayna Qhapaq then marched to Ecuador at the head of an army, intending to expand the empire to the north. It was a journey of return: he had been born in southern Ecuador during one of his father's campaigns. He himself brought with him one of his teenage sons, Atawallpa. When Wayna Qhapaq came to his birthplace, the city now called Cuenca, Cobo reported, "he commanded that a magnificent palace be constructed for himself." Wayna Qhapaq liked his new quarters so much that he stayed on while Atawallpa and his generals went out to subjugate a few more provinces.

In 1615, the Inka writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala presented his life's work, a massive history of Inka society with four hundred drawings, to King Philip II of Spain, hoping that the king would use it to learn more about his new subjects. Whether Philip ever saw the manuscript is unknown, but Poma de Ayala's work-one of the few non-European accounts of Inka life-is now a fundamental scholarly source. Although the portraits here are not taken from life, they hint at how the Inka viewed and remembered their leaders.

They did not meet with success. The peoples of the wet equatorial forests did not belong to the Andean culture system and were not interested in joining. They fought ferociously. Caught by an ambush, Atawallpa was forced to retreat. Enraged by this failure, Cobo wrote, Wayna Qhapaq "prepared himself as quickly as possible to go in person and avenge this disgrace." He left his pleasure palace and publicly berated Atawallpa at the front. In a renewed offensive, the army advanced under the Inka's personal command. Bearing clubs, spears, bows, lances, slings, and copper axes, brilliant in cloaks of feathers and silver breastplates, their faces painted in terrifying designs, the Inka army plunged into the forests of the northern coast. They sang and shouted in unison as they fought. The battle seesawed until a sudden counterattack knocked Wayna Qhapaq out of his litter-a humiliation. Nearly captured by his foes, he was forced to walk like a plebe back to his new palace. The Inka army regrouped and returned. After prolonged struggle it subjugated its foes.

Finding the warm Ecuadorian climate more to his liking than that of chilly Qosqo, Wayna Qhapaq delayed his triumphal return for six years. Wearing soft, loose clothing of vampire-bat wool, he swanned around his palaces with a bowl of palm wine or chicha, a sweet, muddy, beer-like drink usually made from crushed maize. "When his captains and chief Indians asked him how, though drinking so much, he never got intoxicated," reported Pizarro's younger cousin and page, Pedro, "they say that he replied that he drank for the poor, of whom he supported many."

In 1525 Wayna Qhapaq suddenly got sick and expired in his Ecuadorian retreat. Once again the succession was contested and bloody. Details are murky, but on his deathbed the Inka seems to have passed over Atawallpa, who had not distinguished himself, and designated as his heir a son named Ninan K'uychi. Unluckily, Ninan K'uychi died of the same illness right before Wayna Qhapaq. The Inka's next pick was a nineteen-year-old son who had stayed behind in Qosqo. As was customary, high priests subjected this choice to a divination. They learned that this son would be dreadfully unlucky. The priest who reported this unhappy result to Wayna Qhapaq found him dead. In consequence, the court nobles were left to choose the emperor. They settled on the teenager who had been the Inka's final choice.

The teenager's principal qualification for the post was that his mother was Wayna Qhapaq's sister. Nonetheless, he had no doubts about crowning himself immediately-he didn't even wait to find out if Wayna Qhapaq had left any instructions or last wishes. The new Inka took the name Washkar Inka ("Golden Chain Inka"). Atawallpa remained in Ecuador, ostensibly because he was unable to show his face after being berated by his father, but presumably also because he knew that the life expectancy of Inka brothers tended to be short.

Meanwhile, Wayna Qhapaq's mummified body was dressed in fine clothing and taken back to Qosqo on a gold litter bedecked with feathers. Along the way, the dead emperor's executors, four high-ranking nobles, schemed to depose and murder Washkar and install yet another son in his place. Something aroused Washkar's suspicions as the party neared Qosqo-perhaps his discovery that Atawallpa had stayed in Ecuador with most of the Inka army, perhaps a tipoff from a loyal uncle whom the conspirators had approached. After staging a grand funeral for his father, Washkar ordered the executors to meet him one at a time, which provided the occasion to arrest them. Torture and execution followed.

The plot circumvented, Washkar went to work eliminating any remaining objections to his accession. Because Wayna Qhapaq had not actually married Washkar's mother-the union was properly incestuous but not properly legitimate-the new Inka demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in a wedding ceremony with his father's mummy. Even for the Andes this was an unusual step. Washkar further solidified his credentials as ruler by marrying his sister. According to the unsympathetic account of Cabello Balboa, Washkar's mother, who was apparently willing to marry her dead brother, objected to her son's plan to marry her daughter. The ceremony took place only after "much begging and supplication."

Civil war was probably unavoidable. Egged on by scheming courtiers and generals, relations between Atawallpa and Washkar spent several years swinging through the emotional valence from concealed suspicion to overt hostility. Washkar, in Qosqo, had the machinery of the state at his disposal; in addition, his claim to the fringe was generally accepted. Atawallpa, in Ecuador, had a war-tested army and the best generals but a weaker claim to the throne (his mother was merely his father's cousin, not his sister). The war lasted for more than three years, seesawed across the Andes, and was spectacularly brutal. Washkar's forces seized the initial advantage, invading Ecuador and actually capturing Atawallpa, almost tearing off one of his ears in the process. In a sequence reminiscent of Hollywood, one of Atawallpa's wives supposedly smuggled a crowbar-like tool into his improvised battlefield prison (his intoxicated guards permitted a conjugal visit). Atawallpa dug his way out, escaped to Ecuador, reassembled his army, and drove his foes south. On a plateau near today's Peru-Ecuador border the northern forces personally led by Atawallpa shattered Washkar's army. A decade later Cieza de Leon saw the battleground and from the wreckage and unburied remains thought the dead could have numbered sixteen thousand. The victors captured and beheaded Washkar's main general. Atawallpa mounted a bowl atop the skull, inserted a spout between the teeth, and used it as a cup for his chicha.

With the momentum of war turning against him, Washkar left Qosqo to lead his own army. Atawallpa sent his forces ahead to meet it. After a horrific battle (Cieza de Leon estimated the dead at thirty-five thousand), Washkar was captured in an ambush in the summer of 1532. Atawallpa's generals took the Inka as a captive to Qosqo and executed his wives, children, and relatives in front of him. Meanwhile, Atawallpa's triumphant cavalcade, perhaps as many as eighty thousand strong, slowly promenaded to Qosqo. In October or November 1532, the victors stopped outside the small city of Cajamarca, where they learned that pale, hairy people who sat on enormous animals had landed on the coast.

No matter how many times what happened next has been recounted, it has not lost its power to shock: how the curious Atawallpa decided to wait for the strangers' party to arrive; how Pizarro, for it was he, persuaded Atawallpa to visit the Spaniards in the central square of Cajamarca, which was surrounded on three sides by long, empty buildings (the town apparently had been evacuated for the war); how on November 16, 1532, the emperor-to-be came to Cajamarca in his gilded and feather-decked litter, preceded by a squadron of liveried men who swept the ground and followed by five or six thousand troops, almost all of whom bore only ornamental, parade-type weapons; how Pizarro hid his horses and cannons just within the buildings lining the town square, where the 168 Spanish awaited the Inka with such fear, Pedro Pizarro noted, that many "made water without knowing it out of sheer terror"; how a Spanish priest presented Atawallpa with a travel-stained Christian breviary, which the Inka, to whom it literally meant nothing, impatiently threw aside, providing the Spanish with a legal fig leaf for an attack (desecrating Holy Writ); how the Spanish, firing cannons, wearing armor, and mounted on horses, none of which the Indians had ever seen, suddenly charged into the square; how the Indians were so panicked by the smoke and fire and steel and charging animals that in trying to flee hundreds trampled each other to death ("they formed mounds and suffocated one another," one conquistador wrote); how the Spanish took advantage of the soldiers' lack of weaponry to kill almost all the rest; how the native troops who recovered from their initial surprise desperately clustered around Atawallpa, supporting his litter with their shoulders even after Spanish broadswords sliced off their hands; how Pizarro personally dragged down the emperor-to-be and hustled him through the heaps of bodies on the square to what would become his prison.

Pizarro exulted less in victory than one might imagine. A self-made man, the illiterate, illegitimate, neglected son of an army captain, he ached with dreams of wealth and chivalric glory despite the fortune he had already acquired in the Spanish colonies. After landing in Peru he realized that his tiny force was walking into the maw of a powerful empire. Even after his stunning triumph in Cajamarca he remained torn between fear and ambition. For his part, Atawallpa observed the power of Inka gold and silver to cloud European minds.*9 Precious metals were not valuable in the same way in Tawantinsuyu, because there was no currency. To the Inka ruler, the foreigners' fascination with gold apparently represented his best chance to manipulate the situation to his advantage. He offered to fill a room twenty-two feet by seventeen feet full of gold objects-and two equivalent rooms with silver-in exchange for his freedom. Pizarro quickly agreed to the plan.

Atawallpa, still in command of the empire, ordered his generals to strip Qosqo of its silver and gold. Not having lived in the city since childhood, he had little attachment to it. He also told his men to slay Washkar, whom they still held captive; all of Washkar's main supporters; and, while they were at it, all of Atawallpa's surviving brothers. After his humiliating captivity ended, Atawallpa seems to have believed, the ground would be clear for his rule.

Between December 1532 and May 1533, caravans of precious objects-jewelry, fine sculptures, architectural ornamentation-wended on llama-back to Cajamarca. As gold and silver slowly filled the rooms, all of Tawantinsuyu seemed frozen. It was as if someone had slipped into the Kremlin in 1950 and held Stalin at gunpoint, leaving the nation, accustomed to obeying a tyrant, utterly rudderless. Meanwhile, the waiting Spanish, despite their unprecedented success, grew increasingly fearful and suspicious. When Atawallpa fulfilled his half of the bargain and the ransom was complete Pizarro melted everything into ingots and shipped them to Spain. The conquistadors did not follow through on their part of the deal. Rather than releasing Atawallpa, they garroted him. Then they marched to Qosqo.

Almost at a stroke, just 168 men had dealt a devastating blow to the greatest empire on earth. To be sure, their victory was nowhere near complete: huge, bloody battles still lay ahead. Even after the conquistadors seized Qosqo, the empire regrouped in the hinterlands, where it fought off Spanish forces for another forty years. Yet the scale of Pizarro's triumph at Cajamarca cannot be gainsaid. He had routed a force fifty times larger than his own, won the greatest ransom ever seen, and vanquished a cultural tradition that had lasted five millennia-all without suffering a single casualty.

VIRGIN SOIL.

I have just pulled a fast one. The Inka history above is as contemporary scholars understand it. They disagree on which social factors to emphasize and on how much weight to assign individual Spanish chronicles, but the outline seems not in serious dispute. The same is not true of my rendering of Pizarro's conquest. I presented what is more or less the account current when Dobyns arrived in Peru. But in his reading he discovered a hole in this version of events-a factor so critical that it drastically changed Dobyns's view of native America.

Why did the Inka lose? The usual answer is that Pizarro had two advantages: steel (swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses. The Indians had no steel weapons and no animals to ride (llamas are too small to carry grown men). They also lacked the wheel and the arch. With such inferior technology, Tawantinsuyu had no chance. "What could [the Inka] offer against this armory?" asked John Hemming, the conquest historian. "They were still fighting in the bronze age." The Inka kept fighting after Atawallpa's death. But even though they outnumbered the Europeans by as much as a hundred to one, they always lost. "No amount of heroism or discipline by an Inka army," Hemming wrote, "could match the military superiority of the Spaniards."

But just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England, steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists have long marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plentiful in the mountains, yet the Inka used metal for almost nothing useful. In the late 1960s, Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, suggested to "an eminent scholar of Andean prehistory that we take a serious and careful look at Andean metallurgy." He responded, "But there wasn't any." Lechtman went and looked anyway. She discovered that Inka metallurgy was, in fact, as refined as European metallurgy, but that it had such different goals that academic experts had not even recognized it.