Sometimes called "Peoples of the Sun," the Inca were originally a warlike tribe living in a semiarid region of the southern sierra. The Inca empire, though short-lived, covered the South American Andes from modern-day Colombia to Chile.

From 1100 to 1300, the Inca moved north into the fertile Cusco Valley. From there, they overran the neighboring lands. By 1500 the Inca Empire stretched from the Pacific Ocean east to the sources of the Paraguay and Amazon rivers and from the region of modern Quito in Ecuador south to the Maule River in Chile. This vast empire was a theocracy, organized along socialistic lines and ruled by an Inca, or emperor, who was worshiped as a divinity. Because the Inca realm contained extensive deposits of gold and silver, it became in the early 16th century a target of Spanish imperial ambitions in the Americas.

Their lands were held together by an extensive network of roads, traversed by imperial messengers bearing quipus, or knotted-string messages. The empire was incredibly skillful in its use of dry masonry, irrigation and terraces. The city of Machu Picchu - made of large stones interlocked like fingers with no mortar used - attests to the technical and aesthetic mastery of this Amerindian empire.

All that came to an end when, in 1532, the Spanish conquistador Pizarro arrived with a small but well-armed force, captured the emperor Atahualpa and began the destruction of a culture.