The Ancient Civilizations of Peru

by John Alden Mason

Inca gold no longer lures the conqueror - but the Quechua Indian still guides his llamas through the narrow-walled Inca streets of Cuzco, and the lost civilizations of Peru still call to the imagination across the centuries. And with reason - for radiocarbon dating places an embryonic civilization in Peru in 7566 BC, over 9000 years before Pizarro plundered the mature flowering of the Inca Empire. Other, less destructive, visitors have worked since then at Machu Picchu, at Cuzco, at Titicaca and myriad other sites to resurrect the rich variety of Inca and pre-Inca culture wiped out by the Spanish Conquest. The sum of their discoveries, archaeological, historical, artistic, geographical and ethnographical, is surveyed here by J.Alden Mason in a picture of the peoples and country of ancient Peru.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

1885-1967

Reviews

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting and nuanced history of the civilizations that populated what is now Peru prior to the Spanish conquest. Mason makes a point of distinguishing between the civilizations that remained confined to a singly river valley and those that were able to exert their influence across wider regions, whether the multiple coastal river valleys or the Andean highlands. In this way he chronicles the ebb and flow of the handful of known civilizations from the first millennium BCE up to the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire. While the wide date ranges that Mason gives to these civilizations is something that certainly dates the book, written in the 1950s, the meticulous care to acknowledge the technological innovations and territorial range of these civilizations allows the reader to form a more complex picture of pre-Spanish Peru. Finally Mason uses the far more detailed, and archeologically verified, accounts of the Inca empire to give a fleshed out description of its history, government, religion, economy and artistry. I would definitely recommend this to anyone curious to learn more about the cultural legacy of ancient Peru.