The snake on this Wari vessel (800-1000 AD) represented a sacred animal symbolically linked with water and fertility. Ernest Amoroso, NMAI/SI A belt (ca. 1450) made from the shell of a mollusk ...

The Inca Empire in South America, one of the most powerful pre-Columbian societies, was known for many innovations — such as the architecture of Machu Picchu, an extensive road network, and a system ...

For centuries, the vanished Inca fortress of Ancocagua existed only in lore. Now, at a mountaintop site in Peru, researchers are zeroing in on a discovery that could reshape what we know of the empire ...

Nearly 500 years after the collapse of the largest empire in the Americas, a single bridge remains from the Inca's extraordinary road system – and it's rewoven every year from grass. "I believe since ...

Hiram Bingham called Machu Picchu “the most important ruin discovered in South America since the Spanish conquest.” Ivan Kashinsky and Karla Gachet The last stretch of road that the emperor of the ...

Inca bureaucrats recorded all the goings-on in their bustling empire using knotted cords called khipu, where the position and order of the knots represented numbers. They relied on the khipu system to ...