Briefly Noted

The Incas and their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru

Michael E. Moseley (London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 2001) 288 pp., $27.50

America’s largest native empire, the Incas, stretched from the cold Andean highlands through coastal deserts to the steamy Amazon basin. Its gold-filled cities, mountaintop redoubts and extensive road networks have all been explored in earlier versions of this classic text first published in 1992, but this new edition reports surprising recent discoveries. Who would have guessed that the most ancient mummies in the world—some more than 8,000 years old—were uncovered on the Chilean and Peruvian coasts and not in the Egyptian desert? Or that many regions of the Inca empire, now blanketed by thick forests, were intensively farmed in pre-Columbian times?

Scribes, Warriors and Kings: The City of Copán and the Ancient Maya