When Europeans first ventured into the Andes in the 1500s, they found the Inca empire in the throes of a civil war. The ensuing "Inca apocalypse" transformed lives throughout the continent as the Spanish empire laid the foundations for modern dependency relationships in Latin America.
To deconstruct this violent, rapid, and deeply transformative cultural interaction, this conference takes an Andes-wide approach, highlighting two very different ways of building empire, first by the Inca and then the Spanish. We will leverages new perspectives and data from archaeological excavations, early Spanish documents, expansions of indigenous languages, DNA, isotope studies, bioarchaeological details of human remains, and radiocarbon dating.
This multidisciplinary approach is key to understanding local–imperial interactions, migrations, chronologies, and conflicts, presented by a new generation of diverse scholars who argue for major changes to the established view of the rise and fall of the Inca.
