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 ...

The Inca were a powerful Indigenous civilization that emerged in South America during the early 1200s and flourished until the 16th century. At their height, they were the largest empire in the ...

South Americans have cultivated coca plants for about 8,000 years. Valuing the leaves as highly as gold, the Inca treasured ...

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 ancient Inca wonder of Machu Picchu, perched 8,000 feet above sea level on a ridge in the Peruvian Andes, was a royal estate for the legendary warrior Pachacuti, who was largely responsible for ...

Do long-dead builders have the answer to more sustainable road development? A new exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC shows why the Incan kingdom built a lasting infrastructure.

These children [to be sacrificed to the mountain and other gods] would be collected from all over the land and would be carried in litters together … They should be very well dressed, paired up female ...

"Land of the Four Quarters" or Tahuantinsuyu is the name the Inca gave to their empire. It stretched north to south some 2,500 miles along the high mountainous Andean range from Colombia to Chile and ...

Archaeologists are uncovering remnants of a large pool constructed in Ecuador by the Inca during the 15th century. Its elaborate series of canals may have been used to collect water from as far away ...

A deceptively simple feat of agricultural engineering helped the Inca to build the largest empire in South American history. In the 15th and early 16th Centuries, a small island in Lake Titicaca was ...

The possible living face of Peru's most famous mummy, a teenage Inca girl sacrificed in a ritual more than 500 years ago atop the Andes, was unveiled Tuesday. The silicone-made bust portrays a young ...