Inca social organization has been a subject of global inquiry from the entry of the Spaniards into Tawantinsuyu—the Realm of the Four Quarters —in 1532 until the present. Interest in the Incas, and in Andean societies in general, is also part of the public and scholarly discussion of indigenous rights and representativeness, inequality, and relationships between society and land. Within that broader context, the volume edited by Alconini and Covey contains an ensemble of contributions that stand out by the diversity of approaches and issues covered. The Oxford Handbook of the Incas summarizes data currently available in Inca research, while exposing new research problems and offering a welcome reflection on the links between modernity and the past.

Given the number of chapters in the book, this review proceeds by sections. Part 1, which includes essays by Pillsbury, Moore, Covey, and Farrington, works as an extended introduction to Inca culture and history. One of the first topics examined is the different, and at times contradictory, approaches to Inca origins and evolution by Europeans, mestizos, and indigenous peoples, who approach the task of recreating history using not only written documents but also oral and performative media. The authors also explore how the documental and material sources about the Incas were reread and used politically after the European conquest. A survey of the origins of the Inca state in the southern highlands of Perú circa AD 1200 follows, with comparisons to earlier regional forms of statecraft. This section also delves into the organization of the capital city Cuzco—also spelled Qosqo—and the peculiar character of the Inca civilization, given the absence of currency-based commerce and writing sensu stricto.

Part 2 reviews the shape and function of key settlements. With contributions by Quave, Gyarmati and Condarco, Coben, Bray and Echevarría, and Eeckhout and López Hurtado, this section analyzes the status of royal estates and imperial centers in Cuzco, the Peruvian central coast, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Management of the workforce and resources at those settlements is related here to the Inca rhetoric of state reciprocity and the local experience of Tawantinsuyu values. Usefully, this section and the next two parts make distinctions between contact with and control by Cuzco's lords. The third part analyzes Inca economic and administrative institutions. Chapters by D'Altroy, Kosiba, Aland, Turner and Hewitt, Costin, and Jennings and Duke offer updated visions of the practical structures that gave shape to the Inca realm. As noted in D'Altroy's valuable synthesis, the expressions of Inca organization—tribute and redistribution, gift-giving, infrastructure, and deployment of military strength—always had ceremonial and religious undertones. This has obvious implications for current and future research about Inca rulership.

The chapters in Part 4, by Acuto and Leibowicz, Santoro and Uribe, Zori, Ogburn, Alconini, Schjellerup, and Troncoso, remind us about the diversity in scale and tempo of the Inca regional experience. This section examines interactions among local populations and Incas in Chile and Argentina's northwestern sierra, the eastern border of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chachapoyas. The revision of concepts and evidence on frontiers, ethnic relationships, hegemony, and pre-European colonialism is complemented by examples of acceptance, manipulation, and opposition to the Incas and two of their characteristic institutions: the mitmacona, resettled communities, and the acllacona, groups of women in the service of state and cult.

Essays in Part 5, by Bauer, Christie, Chase, Yaeger and López Bejarano, and Mignone, deal with several facets of Inca and prehispanic Andean religion. The Andean world was one of ceremonial landscapes with immanent power and nested meanings. This section illustrates a selection of those spaces, from Lake Titicaca to the far southern sanctuaries of the empire where capacocha (child sacrifice) was conducted. As presented in the ideology of locality cases brought up by Chase, this part of the book underlines the need for a renovated and critical approach to archaeology and ethnohistory that aims to understand both the religiousness of the populations integrated into the Inca state and the landscapes and identities that gave meaning to existence in the Andes.

The chapters by Herring, Urton, Protzen, Phipps, and Ziółkowski in Part 6 explore Inca visual culture and logos in prehispanic and colonial times. Analysis of the diversity of Andean aesthetics under Inca rules—and their scholarly inquiry—is joined here to a revision of how those expressions continued to transmit information and be read in the face of Hispanic influence. It is worth recalling that those creations, like the quipus and yupanas, were above all media that recorded data used in support of or against dominant social principles. Part 7, with contributions by Wernke, Murphy, Lee, and Garrett, examines the colonial transition—violent or negotiated—from indigenous statecraft based on work tribute and redistribution to viceregal Spanish organization funded by the market economy, but dependent, at least initially, on Inca institutions and authorities. An expression of that dynamic is recognizable in the colonial responsibilities (and ambivalences) of Inca lineages and local curacas (ethnic lords); this load was particularly heavy after what Garrett calls “the Bourbon assaults on the Habsburg colonial pact” (p. 772).

In the final part of the volume, Gänger, Salazar and Burger, Catherine Covey, and the editors discuss the past and present use of the Inca heritage. In these chapters the reader will recognize complex links among the inception of archaeology in South America, the re-creation of Inca traditions and spaces in Cuzco, the growing influence of tourism, and modern representations of identity. The authors approach the distinguished position of the Incas in Andean and Latin American imaginaries as resulting from pervasive social memories and the agency of historians, archaeologists, and politicians. This difficult balance between local forces and national agendas serves to frame the continuous reinvention of Inca history within and outside the Andean frontiers.

There are some absences in the volume. Despite the outstanding role played by Alconini (a Bolivian scholar and the first editor), only one-quarter of the authors are Latin American. Thus, the volume largely presents international scholarship on the Incas as perceived from the Northern Hemisphere. The study of the Qhapaq Ñan, the Andean road system, is covered only tangentially in some chapters, despite the progress achieved in that field by South American academics. Finally, it would have been useful to have a chapter dedicated to evaluating the impact of Inca territory and populations on Hispanic and European societies. The last reflection is far from new. One of the illustrated pages of the Murúa Codex (c. 1600) shows the Potosí mines, embodied as an Inca lord with several workers busy extracting minerals, as the “columns” (cullunas in the transcription by Guaman Poma, c. 1610) of the transatlantic Spanish state.

These comments do not detract from the value of the texts gathered in this major contribution to Inca and South American studies. Alconini and Covey's book, the outcome of an intellectual ayni—the Quechua word for a collective effort—captures in detail the current state of knowledge about Tawantinsuyu, and it arrives at a time of renewed academic and public dialogue on the past and present of Andean countries.