This handbook, with 860 pages, forty-seven chapters and forty-eight contributors, seeks to provide the reader with an up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the Incas. It is divided into eight thematic headings.

‘The Origins and Development of the Inca Empire’ covers the documentary source material and the antecedents to the Inca state. ‘Royal Estates and Inca Imperial Centres’ looks at Inca administrative centres and royal estates across the area under Inca control. ‘Inca Hard Power Militarism, Economy and Political Hierarchies’ starts with a particularly useful chapter by Terence N Altroy, which considers the Inca political framework and economic structure and its basis in reciprocal exchange and kin relationships. The remaining papers under this heading consider the agricultural practices, results of isotopic studies, textiles and diet. Despite its title, this section contains little regarding the Inca approach to military practice and strategy. ‘Inca Imperial Identities: Colonisation, Resistance and Hybridity’ deals with the expansion of Inca colonial control, mining practices and rock art. ‘Sacred Landscapes’ reflects on the important subject of huacas, ceques, pilgrimage and sacred geography, a particularly useful theme for understanding what was important in Andean thinking about how their world operated. ‘Art Iconography and record keeping’ includes a very helpful series of chapters concerned with some of the details on information gathering and transfer, and state infrastructure. ‘The Colonial Era: continuity, change and adaptation’ deals with the forms in which Andean peoples and the Inca polity responded to the Spanish conquest, its colonial impact and the associated effort of the Catholic church with respect to conversion of the people and cultures it encountered in the Andes. ‘The Many Uses of the Inca Past and Present’ addresses how the Inca and other pre-Hispanic heritage has influenced the present state of Peru and how its people continue to deploy this heritage in their day-to-day lives as well as its importance to the Peruvian economy.

Many of the individual papers making up the volume are outstanding in the depth of their knowledge and quality of the presentation of their interpretations of the Inca ethnographic, cultural and historic legacy. Particularly commendable are the chapters by Altroy, Chase, Protzen and Wernke and the connecting and concluding chapters by Alconini and Covey.

The book includes input from many of the leading researchers in the field of Andean studies, a multidisciplinary group including archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, architects and biochemists, among others. They provide the reader with a comprehensive discussion of the Inca polity, its empire, administration and management of the many ethnic groups under its control, from Argentina, Bolivia and Chile in the south across Peru, to Ecuador in the north.

Much of the work touches on the results of recent research. The isotope work makes it possible for investigators to address the kinds of questions that thirty years ago would have been unheard of. Such questions include where individuals recovered from burials originated from and where they spent their adult lives, what kind of foods they would have consumed as juveniles and as grown-ups and how healthy their lives were; as well as what kind of family unit and social group they were from. The ethnohistoric context and archaeological evidence are compared and contrasted. The lives of the Incas and their contemporaries do not fit easily into the kind of categories and divisions that are current in our day-to-day understanding of the world and how it functions. Economy, religion, politics and social classifications were not understood as separate realms and the handbook unfolds some of these differences and how Andean culture has changed since the time of the conquest

One of the aspects of the Inca state most comprehensively investigated in recent decades, the Capac Ñan or Inca road network and associated infrastructure, gets relatively limited attention in the volume. Although many of the chapters touch on aspects of the cosmology, epistemology and worldview of the Incas and their contemporaries, a comprehensive chapter on this theme is missing from the book. The reader will be able to fill this gap by consulting some particularly noteworthy studies by Carolyn Dean (Reference Dean2010); Susan Ramírez (Reference Ramírez2005) and Gonzalo Lamana (Reference Lamana2008), which have all served to substantially enlighten our understanding of such themes. These approaches have clarified how remote the sixteenth-century Andean worldview was, both from our own and that of the Spanish conquistadors.

The book could have done with a little more copyediting, there being a notable number of small spelling mistakes and on one occasion a transposition of a caption. The handbook, however, is a significant contribution to the field of Inca studies and Andean research. For the student, academic and interested lover of books of the history and archaeology of the Andes and Incas this is an essential volume.