Like other aspects of government and social organization, the military defense of the Inca Empire was well ordered and highly planned. The majority of evidence of warfare comes from the archaeological record which shows the high level of preparation.

While the Inca capital city itself, Cuzco, was not surrounded by walls or fortified defenses there were fortresses built near the city which offered a number of advantages. The first advantage was the defense the fortresses gave the city people against any attackers.

These fortresses were designed to shelter the taxpayers and other nobles and provide food to the people for considerable amounts of time when all supply lines were broken. This was achievable because the majority of food warehouses were situated outside towns but within defending reach of the fortresses, There could be up to 500 warehouses in rows along hillsides containing food, clothes, and army stores such as weapons and tools. An example of this system was discovered outside the provincial town of Huanuco.

Many of these warehouses were only accessible via a window which could be reached by constructing stones steps leading up the wall. The second purpose of the fortresses was to control and dominate their conquered subjects. The provincial town of Paramongo was naturally defended by its topographical position but still a fortress was constructed. Other results included a store of raw material for the manufacture of public goods, supplies to relieve famine stricken or areas of crop failure and a means of providing luxury items for the ruling classes.

While the cities themselves were not surrounded by a wall, the royal palaces and Sun god converts were well protected in their own right. The main entrance into the Emperor’s palace considered of two doorways, the first guarded by 2000 soldiers and the second was protected by 100 captains. Many of the homes of the nobility’s were guarded in much the same way, while the converts were guarded by high walls and a single entrance.

The all important expansion of the Inca empire was based around their standing armies, forced tributary status and their extensive communication systems. While the majority of taxpayers were agriculturalists, the sheer number of male workers to draw upon enabled the Incas to maintain a standing army, so the empire was ready to respond instantaneously to any threat. This army, of course, was also able to remain continually in service because of the tribute system and warehouses which provided food for the soldiers all year round.

Inca history states that in the early 15th century the neighboring kingdom of Chancas marshaled an army in order to conquer the fertile Inca land. The Incas lost the battle but due to Cusi Yupanqui, the Emperor’s son, they managed to take back the lost land. He became the first Inca to accumulate land from the surrounding ethnic groups.

The Inca army, which grew in size with the expansion of the empire, was mainly made up of armed foot soldiers practiced in the art of hand-to-hand combat. Their main weapon was the club which required two hands to operate but was capable of inflicting fatal head wounds. On the other hand, with the accumulation of the eastern jungle people, the bow and arrow became more common. This weapon could be used to kill enemy troops from a short distance.

Also, due to the large amount of manpower the Emperor was able to draw from, the Incas built and maintained extensive roads, some reaching up to 30,000–40,000 km long. These roads were only second in size to those of the Roman empire during pre-industrial civilizations. The labor needed was mainly provided by stone masons who did not need to use mortar, instead freestanding walls where built to control the flow of soldiers. These road systems allowed the army to move swiftly to all sides of the Empire.

For further reading see ‘Everyday life of the Incas’ by A. Kendall.

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Charlotte Gardner, a guest blog writer, is currently studying archaeology at the Australian National University. In her spare time she likes to read and write about eccentric historical moments. Her love of old buildings and older stories was sparked when she visited Italy. One of Charlotte’s greatest wishes is that in a few thousand years her skeleton will be dug up by an archaeological investigation team and put on display in a national museum. You may contact Charlotte via email at: charlotteg86@gmail.com.

The Inca empire reached its peak in the 1500s, after emerging in under a century. From 1470 they ruled from their capital Cuzco, a vast area that reached the practicable limits of its expansion with the Amazonian rainforest to the east and the Andes to the south.

The empire was highly organized, divided into geographical, social and hierarchical groups. The empire, Taluantinsuys (Land of the Four Quarters), was divided into four provinces, or suyu, called Chinchaysuyu, Antisuyu, Cuntisuyu and Collasuyu. These quarters were then further divided into smaller provinces whose boundaries often reflected the pre-Inca divisions. This was especially so with the Empire’s rapid expansion and integration of other cultures.

At the head of the organization was the royal family ruled by the Emperor, or Child of the Sun. The Incas believed that their royal family were direct descents from the Sun god through their ancestor Manco Capac, and therefore they ruled with divine right. Each member of the royal family was known by their title, used solely by the Inca royal family. These included Auqui for an unmarried son of the Emperor and Inca for a married son. It was necessary to make this strict legal hierarchical system to define the next heir to the throne; the Emperor’s wives could number into the hundreds and illegitimate sons by his concubines were not eligible for the succession.

Anyone who wanted an audience with the Emperor had to take off his sandals and carry a “token burden” on his back, both signs of respect. The organization of the empire was so strict that everyone knew their position in the society. Under the royal family were the nobles of royal blood or nobles by Inca privilege; both groups belonged to the elite and helped govern the provinces. To help with decisions the Emperor would discuss matters with his advisers, a group of men made up of royal relatives or men who held important social positions in their native lands.

Administration of the empire revolved around the taxpayers, or ‘commoners’. This social group made up the majority of the Inca population and were mainly agriculturalists. These subjects were expected to pay their taxes as energy or labour. The tight social categories were rigorously enforced because they dictated who was liable to pay tribute.

Each province was expected to provide agreed upon amounts of tribute to the Inca government warehouses made up of the supplied energy of every agriculturalist in that area. In return the government was supposed to adjust its demands depending on the seasonal capacity of the provinces. In addition, male individuals who possessed a particular skill were exempt from contributing to the province tribute and instead was required to complete local works. These could include repairing bridges, building roads, or serving time in the army, the public work force or the mines. In this way, it was more common for towns to be build around specialist’s skills which relied on supplies from other specialists skills, for example, a bridge builder living in a town with a carpenter.

On the other hand, the agriculturists retained enough land to feed themselves but were close to government and the religious owned land to work on also. When it was sowing or harvesting time all other tasks, but urgent government business such as warfare, were postponed so the taxpayers could focus on the land.

First the lands of the Religion were worked, the community land, or Emperor’s; and, and then the taxpayers personal land. The Emperor would start the work using a golden hand plough. He would, of course, stop working after the initial ceremonial beginning, leaving the land to be worked on by the taxpayers. Each man supervised the work of his family on his appointed land plot and the first who finished his part was considered a rich man. After the harvest, the produce from the Emperor’s land was then transported and stored in warehouses for future redistribution.

For further reading see ‘Everyday life of the Incas’ by A. Kendall

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Charlotte Gardner, a guest blog writer, is currently studying archaeology at the Australian National University. In her spare time she likes to read and write about eccentric historical moments. Her love of old buildings and older stories was sparked when she visited Italy. One of Charlotte’s greatest wishes is that in a few thousand years her skeleton will be dug up by an archaeological investigation team and put on display in a national museum. You may contact Charlotte via email at: charlotteg86@gmail.com.

Lying on the Konya plain in the south of modern day Turkey, Çatalhöyük is the world’s earliest known town. Founded roughly 9500 years ago, the settlement covered 35 acres — making it larger than the ancient city of Jericho, founded some 500 years later. Archaeological evidence unearthed at Çatalhöyük suggests that the town’s 5000 to 8000 residents lived in a society with no class system or gender barriers. They subsisted on cereal farming, the raising of livestock and, most importantly, the trading in black obsidian mined from the mountain Hasan Dag, located 87 miles to the east.

Most interesting still was the town’s configuration. All homes in Çatalhöyük were built from sun-dried brick and entered through the roof. There were no streets, alleyways or plazas in the town — each house was built wall-to-wall to its neighbor. The result was a large cube, and eventually a mound, whose outer most walls formed a defensive boundary around the edge of the settlement.

The town’s unique construction has allowed its contents to remain remarkably well protected over thousands of years. The 1961 excavation of Çatalhöyük, covering just one square acre, yielded 139 intact rooms. Of those, roughly 40 were classified as “shrines” by British archaeologist James Mellaart for their unique revelations about the religious beliefs of Neolithic man.

One wall of each supposed shrine were adorned with reliefs of the heads of bulls and rams, while others offered murals of birth and death scenes. Cattle horns, effigies of goddess figures and animals, and mounted human skulls were found in great number along with couches, textile fragments and other invaluable insights discovered within the ancient holy sites.

There were other equally startling finds in other chambers. Some rooms proved to be mortuaries, where striking murals portrayed vultures picking the bones of human corpses. Skeletons later discovered buried in the same rooms indicate that this was how the dead were prepared for burial in Çatalhöyük.

After flourishing for ten centuries, the town was abandoned around 5700 BC, as the greater population of the area begin to shift towards Mesopotamia. It would be there where originally Neolithic clans, such as the one at Çatalhöyük, would evolve into the world’s first kingdoms and states over the next two thousand years. To date, however, the ruins of Çatalhöyük remain one of Asia Minor’s most valuable archaeological finds and the most well preserved Neolithic site in the world.

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Chauvet Cave was first discovered by Jean-Marie Chauvet in 1995. It is located in southeast France and has been dated between 30,000 and 33,000 years B.P. (Before the Present). These dates place the drawings in the Auriganacian, or the early Upper Paleolithic period. This era is defined by the functionally flexible stone tool industry, their manufacture of body ornaments and sophisticated cave art.

By 35,000 years B.P. the Auriginancian era was established around Europe, including France, Britain and Belgium. From these areas teeth, mammoth ivory and shell have been recovered in the shape of beads and other jewelry. Also found were a variety of antler points and needles suggesting the production of clothing such as leggings and coats far more suitable for the climate than the Neanderthal’s use of unprocessed fur and animal hides. The production of these goods is considered to be the emergence of ‘modern’ behaviour. On the other hand, the absent of burials or man-made dwelling structures suggests that although there was most likely a human thinking revolution it was far from complete at this time.

Art of the Aurignacian era can be separated into two groups. The first is portable art which began appearing about 35,000 B.P. and is made up of carvings such as the Venus figurine. The second group is stationary art, or parietal art, mainly made up of cave drawings and paintings. Over Europe, the majority of cave art depicts animals with an overwhelming representations of animals of significant economic value like horse, reindeer, bison, aurochs, ibex, and mammoth along with carnivores such as lions, bears and wolves. Chauvet Cave particularly seems to contain a surprisingly large number of carnivores, with at least thirty-three figures making up almost fourteen percent of the animal figures. The carnivores represented include mainly bears and large cats including at least one spotted panther. These animals, especially the felines, are consistently among the most inaccurately proportioned with their canine teeth substantially larger than in real life. This may be because the large cats are harder to observe than other common animals such as the horse and bison, however, their teeth do seem to attract a lot more attention in general. Not only were the carnivores the only animals drawn with teeth but also their teeth were used as jewelry.

It is hard today to interpret the art of the Upper Paleolithic because so much has changed over the 30,000 years since its creation. When studying Paleolithic art we are only observing a small proportion what was made, only the surviving art is accessible to us. While art historians often view this early cave art as the ‘awakening’ of a human instinct to study the world around them, the majority of pre-historians believe instead that it is part of a wider cultural behavior. One suggestion is that the art represented a type of communication related to the movement and behavior of animals, perhaps in response to planned hunting activities. This hypothesis shows a marked shift from the idea of symbolism towards one focused on the communication of information about the surrounding environment. At any rate, the majority of experts agree that the people creating the drawings are copying images and scenes from real life. It is, however important to note, that while many of the drawings found probably do represent some greater thought or idea, there may be a certain percentage of meaningless scrawl made by amateurs or practicing children.

When undertaking their excavations, a number of other finds were located including animal bones, bear scratch marks, fire residue and human footprints. From these artifacts it was concluded that the cave had once housed bears before the arrival of humans. This might explain the relatively large number of carnivores depicted on the walls compared to other caves of similar ages. Also, a bear’s skull had been placed on the edge of a stone block. Its placing has led to many speculations about the relationship between bears and people in this cave. Nevertheless, the skull’s placement could also be the result of non-symbolic activities such as a children playing.

While the other archaeological artifacts found in the cave helped to give perspective to the animal panels, they still leave many questions unanswered. As stated before, because of the time gap between then and now, it is almost impossible for us to understand completely the meaning behind the drawings. One of the biggest mistakes made by archaeologists is to interpret the drawings using a modern understanding of the animals depicted and the current landscape, or to imprint ethnographic research onto the drawings.

For further reading see “Chauvet Cave the discovery of the world’s oldest paintings” by J.M. Chauvet, E.B. Deschamps, C. Hillaire and J. Clotte.

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History Collectors: We offer a wide selection of museum quality replicas and authentic items representing nearly every century of the Common Era and the most significant civilizations of ancient history. Once you browse through our online catalogue, we are certain you’ll find the perfect gift for yourself or a loved one with an interest in history.

About the Author
Charlotte Gardner, a guest blog writer, is currently studying archaeology at the Australian National University. In her spare time she likes to read and write about eccentric historical moments. Her love of old buildings and older stories was sparked when she visited Italy. One of Charlotte’s greatest wishes is that in a few thousand years her skeleton will be dug up by an archaeological investigation team and put on display in a national museum. You may contact Charlotte via email at: charlotteg86@gmail.com.