200. The Andean Area
The triumphs of Mexican civilization were in the spiritual or intellectual field; those of Peru lay rather in practical and material matters. The empire of the Incas was larger and much more rigorously organized and controlled, their roads longer and more ambitious as engineering undertakings, their masonry more massive; their mining operations and metal working more extensive. The domestication of the llama and the cultivation of certain food plants such as the potato gave their culture an added stability on the economic side.
The extent of the Inca empire, and of the smaller states that no doubt preceded it, was of influence in shaping Andean culture. Organized and directed efforts of large numbers of men were made available to a greater degree than ever before in the New World. The empire also operated in the direction of more steady industry, but its close organization and routine probably helped dwarf the higher flights of the mind. In the quality of their fabrics, jewelry, stone fitting, and road building, as well as in exactness of governmental administration, the Peruvians excelled. It is remarkable how little, with all their progress in these directions, they seem to have felt the need of advance in knowledge or art for its own sake. They thought with their hands rather than their heads. They practised skill and inhibited imagination.
The Incas, like the Aztecs in Mexico, represent merely the controlling nation during the last stage of development. Their specific culture was the local one of the highlands about Cuzco. Prehistoric remains from the coast both north and south, and in the Andean highland southward of Cuzco in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca and the adjacent parts of Bolivia, demonstrate that this Inca or Cuzco culture was only the latest of several forms of Andean culture. At the time of Inca dominion, the great temple of Tiahuanaco near Lake Titicaca was already a ruin. Pottery of a type characteristic of the Tiahuanaco district, and similar in style to its stone carvings, has been found in remote parts of the Andean area, thus indicating the district as an early center of diffusion. Other centers, more or less contemporaneous, some of them perhaps still earlier, can be distinguished along the coast. In short, the inner history of the Andean region is by no means summed up in that picture of it which the Inca domination at the time of discovery presented. New scientifically conducted excavations throughout the area will no doubt unravel further the succession of local cultural developments.