In roughly a hundred years of military campaigns, Inca dominion spread like wildfire across the Andes, a process traditionally thought to have been set in motion by a single, charismatic ruler, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. Taking nearly a century of archaeological research in the region around the Inca capital as his point of departure, R. Alan Covey offers an alternative description of Inca society in the centuries leading up to imperial expansion. His focus on long-term regional changes, rather than heroic actions of Inca kings, allows the historical and archaeological evidence to be placed on equal interpretive footing. The result is a narrative of Inca political origins linking Inca statecraft to traditions of Andean power structures, long-term ecological changes, and internal social transformations. An important advancement in the study of archeology and written historical evidence of the Inca heartland, this book will be of interest to scholars of South American pre-history and archaeologists specializing in centralized states and empires.