Awards

• Winner of Finalist for a 2021 PROSE Award.

Overview

A major new history of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, set in a larger global context than previous accountsPrevious accounts of the fall of the Inca empire have played up the importance of the events of one violent day in November 1532 at the highland Andean town of Cajamarca. To some, the ""Cajamarca miracle""-in which Francisco Pizarro and a small contingent of Spaniards captured an Inca who led an army numbering in the tens of thousands-demonstrated the intervention of divine providence. To others, the outcome was simply the result of European technological and immunological superiority. Inca Apocalypse develops a new perspective on the Spanish invasion and transformation of the Inca realm. Alan Covey's sweeping narrative traces the origins of the Inca and Spanish empires, identifying how Andean and Iberian beliefs about the world's end shaped the collision of the two civilizations. Rather than a decisive victory on the field at Cajamarca, the Spanish conquest was an uncertain, disruptive process that reshaped the worldviews of those on each side of the conflict.. The survivors built colonial Peru, a new society that never forgot the Inca imperial legacy or the enduring supernatural power of the Andean landscape.Covey retells a familiar story of conquest at a larger historical and geographical scale than ever before. This rich new history, based on the latest archaeological and historical evidence, illuminates mysteries that still surround the last days of the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas.

Full Product Details

9780190299125

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Reviews

Inca Apocalypse is an outstanding overview of the fall of the Inca Empire written by a world class scholar. --Brian S. Bauer, University of Illinois at Chicago Inca Apocalypse is a magnificent book. Alan Covey draws on his own archaeological fieldwork to portray the rapid hegemony of the Inca Empire, stressing the role of powerful women. He then deploys massive research to give a detailed narrative of Pizarro's expeditions and conquest, decades of civil wars between the unscrupulous victors, and the Spanish Crown's and Catholic Church's strategies to control the Andean realm and its subject peoples. --John Hemming, author of The Conquest of the Incas Alan Covey has transformed the image of the Spanish occupation of the vast scattered domains of the Inca Empire, from a simple triumph of European technologies (and diseases), into a prolonged, and multi-faceted series of conquests that were not only military but also political, ecological, and, above all, religious. His book could well help to provide a model for a more nuanced account of European conquests in other parts of the globe. --Anthony Pagden, author of The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present

Author Information

R. Alan Covey is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History.

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