The Johnny-Come-Lately Incas

The Incas were relative newcomers themselves when the Spanish arrived. The Inca Empire had only begun expanding after 1400 A.D., and had been around for a mere century before being so brutally cut short by the Spanish. The Incas were only the last in a whole series of cultures predating the Spanish conquest, but it has taken a while for the world to appreciate the achievements of these earlier Peruvian civilizations.

Part of the problem can be blamed on the Inca themselves, who liked to pretend that it was all their own work. There is evidence that the Incas substantially retold the history of preceding civilizations to downplay their achievements, and in some cases to ignore those achievements completely. In Crónica del Perú, one of the best of the early Spanish chroniclers, Pedro de Cieza de León, quoted his Inca sources as saying that before them there were only ‘naked savages’ and that ‘these natives were stupid and brutish beyond belief. They say they were like animals, and that many ate human flesh, and others took their daughters and mothers to wife and committed other even graver sins.’

This manipulative distortion of history was so successful—the same myth was repeated by other chroniclers like Garcilaso de la Vega in the early 17th century—that the truth has only emerged recently. Far from imposing order on an unruly bunch of savages, the Incas were merely the latest dominant tribe (and a short-lived one at that) in a series of Andean civilizations that had flourished over the preceding 4,000 years, including the Moche in the north of Peru, the Wari of the central states and the Tiahuanaco culture near Lake Titicaca.

Max Uhle, a German archaeologist, first revealed how literally deep the roots of Andean culture were. In dig after dig in southern and central Peru in the early 20th century, he showed conclusively that the Inca had been preceded by earlier cultures, and that some of these cultures had built up similar empires. In the north, Julio C Tello, excavated the extraordinary Chavín de Huántar, with its jungle iconography of snakes and jaguars dating from as early as 1200 B.C.—over two millennia before the Incas.
So where did the Incas come from? The prosaic response is that up until around 1400, A.D., they were just one of a number of competing tribes in the area around Cuzco, before they built up their enormous empire under a series of dynamic and capable emperors.

An explanation of this is covered in my book, Lehi Never Saw Mesoamerica.