Ancient Peru

The Andean civilizations made up a loose patchwork of different cultures that developed from the highlands of Colombia to the Atacama Desert. The most advanced civilizations were those of the Inca Empire and the Muisca. There were other cultures in Ancient Peru and earlier cultures in Tiwanaku and the Norte Chico civilization. The Inca Empire was the last sovereign political entity that emerged from the Andean civilizations before the Spanish conquest. The Inca Empire was a patchwork of languages, cultures and peoples. The components of the empire were not all uniformly loyal, nor were the local cultures all fully integrated. For example, the Chimú culture used money in their commerce, while the Inca empire as a whole had an economy based on exchange and taxation of luxury goods and labor, and it is said that Inca tax collectors would take the head lice of the lame and old as a symbolic tribute. The portions of the Chachapoya culture that had been conquered were almost openly hostile to the Inca, and the Inca nobles rejected an offer of refuge in their kingdom after their troubles with the Spanish.

Spanish rule ended or transformed many elements of the Andean civilizations notably influencing religion and architecture.

The Norte Chico civilization (also called Caral) was a complex pre-Columbian society that included as many as 30 major population centers in what is now the Norte Chico region of north-central coastal Peru. It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas and one of the six sites where civilization separately originated in the ancient world. It flourished between the 30th century BC and the 18th century BC. The alternative name, Caral-Supe, is derived from the Sacred City of Caral in the Supe Valley, a large and well-studied Norte Chico site. Complex society in Norte Chico arose a millennium after Sumer in Mesopotamia, was contemporaneous with the Egyptian pyramids, and predated the Mesoamerican Olmec by nearly two millennia.

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