Great Inca Road Exhibit
Mike R
Art Daily posts news on the Great Inca Road Exhibit at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City
Mike Ruggeri
NEW YORK, NY.- "Highway of An Empire: The Great Inca Road," an
exhibition of more than 50 striking photographs featuring the 25,000
miles of roads and trails that the Incas built six centuries ago in
South America, opens Saturday, October 17 at the American Museum of
Natural History. On view in the IMAX Corridor on the second floor
through September 2010, the exhibition explores the roads that
crisscrossed the Incan realm, radiating out from Cuzco, the Inca
capital tucked in the mountains of modern-day Peru.
The vast Inca Empire owed its reach and power to this extensive and
intricate network of roads. Linking forts, religious sites, and
administrative centers from the Pacific coast to the Amazonian
rainforest, the Inca roads allowed armies and imperial officials to
conquer and then control the largest empire in the Americas.
In this series of stunning photographs, "Highway of An Empire" reveals
the diversity of this road system - from broad paved highways to woven
suspension bridges to beaten tracks through barren desert - and of the
landscape through which it travels. Other highlights include
intriguing round terraces of Moray, which may have been used to grow
special plants brought from distant parts of the empire; a tropical
forest located along the Amazon tributary near the present-day border
between Peru and Bolivia; Sondor, a terraced knoll that may have been
used for religious rituals; the Huascarán peak in the Cordillera
Blanca, the highest in Peru and one of the highest in the Andes;
Laguna de Los Condores, where in 1996 a local worker discovered a
cache of some 200 mummy bundles tucked in a cliff side high above a
lake; Andeans gathering a potato crop; and maps of the road network.
As one of the most important technological works of the pre-Hispanic
Americas, the Great Inca Road continues to embrace its profound
history as well as to welcome opportunities for trade and economic
development. The ancient route runs through Argentina, Bolivia, Chile,
Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, and these six nations are working
together to nominate it for inclusion on the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) list of
World Heritage Sites.
The exhibition curator for "Highway of An Empire: The Great Inca Road"
is R. Alan Covey, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Southern
Methodist University, and Research Associate in the Museum’s Division
of Anthropology. Curatorial Advisor to the exhibition is Charles
Spencer, Curator, Division of Anthropology.
Visitors interested in learning more about the subjects featured in
"Highway of An Empire" can also visit the Museum’s Hall of South
American Peoples. This hall explores the pre-Columbian cultures of
South America, including those of the ancient Inca, Moche, Chavin, and
Chancay, as well as those of the many peoples of modern Amazonia.
Museum researchers have worked with Andean colleagues on several of
the most significant archaeological studies of the Inca Empire,
including a large-scale research project at Huánuco Pampa, an
important provincial center. The research project, which involved the
mapping of nearly 4,000 buildings at the site and excavating in more
than 300 structures, was led by the late Craig Morris, the Museum’s
Dean of Science and Curator in the Department of Anthropology.
Huánuco Pampa is perhaps the best-preserved of the Inca provincial
administrative centers established between southern Colombia and
central Chile, and Morris’s research on the site significantly
advanced the understanding of the Inca Empire. "The Huánuco Pampa
Archaeological Project: Volume I: The Plaza and Palace Complex,"
authored by Morris and his colleagues R. Alan Covey and Pat Stein, has
been submitted for publication through the series Anthropological
Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. This volume is the
first of a series of publications presenting project data from the
Huánuco Pampa excavations and is focused on how the Incas used open
spaces at their provincial administrative centers to choreograph a
range of encounters with their subjects.
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