336 Philip Ainsworth Means, 



ing from the simple pottery-types of their ancestors a new kind 

 of pottery which was to find its fullest florescence under the 

 last five Inca rulers. Because of the lack of detailed knowledge 

 of the early Inca period, we shall not touch upon that culture 

 again in this paper. 



8. THE INCA CULTURE AT ITS HEIGHT. 



As the Inca culture is the nearest to us historically it is but 

 natural that we should know more about it than we do of the 

 rest. It is even possible to draw up a fairly complete and reliable 

 history of the Inca dynasty, especially of the last six rulers. 

 For a long time it was customary to assign all evidences of pre- 

 Columbian culture in Peru to the Incas ; indeed, that is still done, 

 unfortunately, by some writers. They disregard the growing 

 evidence which points more and more clearly to the inferiority 

 in many respects of the Incas to their various predecessors. 



The Incas were, nevertheless, wonderful people. They had a 

 real genius for government and their state was the only truly 

 socialistic monarchy that has ever existed. The individual was 

 nothing; the state, that is the Inca himself and his blood-rela- 

 tives, was supreme in all things. It is not surprising that, in 

 a state like this, strongly centralized, autocratic, theocratic and 

 all-controlling, the art of outlying regions should all tend to 

 approximate that of the capital of the dominion ruled by the 

 Inca from Cuzco. This is, in the writer's opinion, the psycho- 

 logical explanation of the fact that from Quito to Chile and 

 from the Pacific to the Brazilian wilderness, vessels, architecture, 

 weapons, textiles and language all conform, with varying degrees 

 of closeness, to the fashion or example set by the people of Cuzco. 

 Typical Cuzco pottery is found wherever the Inca conquerors 

 penetrated ; Quichua dialects prevail to-day over the same areas. 



As far as shape is concerned, the vessels made by the sub- 

 jects of the Incas of the later generations are the most graceful 

 in Peru. The aryballus, the beaker, the bowl and many other 

 forms, all very attractive, are found. Dr. Hiram Bingham, whose 

 trips to Peru have resulted in the publication of many valuable 

 pictures of Inca sites and products, has given a resume of the 

 commoner Inca forms. ^^ Machu Picchu, the site from which 



"''Bingham, 1915b. 



