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Inca Sites
3 of 427 entries in Sacred Sites. Click any to see everything it connects to.
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Sites significant to Inca state religion, which combined worship of the sun god Inti with a wider system of sacred landscape features known as huacas across the Andes. The tradition ended as an organised state religion with the Spanish conquest, so these sites are known through archaeology and colonial-era accounts rather than continuous practice.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingTemples, mountain shrines and sacred stones of the Andean world, in which the landscape itself is the sacred object: peaks, springs, caves and worked and unworked stones are huacas. At Cusco they were organised on a system of sight-lines radiating out from the Qorikancha, each line maintained by a named kin group. 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredThe Inca state was one Andean polity among many and its religion was built on older ones - Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimu and the local cults it absorbed as it expanded. Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities live in the same landscape today, and offerings to mountains and to the earth continue to be made there. 3 Origins
Whose Classification This IsMuch of what is recorded of Inca religion reaches us through the Spanish chroniclers and through the seventeenth-century campaigns to extirpate idolatry, whose purpose was to find and destroy the shrines they describe. The written record is a record of that destruction as much as of the cult. 3 Learn More
Sacred Sites of the Inca
This group holds the sacred sites of the Inca and wider Andean world, the temples, mountain shrines and sacred stones of the empire that ruled the Andes before the Spanish conquest. Andean religion sanctified the landscape itself, its peaks and springs held as huacas, dwelling-places of the sacred.
The browser will find the Inca temples and mountain sanctuaries the atlas gathers. The entries describe each site's religious meaning, noting the survival of Andean sacred practice into the present.
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