Ruins of the Ancient Inca Empire

Power, ideology and ritual: the practice of agriculture in the Inca Empire.

Scholars have long debated the nature and basis of political power in complex societies, and ideology has figured prominently in their debates as a force explaining and actively validating the social order. "An ideology tells the members of a group who they are and explains their relations to one another, to people outside the group, to the past and future, to nature, and to the cosmos" (Conrad...

Governance in the Ruins

Song Among the Ruins

American distress at the horrors produced by the atomic bombs released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 generated a laudable desire to salvage something positive from the damage. Immediately after the war, the American government sent survey teams to the bombed cities to evaluate the extent and nature of the damage. An account of those early days has appeared in The Yale Journal [ 1,2]. The re...

Decoding Road Networks into Ancient Routes: The Case of the Aztec Empire in Mexico

Historical evidence in some regions of Latin America has suggested that the system of ancient routes between places could have determined the success or collapse of prehistoric societies. The identification of such routes provided essential information to understand initial conditions in the evolution of the actual road infrastructure. Looking into the increasing technology applied to generate ...

[And new life blossoms from the ruins].