[Aztlan] Great Inca Road Exhibit

[michael ruggeri]

Listeros,

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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Mike Ruggeri's Ancient America Museum Exhibitions, Conferences and  
Lectures
http://tinyurl.com/c9mlao