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the moral inferiority of the natives. But the book had no successor. More than a century later, when Dobyns went to Lima, Prescott’s was still the only complete account. (A fine history, John Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas, appeared in 1970. But it, too, has had no successor, despite a wealth of new information.) “The Inka were largely ignored because the entire continent of South America was largely ignored,” Patricia Lyon, an anthropologist at the Institute for Andean Studies, in Berkeley, California, explained to me. Until the end of colonialism, she suggested, researchers tended to work in their own countries’ possessions. “The British were in Africa, along with the Germans and French. The Dutch were in Asia, and nobody was in South America,” because most of its nations were independent. The few researchers who did examine Andean societies were often sidetracked into ideological warfare. The Inka practiced a form of central planning, which led scholars into a sterile Cold War squabble about whether they were actually socialists avant la lettre in a communal Utopia or a dire precursor to Stalinist Russia.

Given the lack of previous investigation, it may have been inevitable that when Dobyns traced births and deaths in Lima he would be staking out new ground. He collected every book on Peruvian demography he could find. And he dipped into his own money to pay Cornell project workers to explore the cathedral archives and the national archives of Peru and the municipal archives of Lima. Slowly tallying mortality and natality figures, Dobyns continued to be impressed by what he found. Like any scholar, he eventually wrote an article about what he had learned. But by the time his article came out, in 1963, he had realized that his findings applied far beyond Peru.

The Inka and the Wampanoag were as different as Turks and Swedes. But Dobyns discovered, in effect, that their separate battles with Spain and England followed a similar biocultural template, one that explained the otherwise perplexing fact that every Indian culture, large or small, eventually succumbed to Europe. (Shouldn’t there have been some exceptions?) And then, reasoning backward in time from this master narrative, he proposed a new way to think about Native American societies, one that transformed not only our understanding of life before Columbus arrived, but our picture of the continents themselves.

TAWANTINSUYU

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. “If imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptability,” wrote the Oxford historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “the Inka were the most impressive empire builders of their day.”

The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South America—some as rich as the Inka themselves, some poor and disorganized, all speaking different languages—into a single bureaucratic framework under the direct rule of the emperor. The unity was not merely political: the Inka wanted to meld together the area’s religion, economics, and arts. Their methods were audacious, brutal, and efficient: they removed entire populations from their homelands; shuttled them around the biggest road system on the planet, a mesh of stone-paved thoroughfares totaling as much as 25,000 miles; and forced them to work with other groups, using only Runa Sumi, the Inka language, on massive, faraway state farms and construction projects.*7 To monitor this