Elizabeth Arkush

New Capabilities

Her recalibrated dates show Inca and local occupations overlapped decades

For more than half a century, archaeologists dated the Inca Empire from a timeline built in the 1940s on oral histories recorded by the Spanish cleric Miguel Cabello de Balboa. It gave the empire 94 years, from Pachacuti's rise in 1438 to the Spanish conquest that began in 1532. Radiocarbon dates from sites across the Andes now place Inca activity decades earlier.

Updated Oct 21