CP Climate of the Past CP Clim. Past 1814-9332 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/cp-5-375-2009 Putting the rise of the Inca Empire within a climatic and land management context Chepstow-Lusty A. J. 1 2 Frogley M. R. 3 Bauer B. S. 4 Leng M. J. 5 Boessenkool K. P. 6 Carcaillet C. 2 7 Ali A. A. 2 Gioda A. 8 Institut Français d'Etudes Andines (IFEA), Lima, Peru Centre for Bio-Archaeology and Ecology, Université Montpellier 2, Montpellier, France Department of Geography, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Department of Anthropology, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois, USA NERC Isotope Geoscience Laboratory, Nottingham, UK School of Earth, Ocean and Planetary Sciences, University of Cardiff, Cardiff, UK Paleoenvironments and Chronoecology, Institut de Botanique, Montpellier, France Hydrosciences, IRD, Lima, Peru 22 07 2009 5 3 375 388 Copyright: © 2009 A. J. Chepstow-Lusty et al. 2009 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/5/375/2009/cp-5-375-2009.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/5/375/2009/cp-5-375-2009.pdf

The rapid expansion of the Inca from the Cuzco area of highland Peru (ca. AD 1400–1532) produced the largest empire in the New World. Although this meteoric growth may in part be due to the adoption of innovative societal strategies, supported by a large labour force and a standing army, we argue that it would not have been possible without increased crop productivity, which was linked to more favourable climatic conditions. Here we present a multi-proxy, high-resolution 1200-year lake sediment record from Marcacocha, located 12 km north of Ollantaytambo, in the heartland of the Inca Empire. This record reveals a period of sustained aridity that began from AD 880, followed by increased warming from AD 1100 that lasted beyond the arrival of the Spanish in AD 1532. These increasingly warmer conditions would have allowed the Inca and their immediate predecessors the opportunity to exploit higher altitudes (post-AD 1150) by constructing agricultural terraces that employed glacial-fed irrigation, in combination with deliberate agroforestry techniques. There may be some important lessons to be learnt today from these strategies for sustainable rural development in the Andes in the light of future climate uncertainty.

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