The Inka Empire or Tawantinsuyu (the Quechua name for the "realm of four parts") was the largest political system to develop in the New World.Tawantinsuyu extended over 2,000,000 square kilometers and encompassed at least 86 ethnic groups from Argentina and Chile to the current border between Ecuador and Colombia.Intriguingly, the Inka ruled their empire without wheeled technologies, markets, money, or phonetic writing systems.Instead, they kept the records of the empire in a complex system of knotted strings called khipus.For that reason, much of what we know of this interesting polity comes from post-conquest sources.This breathtaking collaborative volume, edited by Izumi Shimada, seeks to offer a holistic vision of the Inka empire, placing different disciplines, methods, sources, and perspectives in dialogue.It includes 19 chapters by 23 authors that consider linguistic and genetic evidence along with material culture and historical documents to study Inka origins, imperial infrastructure, administrative strategies, agricultural technology, accounting, architecture and landscape intervention, and political organization, among other aspects.The volume is divided into five parts, prefaced by a useful introductory chapter by Shimada that lays out the book's aims and structure.The first part is concerned with the written sources and discusses the origins and formation of the Inka empire.It opens with an insightful historiographical essay by anthropologist Frank Salomon that maps the early textual evidence of the Inka empire.The following two chapters examine linguistic evidence (Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino) and DNA analysis (Ken-Ichi Shinoda).Cerrón-Palomino argues that the Inka originally spoke Puquina language and migrated north from the Lake Titicaca region (along the modern Peru-Boliva border), while Shinoda postits that genetic evidence also supports a movement from the Titicaca region to Cuzco.In chapter five, however, Brian S. Bauer and Douglas K. Smit take issue with Cerrón-Palomino and Shinoda's approaches, claiming they "read these origin myths as historically accurate" (pg.68).Rather than seeing the expansion of the Inka as a migration of a single people, they suggest, archaeologists should take a broader view on the development of state-level sociopolitical complexity.In this way, they present archaeological data to argue that by 1300 C.E. the Inka had consolidated and unified a large heartland in the Cuzco basin, decades before the time of their expansion in the 15 th century.