Inca Timeline

200 CE – 1572 CE · 8 sites

The Inca horizon is short and sharp: a late Andean empire that reused older sacred mountains and valley centres. Machu Picchu is one well-preserved royal estate; the administrative spine ran through Cusco and a road system still visible in the landscape.

All sites in this period

Featured

Continent Record

Most-Visited Ancient Site in South America

Machu Picchu

1450 CE – 1572 CE

An Inca citadel built c. 1450 CE, Machu Picchu sits atop a mountain ridge in Peru. Abandoned during the Spanish conquest, it remained unknown to the outside world until 1911.

422

Pre-ColumbianHigh MedievalEarly Modern

94

Featured

Country Record

Known by the Most Names in Peru

Cusco

1200 CE – 1533 CE

The high-altitude capital of the Inca Empire — planned in the form of a puma, with Coricancha at its spiritual centre and colonial churches built atop Inca masonry — the gateway city to Machu Picchu and the heart of Andean imperial archaeology.

211

Pre-Columbian

79

Country Record

Oldest Fortress in Peru

Sacsayhuamán

1100 CE – 1536 CE

A monumental Inca complex on the hill above Cusco, famous for three tiers of zigzagging defensive walls built from limestone blocks so vast — some weighing over 100 tonnes — and cut so precisely that they fit together without mortar, with joints a knife blade cannot penetrate. It is the supreme example of Inca megalithic masonry.

311

Pre-Columbian

79

Featured

Ollantaytambo

1440 CE – 1540 CE

A monumental Inca royal estate and fortress-temple complex in the Sacred Valley of Peru, where giant terraces climb the mountainside to an unfinished Temple of the Sun built from six colossal pink-granite monoliths. Still a living town laid out on its original Inca grid, it was the site of one of the few Inca victories over the Spanish.

41

Pre-Columbian

70

Country Record

Oldest Complex in Peru

Pachacamac

200 CE – 1533 CE

The most important pilgrimage and oracle centre on the pre-Hispanic Peruvian coast — a sprawling city of temples and pyramids on the shores of the Pacific south of Lima, built up over thirteen centuries by successive cultures who all recognised its central deity, Pachacamac, as a supreme creator god. So powerful was Pachacamac's religious authority that the Inca, upon conquering the region, chose to incorporate rather than suppress its cult, building their own Temple of the Sun directly alongside the older oracle.

31

Late AntiqueEarly MedievalMedieval

54

Continent Record

Oldest Fortress in South America

Kuelap

900 CE – 1470 CE

A colossal stone fortress-city perched on a limestone ridge 3,000 metres above the Utcubamba Valley in the Peruvian Andes — built by the Chachapoya, the "Warriors of the Clouds," between roughly 900 and 1470 CE. Enclosed by walls up to 19 metres tall and packed with over 400 circular stone houses, Kuelap is often called the "Machu Picchu of the North" for its scale, preservation, and dramatic mountaintop setting — yet it predates Machu Picchu by centuries and was never an Inca creation.

311

Pre-ColumbianMedievalHigh Medieval

53

Country Record

Earliest Known Site in Peru

Sillustani

1200 CE – 1500 CE

A dramatic pre-Columbian cemetery on a peninsula in Lake Umayo near Lake Titicaca in the Peruvian Andes, famous for its chullpas — towering cylindrical stone funerary towers, some over 12 metres tall, in which the Colla people and later the Inca entombed their elite dead. The finest towers display stonework of extraordinary precision, their smooth curved surfaces built from massive, perfectly fitted blocks that rival the celebrated masonry of the Inca capital at Cusco.

31

High MedievalPre-Columbian

51

Ingapirca

500 CE – 1532 CE

Ecuador's most important archaeological site — an elliptical stone temple complex built atop an earlier Cañari sacred site, combining Cañari lunar worship with Inca solar religion. Its centrepiece, the Castillo (Temple of the Sun), is a masterwork of Inca dry-stone construction whose elliptical platform is astronomically aligned, marking the fusion of two distinct Andean civilizations in the decades before Spanish conquest.

31

Pre-ColumbianEarly MedievalMedieval

47