Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. Terence D'Altroy: It was about 2,400 miles from north to ...

For centuries, the vanished Inca fortress of Ancocagua existed only in lore. Now, at a mountaintop site in Peru, researchers ...

The Inca Empire in South America, one of the most powerful pre-Columbian societies, was known for many innovations — such as the architecture of Machu Picchu, an extensive road network, and a system ...

The snake on this Wari vessel (800-1000 AD) represented a sacred animal symbolically linked with water and fertility. Ernest Amoroso, NMAI/SI A belt (ca. 1450) made from the shell of a mollusk ...

Nearly 500 years after the collapse of the largest empire in the Americas, a single bridge remains from the Inca's extraordinary road system – and it's rewoven every year from grass. "I believe since ...

Archaeologists are uncovering remnants of a large pool constructed in Ecuador by the Inca during the 15th century. Its elaborate series of canals may have been used to collect water from as far away ...

Hiram Bingham called Machu Picchu “the most important ruin discovered in South America since the Spanish conquest.” Ivan Kashinsky and Karla Gachet The last stretch of road that the emperor of the ...

A deceptively simple feat of agricultural engineering helped the Inca to build the largest empire in South American history. In the 15th and early 16th Centuries, a small island in Lake Titicaca was ...

Inca bureaucrats recorded all the goings-on in their bustling empire using knotted cords called khipu, where the position and order of the knots represented numbers. They relied on the khipu system to ...

Steeped in death, conquest, desire, and mystery, the legend of the lost Inca gold is guarded by remote, mist-veiled mountains in central Ecuador. Somewhere deep inside the unforgiving Llanganates ...