Jerónimo Carballo, Christian Volpe, Ana Cusolito
The Inca Empire was the last and greatest in a long series of highly developed cultures in pre-colonial South America. The Inca Road has played a particularly important part in the region’s history. Not only did it play a major role during the Inca Empire but it was a key component of the economy when most of South America was under Spanish rule. Unlike how they treated the Inca’s agriculture or language, the Spaniards incorporated the road system into their trade-based economy and merged it with their own institutions. It was thus a linchpin of the colonial economy in the New World (Glave 1989).