The Best Books on the Maya and the Incas

One introduction to each civilisation, the story of how the Maya were finally read, the argument over why they fell, and two accounts of how the Incas were conquered

The best introduction to the ancient Maya is Michael Coe's The Maya, now in its ninth edition with Stephen Houston, which has been the standard first book on the subject for half a century and has been rewritten as the decipherment of Maya writing changed what could be known. The best single volume on the Incas is Terence D'Altroy's The Incas, a scholarly survey of how the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas was built and run, and John Hemming's The Conquest of the Incas is the classic narrative of how it was destroyed. Those three are the spine of this list.

Around them are five books that each do one thing well. Linda Schele and David Freidel's A Forest of Kings was the first book to tell Maya history as history, with named kings and dated wars, once the glyphs could be read; Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube's Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens is the reference that does the same thing dynasty by dynasty. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code is the story of the decipherment itself, one of the great intellectual detective stories of the twentieth century. David Webster's The Fall of the Ancient Maya is the sober account of the collapse and of why no single cause explains it. And Kim MacQuarrie's The Last Days of the Incas is the popular narrative of the conquest for readers who want the story before the scholarship.

Two well-known books are deliberately not ranked here. Charles Mann's 1491 is the best general account of the Americas before Columbus and has its place on this site's Aztec reading list; it is a fine companion to everything below. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse both use these civilisations as set pieces, and both are read by many more people than any book on this list, but archaeologists of the Maya and the Andes have criticised them heavily and a reader should treat them as a starting argument rather than a source. Every title below is checked against Open Library and publisher records, with editions, years and ISBNs verified rather than scraped.

The books

Which Maya or Inca book to start with

Start with Coe's The Maya if the Maya are your subject. It belongs to the Thames and Hudson Ancient Peoples and Places series, which means it is compact, well illustrated and written for a general reader by a working archaeologist, and it moves in order through the Preclassic villages, the Classic cities of the southern lowlands, the collapse, the Postclassic north and the Spanish conquest, with chapters on writing, the calendar, religion and daily life. The first edition appeared in 1966, before anyone could read a Maya sentence; the current one is built on the decipherment and on decades of excavation since, and Houston, one of the leading epigraphers of the present generation, brought it up to date. It is the book to read first because everything else on the Maya half of this list assumes its outline.

Then read A Forest of Kings, which is a different kind of book altogether. Schele was an art historian who became one of the central figures of the decipherment, Freidel an archaeologist, and their book of 1990 was the first to tell the history of the Classic Maya cities, Palenque, Tikal, Copán and the rest, as a story of named rulers, dynastic succession, alliances and wars, drawn from the monuments those rulers set up. It is long and it is written with an enthusiasm that occasionally runs ahead of the evidence; some of its readings of particular glyphs and events have been revised in the thirty years since. But it is still the book that made the Maya into people with a history rather than a mysterious lost civilisation, and it reads like a discovery because it was one.

Martin and Grube's Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens is the reference to keep beside it. Kingdom by kingdom, it sets out what is known of each ruler, with the dates, monuments and inscriptions on which that knowledge rests, and the second edition of 2008 incorporates readings that postdate Schele. It is not a book to read through, though many people do; it is the book to check Forest of Kings against. Breaking the Maya Code, Coe's other book on this list, is the one to read for how all of this became possible: how a Russian linguist, Yuri Knorozov, worked out in the 1950s that the glyphs were phonetic, how the most powerful Maya scholar of the day, Eric Thompson, refused to accept it for decades, and how a small group in the 1970s and 1980s, Schele among them, finally read the texts. It is one of the best books ever written about an intellectual breakthrough, and it can be read by someone who knows nothing about the Maya at all.

For the Incas, start with D'Altroy. The Incas is a scholarly survey rather than a narrative, organised by topic: the origins of the state in the Cuzco valley, the expansion of the empire under Pachacuti and his successors, the road system and the administrative centres, the economy of labour tax and state storehouses, religion, the khipu, and the conquest. It is the book that most Andean archaeologists would hand to a serious reader, and the second edition of 2014 incorporates a great deal of new fieldwork. It is dense but not difficult, and it is honest about how much of Inca history is known only through Spanish chroniclers writing after the fact.

Then read Hemming for the fall. The Conquest of the Incas has been in print since 1970 and remains the standard narrative of the years from Pizarro's landing to the execution of the last independent Inca ruler in 1572. It is built from the Spanish sources but it is not on the Spanish side; Hemming follows the Inca resistance under Manco Inca and his successors in the mountains of Vilcabamba with as much care as the conquistadors, and the last third of the book, on the neo-Inca state and its destruction, is the part most readers have never heard. It is long and it is the best-written book on this list. MacQuarrie's The Last Days of the Incas covers the same conquest more briskly, with a modern narrative pace, and adds a second story, the rediscovery of the Vilcabamba sites and of Machu Picchu in the twentieth century. Readers who want the story before the scholarship should start there and graduate to Hemming.

MacQuarrie's second story deserves a word, because it corrects a myth that most readers arrive with. Hiram Bingham reached Machu Picchu in 1911 and believed for the rest of his life that he had found Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Inca resistance. He had not. Machu Picchu is now generally understood as a royal estate built for the emperor Pachacuti in the fifteenth century, abandoned before the Spaniards ever saw it and never a place of resistance; the real Vilcabamba lay further into the forest, at a site Bingham had visited and dismissed, and it was identified in the decades after his death. MacQuarrie tells that story alongside the conquest, and Hemming, who did his own fieldwork in the Vilcabamba region, tells the end of it in the final chapters of his book. For the Aztecs, who were the third of the great pre-Columbian civilisations and the first to fall, this site has a separate reading guide; Charles Mann's 1491 is the book that puts all three into one continent-wide picture and is the best companion to everything here.

What the historians argue about

The largest argument in Maya studies is the collapse: why the great cities of the southern lowlands were abandoned during the ninth century and never reoccupied on the same scale. Webster's The Fall of the Ancient Maya is on this list because it takes every proposed cause seriously and refuses to crown one. Drought has the strongest physical evidence, from lake-sediment and cave records that show severe dry periods in the right centuries; but the cities did not all fall at once, some in the north flourished while the south emptied, and the same dry spells had been survived before. Webster's own emphasis is on a society that had grown too large for its agricultural base and whose rulers had staked their legitimacy on results they could no longer deliver, with warfare between kingdoms making everything worse. Diamond's Collapse gives the Maya a chapter and presents the environmental version with great confidence; Maya specialists have objected that it flattens a regional and uneven process into a single morality tale. Readers should hold both in view and trust Webster's caution.

The second Maya argument is about what the texts can tell us. The decipherment turned the Maya from a civilisation known only through its ruins into one with a written history, but that history is the history its kings chose to carve, and there is a long-running debate about how far the monuments can be trusted as a record of events rather than as royal propaganda. Martin and Grube's Chronicle is careful about this distinction; Forest of Kings, written in the first flush of decipherment, is less so, and some of its more dramatic reconstructions have not survived. The safe position, which Coe's survey takes, is that the inscriptions are reliable on dates, names and dynastic sequence and must be read critically on everything else.

The Inca arguments are different because the Incas left no writing that has been read. The khipu, the knotted-cord records of the empire, are securely understood as numerical accounts; whether some of them also encoded narrative is an open question that D'Altroy sets out fairly. Everything else about the Inca past comes through Spanish chroniclers writing after the conquest, several of them from rival Inca lineages with their own reasons to rewrite the succession, and historians have spent a century deciding which to believe. The old picture of the Inca state as a kind of benevolent socialism, drawn from those chroniclers and popular in the early twentieth century, has largely given way to a view of the empire as a system of reciprocal obligation and labour tribute that was run for the benefit of the Inca elite; D'Altroy presents the modern view, and Hemming, writing in 1970, is somewhat closer to the older one.

The last argument is the conquest itself. Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel opens with Cajamarca, where a small Spanish force captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa in 1532, and uses it to argue that European steel, horses, writing and above all disease made the outcome inevitable. Hemming and MacQuarrie tell the same episode and show why historians of the Andes find that account too tidy: the empire had just come through a civil war between two royal brothers, the Spaniards recruited enormous numbers of native allies from peoples who resented Inca rule, Inca resistance under Manco went on for forty years, and the outcome looked far from settled to the people living through it. That epidemic disease, which reached the Andes before the Spaniards did, was decisive is not in doubt; that it made everything else irrelevant is.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best book to start with on the Maya?

Michael Coe's The Maya, now in its ninth edition (2015) with Stephen Houston. It is short, illustrated and written for general readers by archaeologists, and it has been rewritten edition by edition as the decipherment of Maya writing changed the field. Read Coe's Breaking the Maya Code next for the story of that decipherment, and Schele and Freidel's A Forest of Kings for the history of the Classic kings it made possible.

What is the best single-volume history of the Incas?

Terence D'Altroy's The Incas (second edition, 2014) for the empire itself, and John Hemming's The Conquest of the Incas (1970) for its destruction. D'Altroy is a scholarly survey organised by topic; Hemming is a narrative that follows the war from Cajamarca in 1532 to the end of Inca resistance in Vilcabamba in 1572. Kim MacQuarrie's The Last Days of the Incas is the lighter popular alternative to Hemming.

Why did the Maya civilisation collapse?

Historians and archaeologists do not agree on a single cause, and the best book on the question, David Webster's The Fall of the Ancient Maya, argues that there was none. Severe droughts in the ninth century are well documented in lake-sediment and cave records; overpopulation, exhausted soils, warfare between kingdoms and the failure of royal authority all played a part; and the collapse was regional and uneven, with northern cities flourishing while the southern lowlands emptied. Jared Diamond's Collapse presents the environmental explanation confidently, and Maya specialists have criticised it for oversimplifying.

Is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel a good book on the Inca conquest?

It is a good place to encounter the question and a poor place to stop. Diamond opens with Pizarro's capture of Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 and argues that steel, horses, writing and disease made the Spanish victory inevitable. Historians of the Andes point out that the empire had just fought a civil war, that the Spaniards depended on huge numbers of native allies, and that Inca resistance lasted forty years. Hemming's Conquest of the Incas and MacQuarrie's Last Days of the Incas tell the full story; D'Altroy explains the empire that was lost.

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Sources consulted

• The Maya, ninth edition (Coe and Houston), Open Library record
• A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (Schele and Freidel), Open Library record
• Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, second edition (Martin and Grube), Open Library record
• Breaking the Maya Code, third edition (Coe), Open Library record
• The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse (Webster), Open Library record
• The Incas, second edition (D'Altroy), Open Library record
• The Conquest of the Incas (Hemming), Open Library record
• The Last Days of the Incas (MacQuarrie), Open Library record

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