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At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero . By Stella Nair . Austin : University of Texas Press , 2015. Pp. xviii, 268. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 paper.
This important book offers a superb study of Topa Inca's palace complex at Chinchero, Peru, organizing its analysis around Inca concepts and architectural features, and through the spatial progression through which the site would have been experienced. Nair foregrounds how Inca architecture delineated and sacralized space while producing stages for performance, and she provides an excellent reading of the politics of place and movement. The son and successor of the great Inca imperialist Pachacutic, Topa Inca built Chinchero when he himself was ruler and extended the empire. He died there late in the fifteenth century; the unsuccessful claimant to his throne was then imprisoned in his father's palace at the order of his brother and rival. The great terraces and plaza of Topa Inca's compound formed the heart of the colonial reducción of Chinchero and dominate the modern town.
The reader starts with the roads leading to Chinchero from Cusco and the Urubamba Valley, moving through the Inca heartland where Topa Inca built this great compound in...