THE INCA STATE, TAWANTINSUYO, THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD.

The Inca State, or Tahuantinsuyo, was the largest religious, political, and military enterprise of all.
It reached from Carchi in Northern Ecuador to Mendoza in Argentina and Santiago in Chile. Its scouts (Chasquis=Runners) roamed even wider, as recent discoveries has shown.
The Incas expanded and projected on earlier, pre-Incan solutions and adaptations. In the process they applied many techniques that worked well on a smaller scale but became inoperative in a much larger scale. Other techniques were reformulated in such ways that their original outline was barely recognizable.
The places of worship, not build by men, but natural places made of piles of stones, which have the appearance of small temples were preserved. These were said to be the residences of the Spirits, who from there supervised the human labor. Priest and Priestesses were allowed to serve in those places and served as intermediaries between deities and men.
They kept an old Andean Method of no treating the Land as a physical possession instead they were suppose to create from it revenues for the continuity of their religious Orders and their Princes. It involved setting aside acreage and demanding from the conquered peasantry not tribute in kind but rather labour on the fields during the specific seasonal times set up by Nature. The land produced enough for everybody and the excess of goods were kept in storages to be used for the times of hail, frost, and drought. In other words the work force was able to do their job coping with the weather patterns in which the Sun played a very important role. They used the non-planting time for instructions inside buildings to protect themselves from the extreme weather. When the applied method worked in harmony they immediately developed another in order to continue the production and at the same time making it a subject of study and the subsequent teaching had to be passed on to the ones in charge for the next generations of planters and growers.
The Inca State at its zenith did not breach this tradition. Since the needs of the population increased the acreage was expanded through such public works as irrigation and terracing.
There are 2 significant achievements in the Andean agricultural endeavor:
-First, given the wide range of geographical circumstances, there were thousands of quite different ecologic pockets, each with its own micro-environment to be understood and planted. Dozens of crops, with literally thousands of varieties, were domesticated. It is this multiplicity of minutely adapted crops and the domestication of the alpaca and the llama that made the Andean Mountains habitable to millions.
[Population in the Central Andes has always lived between 8,000 and 13,000 feet (nearly 3 mi) above the sea level, where the abode of cold and silence is present. It is admirable how men could live in places in which particular hardships are faced starting from the intenseness of the cold, the violence of the storms, the noises of tempests heard from beneath and then discharging themselves, but their strength and courage presented in them in the pursuing of their goal with unshaken intrepidity surpassed the fear and became heroes in their own personal way first and after that level in a collective way.]
-Second, the high altitude, with 200, even 300 frost-threatened nights a year, that represents a challenge to any agricultural system, was developed there, on slopes with extreme steeps, with precipices on all sides, but a light vapor, suspended in the lower Regions of the Air, needed to be concealed for the growing and preservation of the goods.
On the high, cold plains, known in the Andes as "Puna," there are only 2 seasons: Summer every day and Winter every night. By alternating using the freezing temperatures of the nocturnal winter and the hot sunshine of the daily tropical summer, Andean peoples developed preserves of freeze-dried meat, fish, and mealy tubers (charqui, chuno) that kept indefinitely and weighed much less than the original food. The giant warehouses that lined the Inca highways were filled with these preserves and used to feed everyone.
The Inca did not increase productivity neither the usual labor hours, instead they preferred to magnify on an imperial scale the patterns of reciprocal obligations of the use of the Land familiar to everyone from earlier times.
The Incas did not interfere too much with life of the many local groups that they had incorporated into Tawantinsuyo. Most of the cultures that existed in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile before the Inca expansion can be identified.
Although human occupation in the Central Andes began over 20,000 years ago, the beginings of agriculture and population growth are much more recent. Within the last 8,000 years a specialized desert-and-highland agriculture was developed.
The emergence of Andean Civilizations was the result of a profound and intimate knowledge of their environmental conditions. They developed a set of values that started from a desire to minimize risks but that soon became an elaborated religious, economic, and political ideal.
Every Andean Society or Order, regardless the size, -be it a tiny, local ethnic group of 20 villages in a single Valley or a large Kingdom - tried to control simultaneously a wide variety of ecologic stories up and down the Andean Mountains sides.
There would not be competition for their control instead it was a join labor of coexistence for long periods of time. The agricultural process in each site were treated as permanent, not seasonal establishments. Since more than one Highland area or Principality had maice or coca-leaf oases in a given coastal or upland Amazonian Valley, they traded a lot avoiding in that way any thought of personal gain.
Some of the locations (Coastal or Upland) were many days' march from the religious core of the Empire.  If the group of peasants were small, the herders or salt winners above the core, and the maize and coca-leaf cultivators in the warm area below, would only be 3 or 4 days away. If the unit grew large and could mobilize and maintain several hundreds of young men, then the areas placed high and low could be 10 or even 15 days' walk away from the religious core.
These ethnic groups, many of which were tricked by the Europeans to side with them to break the Inca power, were still easy to locate and identify in the 18th century (Wanka; Canari). In isolated parts of Ecuador (Saraguro, Otavalo) and Bolivia (Chipaya, Macha) this can still be done today.