Memory Landscapes of the Inka Carved Outcrops: From Past to Present presents a comprehensive analysis of the carved rocks the Inka created in the Andean highlands during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It provides an overview of Inka history, a detailed analysis of the techniques and styles of carving, and five comprehensive case studies. It opens in the Inka capital, Cusco, one of the two locations where the geometric style of Inka carving was authored by the ninth ruler Pachakuti Inka Yupanki. The following chapters move to the origin places on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca and at Pumaurqu, southwest of Cusco, where the Inka constructed the emergence of the first members of their dynasty from sacred rock outcrops. The final case studies focus upon the royal estates of Machu Picchu and Chinchero. Machu Picchu is the second site where Pachakuti appears to have authored the geometric style. Chinchero was built by his son, Thupa Inka Yupanki, who adopted his father's strategy of rock carving and associated political messages. The methodology used in this book reconstructs relational networks between the sculpted outcrops, the land and people and examines how such networks have changed over time. The primary focus documents the specific political context of Inka carved rocks expanded into the performance of a stone ideology, which set Inka stone cults decidedly apart from earlier and later agricultural as well as ritual uses of empowered stones. When the Inka state formed in the mid-fifteenth century, carved rocks were used to mark local territories in and around Cusco. In the process of imperial expansion, selected outcrops were sculpted in peripheral regions to map Inka presence and showcase the cultivated and ordered geography of the state.

This book reflects the most recent research devoted to a systematized perspective and a critical (re)construction of previous theoretical attempts of explaining, justifying and continuing Kuhn's ingenious hypothesis in arts. Hofstadter, Clignet and Habermas revealed to be the most engaged scholars in solving this aesthetic "puzzled-problem". In this context, the structural similarities between science and arts are attentively evaluated, thus satisfying an older concern attributed to the historical Kuhn-Kubler dispute, extensively commented along the pages of this book. How can we track the matter of rationality and truth in art and aesthetics, inspired by scientific perspectives? Are artistic styles similar to scientific paradigms? Are we entitled to pursue paradigms and masterpieces as rational models in science, respectively in arts? On what possible grounds can we borrow from science notions such as progress and predictability, in the study of the evolution of art and its aesthetic backgrounds? Are the historical dynamics of science and art affected by political factors in the same manner? This book will be of interest to philosophers, but also to historians of science and historians of art alike in the reassessment it provides of recent debates on reshaping the art world using Kuhn's "paradigm shift".